Mapping your marketing funnel

A funnel is a model of how strangers become customers. It is useful only if each stage has a number attached to it.

Stages, and what to measure

Awareness

Reach and qualified sessions. The metric that matters is not total traffic but the share of sessions from people who could plausibly buy.

Consideration

Depth of engagement with the pages that answer real questions: pricing, comparison, specification, process. Time on a homepage means little; progression to a decision page means a great deal.

Conversion

Enquiry or order, measured at the step level so you can see where people stop. A single conversion rate hides the fact that most abandonment happens in one specific field or step.

Retention and referral

Repeat purchase, renewal and referral rate. For most businesses this is where the margin actually lives, and it is the stage most often left unmeasured.

Building the model

Instrument the events before you optimise anything. Then the funnel becomes falsifiable: you can say which stage is losing people, by how much, and what changing it did. See conversion optimisation.