Funnel Analysis

Funnel analysis is a method that counts user behavior across a predefined sequence of steps in order to identify the step where the most users stop.

Every funnel analysis rests on four settings: the ordered list of steps, the conversion window, the order rule and the counting basis. Changing any of the four moves the numbers without anything changing in the product, so two reports are comparable only when all four match. Tool differences start here: web analytics tools usually build funnels on sessions and pages, while product analytics tools build them on users and events, and one business question yields two different figures across the two families. The main limit is that a funnel is descriptive rather than causal: it shows where people stop, not why, and it measures only the path that was declared, so a popular alternative route appears in the report as a leak.