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What a funnel lets you do

A funnel is an ordered list of steps. Traceten counts how many visitors reached each one, how many were lost between them, and how much revenue came from the visitors who got that far. Because Traceten knows which visitors arrived from an AI assistant, each step also reports its top sources and countries. That is the question a funnel answers here that a general analytics tool cannot: not just “where do people drop off,” but “do the people ChatGPT sends drop off in a different place than everyone else.”

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Steps

A funnel has between 2 and 8 steps. Each step is one of two kinds. A page visit. Matches on the URL path (no query string, no fragment), with one of seven operators: /blog/*/pricing is a wildcard pattern. Everything else in the value is matched literally, so /report_2024 never matches /reportX2024. A goal. Matches a goal by name: signup, scroll_to_pricing, whatever you fire. Either kind can be negated: “visitor does NOT complete this.” A negated step matches visitors who did not do the thing between the previous step and the next one. The first step cannot be negated. There is no earlier step to measure it against, so there is no window in which “did not happen” means anything.

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The conversion window

Every funnel has a window, 7 days by default, adjustable from 1 hour to 90 days. A visitor counts as converting only if they get from the first step to the last within that window. Two consequences worth knowing before you compare a funnel to any other number: The cohort is fixed by the first step. The visitors in a funnel are the ones whose first step falls inside your selected date range. Their later steps are counted for up to one window past the end of that range. Without that tail a 7-day funnel over a 7-day range could never complete; without the entry rule, the tail would recruit a second group of visitors whose funnel you can only see half of. Revenue is cumulative down the funnel. A step’s revenue is the revenue of every visitor who reached that step, so it rises as you move down. It is not “revenue generated at this step.” The per-visitor value beside it is that revenue divided by the step’s visitors.

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Negated steps report late

A negated step cannot be settled while the visitor still has time to do the thing. It resolves once the full window has elapsed since their previous step, or earlier if they hit the next positive step first. So a funnel containing a negated step reports a pending count alongside its visitor count: people whose window is still open, neither converted nor dropped. A step’s visitor count only ever revises upward as pending visitors age out. It never falls. This matters most when your window is as long as your date range: in that case the entire range sits inside the lag, and the final step reads near zero with no other explanation. Widen the range or shorten the window. We chose late-and-rising over early-and-falling deliberately. A conversion rate that drops retroactively reads as a bug in the product, and there is no way to tell the two apart from the outside.

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Country reporting and small numbers

Each step reports its top sources and top countries, up to 8 of each. Countries below a minimum visitor count are never named. They are folded into an other bucket instead of being dropped, so the totals still add up. The set of named countries is decided once for the whole funnel rather than per step, because step counts only fall as you go down: a country named at step 1 and missing at step 4 would tell you exactly what its step-4 count was by subtraction.

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Limits

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In the dashboard

Open Funnels in the sidebar. Pick a funnel from the selector at the top of the page, and set the range with the date picker, up to 730 days: the full time visitor step records are kept. New funnel opens the editor. Add 2 to 8 steps with Add step. A step whose label you leave blank is labelled with its URL or goal name. To reorder steps, drag a step by its handle, with a mouse or a finger. From the keyboard, focus the handle, press Space, move the step with the arrow keys, and press Space again to drop it or Escape to cancel.

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Visitors at a step

Under the chart, a list shows the visitors behind one step, 50 people a page, in the same rows as the Visitors page. Someone who signed in partway through the funnel is one row, so the list can hold fewer people than the step’s count. It starts on step 1. To switch, click the step on the chart, or pick it from the list’s selector. Dropped lists the visitors who reached that step and not the next one, and includes visitors still inside the conversion window. Click a visitor to open their timeline. The list loads 50 people at a time, and every page but the last is full. Its total counts people with a visit in the date range, so it can be lower than the step’s count for two reasons: someone who signed in partway through is counted by the funnel under the identifier they had before and the one after, but is one person here, and someone with no visit in the date range is not listed, for example a person who reached a goal step only through a conversion recorded from your server. A row’s source and location are that visitor’s first touch, and its visits and pageviews cover the whole date range, not only their path through the funnel.

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Building one

You can build funnels on the Funnels page, or over HTTP with the funnels API. Keeping the definitions in version control is worth it: a funnel is a measurement instrument, and one that changes without a diff makes every number before the change unexplainable. A worked example, three steps, no code on your site beyond two HTML attributes:
  1. Page visit, starts_with /pricing
  2. Goal scroll_to_pricing, from <section data-traceten-scroll="scroll_to_pricing">
  3. Goal signup, from <button data-traceten-goal="signup">
That tells you how many people who landed on pricing actually looked at the table, and how many of those signed up.

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What is stored, and for how long

A funnel holds no data of its own: it is a query over the visitor step records every pageview and goal already writes, which are retained for 730 days. A funnel is therefore not limited to a shorter window than the pageviews it counts, and those records are the longest-lived ones tied to a visitor identifier. See data collected.

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