Funnels in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) —Tutorial with Pictures
You’ve spent time strategizing. You’ve created marketing collateral. You’ve set everything into motion and your funnel is launched.
The next thing you want to do is see how it’s working. Are users moving through the funnel in the way you expected them to? Where are they dropping off? How can you improve your current efforts so that your funnel can start earning revenue?
The answers to all of those questions lie at your fingertips. With just a few clicks inside Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll have all the insights you need to start optimizing your funnel immediately.
Where do you need to click? How do you set up funnel tracking in GA4?
Read on and we’ll break it down in a step-by-step tutorial (with pictures of course, because tutorials without pictures are.. annoying).
So let’s get to it.
1. From the homepage of Google Analytics 4, click the "explore" tab on the left-hand sidebar.
2. Next, select the “funnel exploration” funnel type. You’ll want to choose this one when you have a predefined funnel in mind that you’d like to track.
The other two types are useful for different activities. For example, path exploration would be optimal if you wanted to get a better understanding of the top 5-10 pages users visit after reaching your homepage.
3. If you’d only like to see data for a specific subset of your audience, you’ll want to do that first. You can segment your audience using the “segment” section in the first column.
You’ll see that you can segment by country, traffic source, etc., by default.
You edit these by hovering over each tab and clicking the three dots that appear.
You can also create custom segments (more on this later).
4. Once you’ve filtered your audience how you’d like, it’s time to outline the specific steps of your funnel.
After clicking on the pencil icon, you’ll see this screen.
As you can see, you’ll be presented with all different types of options. These are all events that a user can trigger when they’re on your site. There’s plenty of them so just click around, explore, and do some Googling if you’re not sure what something is. Google searches like, “which event to track users from Reddit", “which event to track purchases over $100,” etc., will be your friend here.
As you can see in the screenshot above, I’m starting my funnel with users that have visited a specific page title. To specify the page title we’ll need to fill in the parameter section. You’ll see an option to do so after selecting an event form the list above.
I’ve selected the page, “AlexMoriarty” (my homepage). So our funnel will start with all users who have visited the page “AlexMoriarty.”
Next, we’ll fill in the sequential steps of our funnel.
In the screenshot above, you’ll see I’ve created a funnel that includes the following steps.
Start on homepage —> Visit portfolio —> Visit Patreon project —> Scroll through Patreon project
5. Last, after you have the data displayed in GA4, analyze it.
Following the example, let’s look at the data below and see how many people that have visited my homepage, have made their way to my Patreon project, and then have taken the time to scroll through it.
As you can see, of the 152 people who visited my homepage, 51 made it to the Patreon project and 38 of those 51 actually scrolled through the project.
This data provides a lot of actionable insight.
The most notable thing that jumps out is that 51 people took the time to click through to the project but 13 of them (51 - 38) left the project page immediately after getting there (we know this because they never scrolled).
I have a very large body of text at the top of my Patreon project page. It appears this body of text scared away a little over 25% of everyone who visited the page. The data is telling me I need to fix that and make the page more approachable.
This is the power of funnel analysis in Google Analytics 4. You can easily identify weaknesses, and then take steps to fix them.
That marks the end of the tutorial, but if you have any additional questions, don’t be afraid to leave a comment below, I check these daily and I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding your specific case.
Outside of GA4 sales funnels, here are a few last things for you to consider before you leave.
I offer freelance copywriting services and can help you iterate on your funnel until your website is practically a conversion machine!
Your friends and colleagues could benefit from this article if you share it through social media, (and it’d help me a lot as well)!
Apart from questions, your feedback is valued, if there’s anything you’d like to share with me after reading this article, please reach out through the “contact” section of my website, or email me at alextmoriarty@gmail.com.
