Funnel Visualization Google Data Studio: An Easy Way

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?
• Building a Funnel Visualization on Google Data Studio
• Steps to Build a Funnel on Google Data Studio
  • Step 1: Opening Google Data Studio
  • Step 2: Adding Data
  • Step 3: Adding a Chart
  • Step 4: Adding Dimensions and Metrics
  • Step 5: Modifying the Chart
  • Step 6: Creating Formulas for the Ratios
  • Step 7: Adding and Designing Scorecards
  • Step 8: Placing the Scorecard on the Bar Chart
  • Step 9: Adding More Scorecards
• Conclusion

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!

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
• Step 2: Adding Data
• Step 3: Adding a Chart
• Step 4: Adding Dimensions and Metrics
• Step 5: Modifying the Chart
• Step 6: Creating Formulas for the Ratios
• Step 7: Adding and Designing Scorecards
• Step 8: Placing the Scorecard on the Bar Chart
• Step 9: Adding More Scorecards

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.

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