Two ways to look at the same people
A funnel is a fixed set of steps in a fixed order — welcome page, signup, checkout, paid — and it answers how many got through each one.
A flow map starts from one step and follows every path people actually took from there, including the ones you did not plan. Use the funnel when you know the route you want, and the map when you want to see what people do instead.
Building one
Give it a name, pick the type, then add steps from the events and pages your site already sends. Drag to reorder, remove what does not belong, up to twenty steps.
Saved funnels sit in a dropdown above the chart, so you can keep one for signup, one for checkout and one for the thing you shipped last week, and switch between them. Each can be edited or deleted later.
What the funnel shows
One bar per step, with the share of people who got that far and the raw count. Hover a step and you get what matters for that step alone:
- The conversion from the start, and separately from the previous step.
- Unique conversions as a fraction, not just a percentage.
- The average time it took to complete.
The step where the number falls off a cliff is the one to work on. Everything after it is a smaller audience arguing about details.
What the flow map shows
Columns, one per step, with every branch people took out of each node and how many took it. Drop-off is a node of its own, so leaving is treated as a path rather than a gap in the picture.
Rare paths are collected as a single line — twenty-one more events — and open when you ask for them, so the map stays readable at a glance and complete when you need detail.
Flow settings
- Start from — any event or page, not only the entry point.
- Direction — forward from that event, or backwards to see what led up to it.
- Steps to follow — how deep the map goes.
- Events per step — how many branches each column shows before the rest are grouped.
There is no fixed order anywhere in the map. It follows what people did.
Reading a single path
Hover any link between two nodes and you get the share of that step who took it, the share of all users it represents, and the average time between the two steps.
The time is often the most useful number on the screen. Five minutes between steps is someone reading. An hour and ten minutes means they left, did something else and came back — which makes that step a different problem than a slow page.
When the numbers do not add up
A funnel is only as good as the events behind it. If a step stops firing, the chart shows a collapse that never happened, and the summary above the chart says so — it compares the funnel against the flow map and flags the steps it does not believe.
Missing instrumentation turns into a recommended fix like any other, so the thing to repair is named rather than left for you to discover.