Yandex Metrica Funnel: Find Where Leads Drop Off

What a funnel in Yandex Metrica actually is

A funnel is a sequence of actions a person takes before reaching a goal, plus the number of people who made it to each step. In Metrica you usually build one with a composite goal: every step gets its own condition, and the conversions report shows how many visits moved on.

Overall conversion rate is a single number, and it cannot tell you why people leave. A funnel breaks it into parts. The owner of a clinic in Tashkent might find that people happily open a service page, but only a small share ever reach the booking button. That points to one specific spot, so there is no need to rewrite the whole site or raise the ad budget.

How to choose the steps

Steps should describe the route most visitors really take, not the one you wish they took. Start by looking in Metrica at which pages people actually move between, and only then build the chain.

For a clinic it might be: service page, then prices or the doctor's page, then a click on the booking button, then a submitted form. For an online shop: category, product page, cart, checkout, and a paid order through Click or Payme.

• Keep the number of steps small; a long chain makes the report hard to read.
• Make each step a meaningful action: viewing a key page, clicking a button, opening a form.
• Leave out a step many visitors skip, or conversion will look worse than it is.
• Make the last step your main goal: a request, an order, a call or a jump to Telegram.

Setting up the funnel

The process is simple, but each part matters.

One detail catches many people out: a goal only counts data from the moment it is created. A funnel cannot be rebuilt for the past, so set it up before you launch ads or start SEO work, not afterwards.

Also add goals for contacts that happen outside the form. Plenty of customers in Uzbekistan message on Telegram or phone instead, and if you count only forms the funnel will understate your results.

• Write down the steps and define a condition for each: a page address or an event.
• Create a composite goal and add the steps in the order people go through them.
• Ask your developer to send events for buttons and forms from the code, with clear names.
• Wait for data to build up, then open the conversions report broken down by step.

Reading the drop-offs

The numbers show where the problem is, not why it happens. To test a hunch, open Webvisor and the click map for that exact step and see where people clicked and where they stopped.

Look at search traffic on its own. Apply the segment for visits from search engines and compare it with ads from Instagram or Google. Search visitors often land on informational pages and take longer to reach a request. If they vanish at the very first step, your pages are not answering the query they came with.

• Drop between page and button: the offer is unclear, there is no price or terms, or the button is hidden on a phone screen.
• Drop between button and submitted form: too many fields, validation errors, awkward phone number input.
• Drop at payment: a faulty payment page or missing payment methods people expect.

Common setup mistakes

Many wrong conclusions come from the setup rather than the website. Once a month, send a test request and check that it shows up in the report.

• A step is tied to a page address that will change after a redesign.
• A condition is so broad that it fires on any page.
• The form goal counts a button click even when the form was never sent.
• Periods of different length, or with different weekdays, are compared.

Turning findings into changes

Pick the one step with the biggest loss, form a hypothesis, make a single change and compare periods. Change one element at a time, or you will not know what worked. These ideas are often worth testing:

Compare periods of equal length with similar weekdays. If the change coincided with an ad launch or a holiday, the result is blurred, so wait another week or look only at the search segment. On small sites a few days of difference can be pure chance.

Funnels help with content too. If many people read your articles from search but almost none move on to your services, the articles are not leading anywhere. Add links to related services and a clear next step, then check whether the move to the second step grows.

• move the booking button to the first screen on mobile;
• shorten the form to name and phone;
• put a Telegram button next to the form;
• show the price, or at least how it is calculated, before the button;
• in a shop, show delivery times for Tashkent and the regions right on the product page.

Funnels as part of end-to-end analytics

A funnel in Metrica usually ends at a request, while a business cares about sales and revenue as well. That is why it helps to connect it with your CRM and ad accounts. At markdev we set up end-to-end analytics and reporting so you can see the route from an ad or a search result to a paid order.

If you want to find out at which step your website loses enquiries, tell us about your task. We can help choose the steps, set up goals and make sense of the results.