What is a funnel step?

A shop has one completion: the purchase. An application has several, and none of them is an order: someone signs up, sets something up, pays for the first time. Each of those points is a funnel step: its own conversion definition with a key, a position and a value. A step is reported with an event of type goal, from the browser or from your backend; both routes are equivalent.

An example: software with a trial

An accounting software advertises on Google and LinkedIn and offers a 14-day trial. The question behind it is not “Which ad brings sign-ups?” but “Which ad brings people who pay after the trial?”. For that it creates three steps:

After sign-in the application calls metrunio.identify() once with the customer number; the same number goes out as user_id with the steps from the backend. That way a sign-up on the laptop and a payment on the phone two weeks later belong to the same person and to the ad they came through, as long as the click lies within the click window.

The “Orders & goals” report then shows the funnel: how many customers reached each step and what share of the previous step moved on. Below it, each step shows which channels it is attributed to. An example, not a measurement: 200 signed up, 80 set up, 30 first payment. If sign-ups come mainly through LinkedIn but first payments through Google search, this is where you see it. On “Channels & attribution” you narrow the reports to erste_zahlung and get the ROAS on paid subscriptions against all ad spend.

The key

The key (goal_key) is the name your code uses to report the step: lower case, no spaces, made of letters, digits, underscore, dot and hyphen, at most 64 characters, for example signed_up or shop_created. It is an address: once events have counted against it, it can no longer be changed. If you need a different one, create a new step and retire the old one. The position, by contrast, can be changed at any time with the arrows in the portal.

If your code reports a key that does not exist yet, the definition is created on its own. In the portal it then shows as “created automatically”; you add the name and value afterwards. That has an upside and a catch: you can start with the code without defining every goal in the portal first, but a typo in the code becomes a step of its own. A retired definition no longer counts, even if events with its key keep arriving.

Once per customer

A customer reaches a step, or does not. If your code reports the same step for the same customer a second time (because the page was reloaded or a background job ran twice), it does not count again. The figure in the report is therefore a count of customers, not of calls.

What a funnel step is not

• Not a page funnel: Metrunio does not build a funnel from click paths or visited pages. Only steps your code reports are counted.
• Not revenue: you decide a step’s acquisition value in the portal. The report therefore calls it “set” and keeps it apart from revenue. Only an amount the event itself brings with it is revenue.
• Not exempt from the quota: every step sent is an event and counts against the event quota; the same event ID counts once.
• Not exempt from consent: goal is an analytics event. As with a lead, no step is stored without analytics consent, not even from your backend; the exception for orders your server reports without consent does not apply to steps.