Analytics goal funnels enable an easy way to track how far along users get towards a specified analytics goals. Rather than limiting tracking to a 'yes/no' outcome, progress can be monitored to more closely identify problematic areas in the conversion rate optimization process. For optimal benefit, the funnels should be setup correctly from the start in order to track changes and progress at each step over time.

Ecommerce sites generally should have a purchase funnel from the product page to the cart to each step of the checkout process (billing, shipping, confirmation). Without funnels, it's difficult to identify the biggest problem areas. There's a big difference between shoppers that add an item to the cart and begin checkout vs those that complete a purchase. Without a goal or funnel setup specifically to track the add to cart process, these two visitors could be tracked equally as non-purchasers.

Clearly, the person who started the checkout process is much closer to making a purchase. There are opportunities to continue to communicate with this person, whereas there's limited reason to put effort into marketing to a person who spend little time on the site and showed no signs of engagement.

Goals and funnels are a major component of most analytics tools, including our favorites Google Analytics and Matomo. Analytics goal funnels are a major feature of Google Analytics and it's relatively straightforward to setup ecommerce goals on sites running on Shopify and Woocommerce. More detailed tracking can be enabled by using Google Tag Manager. Matomo requires some manual setup on Shopify currently, and there's a great app available on WooCommerce already.

Regardless of the tool, analytics goal funnels are vital for effective conversion rate optimization. There's much more nuance in a conversion than yes/no and funnels make it easy to identify problematic areas, then address via a/b split testing. Google Analytics goal funnels and Matomo funnels can help improve ecommerce analytics tracking.