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CRO Glossary

Funnel Analysis

Tracking how visitors drop off at each step of a multi-step process, such as checkout or signup.

Funnel analysis breaks a conversion process into sequential steps — e.g., product page → cart → shipping info → payment → confirmation — and measures the drop-off rate at each stage. It's one of the primary tools for finding where to focus CRO effort, because it shows exactly where visitors give up rather than just the final conversion rate.

A funnel view often reveals surprising bottlenecks. A checkout might have a healthy 70% add-to-cart rate but lose 60% of users at the shipping-info step — pointing directly at form friction as the likely culprit, rather than a pricing or product issue further downstream.

Funnel analysis pairs naturally with segment analysis: a drop-off that looks moderate overall might be severe for mobile users specifically, or for a particular traffic source, revealing a targeted fix (like a mobile-optimized payment form) that a single aggregate number would hide.

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