Funnels Report Overview

Overview

Mixpanel’s Funnels allows you to examine how end-users perform events in a series. Funnels calculate and display the amount of users who convert from one event to another within a particular time window. This allows you to identify where your users drop off, what segments convert the most, and other important facets of the user journey.

Use Cases

Imagine your product is a B2B messaging application. You might use Funnels to answer these questions:

What percent of users converted through my signup funnel within 7 days?
At what step of the signup funnel did most users drop off?
How did my A/B test impact conversions in the signup funnel?
How has the payment funnel conversion rate in the US changed over time?
How long does it take most users to complete my payment funnel?
What departments complete the payment funnel most often?
What flows do users take between opening an app and making a purchase?
Why did the successful users purchase?
What flows do users take that don’t lead to a purchase?
How do these two paths differ? What actions should I nudge towards or against?
What did the users that dropped-off do instead?

Loose Ordering

Before we construct a query, we must first understand how funnels calculate conversions. Your users must complete the steps you designate in your funnel in loose order. Loose order means that a customer can engage in other actions in between funnel steps, as long as they complete all the funnel steps in order. Let's start with an example where the funnel has steps: A, B, C, D, E and go through a few cases:

The customer does steps A -> B -> C -> D -> E in exact order. Mixpanel counts this as a conversion.
The customer does steps A -> B -> F -> C -> D -> E. Mixpanel counts this as a conversion. This is an example of loose ordering.
The customer does steps A -> B -> C -> E. Mixpanel will not count this as a full conversion, and the customer will not appear in the funnel after step C. The customer's completion of step E is excluded from the funnel because step D did not occur.

Building your First Report

Building a report in Funnels takes just a few clicks, and results arrive in seconds. Let's build a simple report together. Continuing the B2B messaging example, imagine you wanted to answer the following question:

What marketing UTM medium drove the most signup conversions for users on iOS?

Feel free to follow along and create your own report right in our demo project, here. To skip ahead and see the final result, click here.

Step 1: Choose Events

Events are the basic building block of a Funnels report. In this case, imagine we know the signup flow contains five steps. Within the "Steps" section, add one event for each step, in the following order: "Landing Page," "Download Page," "App Install," "App Open," "Sign Up." At this point, your query should look like this:

Step 2: Choose Filters

Filters exclude unwanted data. In this case, we only care about events performed on the iOS platform. Therefore, add a "Platform" filter, where Platform equals "iOS Native". At this point, your query should look like this:

Step 3: Choose Breakdowns

Breakdowns segment data into groups. In this case, we want to break our funnel down by marketing medium, tracked via UTM tags. Therefore, add a "UTM Medium" breakdown. At this point, your query should look like this:

Congratulations, you've constructed your first Funnels query! Now, it's time to examine the results.

Visualizing Results

Funnels features multiple visualizations to help you view the results of your query in the clearest chart type. By default, Funnels displays the Funnel Steps chart, which displays the percentage of users that converted to each subsequent step of the funnel. In this case, the Funnel Steps chart is the perfect visualization, since it will automatically display the UTM medium with the highest overall conversion rate. Your report should look like this:

However, you can also visualize the funnel in any of the following chart types, which can give you additional insight:

Funnel Trend - view changes in the conversion rate, time to conversion, users entering and exiting your over time
Time to Convert - view a distribution of the time it takes users to convert through the funnel
Frequency - view the number of times users complete any step before converting or dropping off

Further Learning

While this article covers the basics of the Funnels report, you can learn more about its capabilities in the following additional articles:

Advanced Funnels Functionality - learn to use the more advanced features of your Funnels report
Funnels FAQ - commonly asked questions relating to Funnels report