Introduction
Whether you sell products on e-commerce or you sell services, your buyers go through multiple stages before purchase. As the customers go through this journey, a number of them drop out at various stages. Thus, the volume of potential customers resembles the shape of a funnel. The nearer the potential customers are to the bottom of the funnel, the closer they are to buying.
In this article, you will see how you can build a simple funnel visualization on Google Data Studio when the conversion process has several steps, and you want to visualize the number of users who are dropping off/ going forward at each stage of the process. When it comes to creating a funnel visualization, Google Data Studio doesn’t have a straightforward option. Hence, there is no single way to do this. How you create a funnel depends on your specific goals.
Here is what you will cover in this blog:
What is Funnel Visualization?
Funnel visualization monitors and analyses the user interactions that lead to a website goal. It can classify the multiple steps that users take to achieve their goals. Funnel visualization builds a path to analyze the user’s sequence of hits, identify who is falling out, or who is falling through. It also identifies where a user went after each step in the campaign path, and where they navigated to after falling through or falling out through defined steps.
Building a Funnel Visualization on Google Data Studio
Here, let us build a simple funnel on Google Data Studio to visualize the conversion rates on a hypothetical website over a period of three months. There are 6 stages that this hypothetical business is interested in focusing on.
They are:
- Impressions: The number of times the webpage appears in the search results for the users.
- Website clicks: The number of times viewers have clicked on their website link.
- Sign-up step 1: The users have completed the first stage of sign-up.
- Sign-up step 2: The users have completed the second stage of sign-up.
- Sign-up step 3: The users have successfully signed up to the Basic plan/ free plan.
- Upgraded to Pro: The users have upgraded to the paid plan.
We will use Bar charts and Scorecards to visualize this in Google Data Studio.
Let us dive into the steps!
![Download the Guide on How to Set Up a Data Analytics Stack]()
Download the Guide on How to Set Up a Data Analytics Stack
Learn how to build a self-service data analytics stack for your use case.
Hevo offers a faster way to move data from databases or SaaS applications into your data warehouse to be visualized in Google Data Studio. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.
Get Started with Hevo for Free
Check out some of the cool features of Hevo:
- Completely Automated: The Hevo platform can be set up in just a few minutes and requires minimal maintenance.
- Real-time Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always.
- 100% Complete & Accurate Data Transfer: Hevo’s robust infrastructure ensures reliable data transfer with zero data loss.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
- 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to you through chat, email, and support calls.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
Sign up here for a 14-Day Free Trial!
Steps to Build a Funnel on Google Data Studio
The steps to build a funnel on Google Data Studio are as follows:
Step 1: Opening Google Data Studio
Open Google Data Studio by clicking here and click on the Blank Report to create a new report.
Step 2: Adding Data
In the pop-up Add data to report, select the source of your data. Mine is in Google Sheets and hence I will select Google Sheets. Select the file that contains the data and click on ADD. Check the data panel on the right to verify if you see the fields from the file.
Step 3: Adding a Chart
Select Add a chart and click on the Horizontal Bar chart.
Step 4: Adding Dimensions and Metrics
I have data for 3 months (Jan, Feb, and Mar) in my file and I would like to group the data by month. So ‘month’ will be the Dimension.
I will add each stage of the funnel in order as a Metric. Since the top of the funnel is ‘Impressions’, it is added first, followed by ‘Website clicks’, the three sign-up steps, and finally, the upgrade field.
This is how the data panel on the right looks after this step.
This is how the visualization looks.
Step 5: Modifying the Chart
In the style panel on the right, you can make changes to modify the appearance of the chart. For example, you can change the horizontal bars into vertical ones by selecting the vertical symbol on top.
You can select Show data labels to show the numbers on the chart.
This how the chart looks after making such modifications.
Step 6: Creating Formulas for the Ratios
Next, let us show the conversion rates at various levels in percentages. For example, it might be useful to know the ratio of the number of users who finished step 3 of the sign-up to the ones who upgraded to pro. There might be several such ratios that are of interest but are not readily available as fields in the data. In such a case, we can use a Google Data Studio feature called Calculated fields. Using formulas, you can create your own fields from the existing ones.
Let us see how a calculated field can be created to show various KPIs that may be of interest to you.
In order to create calculated fields, go to the bottom of the data panel on the right and click on ADD A FIELD.
Give a name to this new field and create a formula. The formula created here is the ratio of Website clicks to the Impressions. This tells you what proportion of people who got the website URL on their search results clicked on the website link.
Save the new field and select DONE.
Similarly, you create ratios for every step to measure the proportion of users at a given stage who are moving to the next stage in the funnel.
Step 7: Adding and Designing Scorecards
Next, you can add a scorecard to the chart to display the conversion rates. Go to Add a chart and select Scorecard with compact numbers.
By default, Google Data Studio assigns it some random metric. Here is how you change it-
Since the data is grouped by month in the bar chart, drag and drop ‘month’ field to Date Range Dimension (in the DATA panel) of the scorecard.
I want the scorecard to display the ratio of website clicks to impressions (this is the first calculated field that was created in Step 6). So in the data panel for the scorecard, you can drag the field ‘impressions_to_click’ and drop it as the Metric.
Click on ADD A FILTER and create a filter. Give the filter a name so that you can use it again. Under Select a field, select ‘month’. Under conditions, select Contains, and in value, type ‘Jan’. Click on SAVE.
This filter was named Jan_filter to filter to the month ‘Jan’.Similarly, create named filters for ‘Feb’ and ‘Mar’ as well. Once you create a filter, next time you can choose it directly from Filter picker when you click on ADD A FILTER.
Next, you want to ensure that the metrics in the scorecard are shown as percentages. To do that, go to Resources and select Manage added data sources.
Click on EDIT corresponding to the data source. For all the calculated fields which contain the symbol ‘fx’, change the Type to Percent.
This is how the data panel on the right looks.
Step 8: Placing the Scorecard on the Bar Chart
Drag the scorecard on top of the bar which shows the number of website clicks for Jan and then, resizes it appropriately. You can go to the style panel for the scorecard and change the size and color of the label as well. You can Hide Metric Name to avoid cluttering.
This is how the scorecard looks now.
Step 9: Adding More Scorecards
Similarly, you can add all the ratios you want to the chart on top of the bar columns by adding more scorecards as shown in Step 7. You should select the appropriate filter depending on the month you are displaying in the scorecard.
You can create funnel reports using Google Data Studio. Funnel report templates include funnel and pivot tables. A Pivot Table takes your rows in a standard table and pivots them so that it become columns. It supports the addition of multiple row and column dimensions that makes data really interesting.
Know more about visualization in Google Data Studio from here.
Conclusion
In this article, you have seen how you can build a simple funnel to visualize conversion rates at various stages in the chain for a hypothetical business on Google Data Studio. Since the metrics and KPIs vary from business to business, there is no single way to do this. Also, to create a funnel visualization Google Data Studio does not have a direct feature. So you should explore other ways of doing this to suit your specific purposes. You can also extend your funnel visualization and form a funnel report.
To get the best analysis results, it is important to look at data from multiple sources together. Use Hevo, a fully managed platform that performs data integration seamlessly.
Visit our Website to Explore Hevo
Check it out Hevo Data and Sign Up up for your 14-day free trial today.
Share your thoughts on Google Data Studio funnel visualization in the comments below!