What is an advanced funnel chart?
An advanced funnel chart visualizes data as it progresses through sequential stages, with each stage typically showing fewer values than the previous one. This chart type is particularly useful for tracking processes or conversions, helping to identify where users, opportunities, or items drop off along the way. In the employee service and customer service domains, funnel charts are applied across multiple business use cases to illustrate and analyze the flow of data through various stages, providing valuable insights into performance and process efficiency.
Use-cases and examples:
Sales:
Funnel charts are frequently used in sales to represent the stages of a sales pipeline, showing how many potential leads or opportunities move from one stage to the next (e.g., leads → contacts → qualified leads → proposals → closed deals). It helps identify chokeholds and areas where potential customers are dropping off.
For example, a Sales Manager can use this information to gain insights into where leads are getting stuck or why they aren’t converting. By understanding where drop-offs occur, they can optimize outreach strategies, improve lead qualification, and adjust sales tactics to move more prospects through the pipeline. This leads to higher conversion rates, reduced sales cycle times, and better prioritization of follow-ups, ultimately increasing the efficiency and success of the sales process.
Chatbots:
Funnel charts are also valuable tools for analyzing user interactions within chatbot conversations, where each stage of the dialogue is mapped to a funnel stage. By visualizing where users drop off, businesses can pinpoint friction points in the conversation flow, enabling targeted optimization that improves user engagement and enhances deflection strategies.
For example, a Support Manager can use this data to identify when users disengage or escalate to human agents. By understanding these drop-off points, they can tweak the chatbot’s flow, improve responses, and optimize options to prevent unnecessary escalations. This results in greater user satisfaction, reduced support costs, and a higher rate of successful self-service interactions, allowing support agents to focus on more complex issues.
How is it different from a (basic) funnel chart?
A (basic) funnel chart typically visualizes the latest available data for specific sales metrics, such as the current distribution of deals across various stages of the pipeline. However, this basic chart does not account for the historical progression of deals through these stages or provide key metrics like step-level or overall conversion and drop-off rates.
These advanced metrics are essential for gaining deeper insights into the efficiency of the sales process, helping identify areas for improvement and optimize overall pipeline performance.
What are the various metrics displayed in an advanced funnel chart?
An advanced funnel chart provides detailed insights into user progression and drop-offs across various stages of a process. For example, deals moving through a sales funnel typically have the following key metrics.
Conversion Metrics:
Step-Level Conversion: The conversion rate (expressed as a percentage) between two adjacent stages of the funnel, showing how well deals transition from one step to the next.
Step-Level Average Time: The average time taken (expressed in time duration) for deals to move from one stage to the next, offering insights into the speed of progression between stages.
Overall Conversion: The conversion rate (expressed as a percentage) between the first and final stages of the funnel, providing an overview of how many deals ultimately complete the entire process.
Overall Average Time: The total average time (expressed in time duration) taken for deals to move from the first to the last stage of the funnel, helping identify overall process efficiency.
Cumulative Conversion: A cumulative conversion metric (expressed both as a percentage and in absolute numbers), which tracks how deals move through each stage, stage-by-stage, from the start to the final stage.
The following is a conversion funnel that shows conversion metrics for a deal pipeline.
Drop-Off Metrics:
Step-Level Drop-Off: The percentage of deals that drop off between two adjacent stages, helping identify bottlenecks or areas where deals abandon the process.
Overall Drop-Off: The total drop-off rate (expressed as a percentage) between the first and last stages of the funnel, providing a high-level view of the overall attrition rate across the entire journey.
The following is the same data represented as a drop-off funnel.
I’ve configured my funnel chart, but I’m not seeing any data. What should I check?
There are several steps to troubleshoot this issue:
Check Date Range: Ensure that the selected Date Range (which applies to the report-level, page-level, and widget-level filters) isn’t overly restrictive. The data may not appear if the date ranges at any of these levels conflict or exclude the relevant time periods.
Review filters: Validate that no filters applied at any level (report, page, or widget) are restricting your data. For example, if the attribute selected in the Event Type dropdown is used as a filter—such as the deal stage for a sales funnel—ensure that there isn't an additional filter applied to the same attribute, as this could further limit the data displayed.
Check for conflicts between filters and selected stages: Funnel charts rely on the combination of stages selected. If you inadvertently filter out one or more stages, this could result in no data being rendered. Ensure that the stages you select as funnel steps don't conflict with any filters you apply.