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How to Use GA4 to Identify Drop-Off Points in Your Funnel

By August 11, 2025No Comments

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, understanding how users of your website are interacting with it is a crucial step to optimizing your site for generating conversions and boosting your revenue. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers powerful tools and insights that can help you track user behavior and pinpoint areas where your potential customers may be abandoning your conversion funnel. By identifying these drop-off points, you can make data-driven decisions to both enhance your website’s user experience and drive better growth for your business in the long run. In this blog post, we will walk you through how to use GA4 to uncover these points of potential friction in your website’s funnel, and provide you with actionable steps you can take to address them.

How To Access The Funnel Exploration Report

A conversion funnel maps the journey from a user’s first interaction with your website, all the way to completing a conversion goal, such as purchasing a product or signing up for an email newsletter. Each step along the conversion funnel is a critical touchpoint, and any friction–such as a confusing website interface or slow load times for a lead page– can cause users to drop off and lose interest. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers robust tools like the Funnel Exploration Report that can help to pinpoint these drop-off points. This report can be found through the following:

  1. Log in to your GA4 property. 
  2. From the left sidebar, navigate to the “explore” section.
  3. Select “Funnel Exploration” from the template gallery

This will then load a page, that includes 3 sections which are (from L to R):

  1. Variables: This section gives you options to set your date range, any segments (such as direct, paid, mobile or tablet traffic), any dimensions (like gender, country, or event name), and any metrics (like active users, event count, etc).
  2. Tab Settings: This section gives you the option to define the different steps of your conversion funnel, and select a way to visualize your data in an organized, and easy-to-read manner.
  3. Report: View the funnel data and visualization

This specific setup will now allow you to customize your report for your specific conversion funnel that you wish to view, whether this be a funnel tracking the journey of e-commerce customers, lead generation, or some other goal you can define.

How To Define Your Funnel Steps

Clear and measurable funnel steps are key for effective funnel analysis. Each step in your funnel should reflect a specific user action or page view that occurs during the conversion process. For most eCommerce websites, the conversion funnel might look like this:

  1. View Product (Or view page): Triggered by the “view_item” event, or a page view with a “Page Path” containing “/product/”.
  2. Add to Cart: Triggered by the “add_to_cart” event
  3. Begin Checkout: Triggered by the “begin_checkout” event or in some cases a page path containing “/checkout/start”
  4. Complete Purchase: Triggered by the “purchase” event or a page path such as “/order-confirmation” or “/thank-you” 

Now, in the Tab Settings, each of these funnel actions can then be given conditions, by clicking the pencil icon next to “Steps”. These conditions can be based on events (e.g. event_name IS lead_form) or page paths (e.g. page_path contains /checkout/). 

GA4 supports using up to 10 Steps, and lets you choose whether any steps must be followed directly or indirectly, accommodating any conversions that may not follow the exact same path (for example, if you have an instant checkout option in addition to the normal purchase process, which bypasses add to cart options). By default, any conversion funnel created in GA4 is “closed,” which requires a user to always start at the first step. (to allow mid-funnel entries, toggle the “make open funnel” option)

Analyze Drop Off Points

Funnel Insights

Now that you have explored a bit more in GA4, have created your funnel, and explored the data each tab provides, it is time to analyze the drop-off points in your funnel. The report tab can display your funnel in 2 different options: a Standard Funnel (Bar Chart) or a Trended Funnel (line chart). The standard funnel will help highlight immediate drop-off points, while the trended funnel will track performance over a period of time. When analyzing the percentage of users that are advancing between steps, you can visually see where there may be chokepoints in your funnel. If there is a sharp decline, such as 75% of people dropping off after adding to cart, this could signal a problem, such as higher-than-expected shipping costs or a confusing checkout process. Spend some time in this area to learn more about where your specific funnel might be having trouble.

Breakdowns

Use the “breakdown” feature in Tab Settings to segment this data by specific dimensions (categories), such as “Device Category” or “Traffic Source”. This can not only help figure out if your users are more likely to find you on mobile or desktop, but can also reveal if drop-off points are specific to mobile devices, or even specific traffic channels (like Organic, Paid Search, or others). This can give you insight into how to fix this, such as making your website more mobile-friendly (in the case of mobile device drop off being abnormally high).

Investigate The Causes of Drop-Offs

As mentioned previously, the different funnels you can analyze in Google Analytics can show you where your website’s users drop off, but understanding the why behind your web visitors dropping off does require a little bit more investigation. Conversion rate is one metric that can actually be partially explained by these drop offs in the conversion funnel, which is why GA4 analysis is so helpful in improving the conversion rate of your website. When doing your evaluation of the data found in GA4, consider these potential issues:

  • Too much information is required during the conversion process (i.e., for lead generation, requiring any identifying information other than name, phone number, and email address)
  • Too much time is taken to load the page
  • The confusing layout of the different pages for each step 
  • Too many steps are required for conversion to occur

Additional Benefits Of GA4

Google Analytics is still considered to be one of the most effective free tools available to help businesses understand their website metrics, especially the user experience, and identify potential areas for improvement. Not only does GA4 provide various reports for advanced data analysis, but it also can help you identify possible Google Ads campaigns that may not be performing as well as you would like, and help you find areas of improvement with regards to targeting, keywords and even help with determining the amount of information needed to be in the ads themselves, to help ensure a seamless conversion process starting from a click on the search results page, ending with a conversion event on your website. 

Improve Your Marketing Funnel Performance

Mastering GA4’s Funnel Exploration report equips you with the insights needed to optimize your website’s conversion funnel, turning data into actionable strategies. By identifying drop-off points and investigating their causes, whether it’s a clunky interface, slow load times, or excessive form fields, you can enhance user experience and boost conversions. 

Leverage GA4’s advanced features like segment comparisons and path exploration to refine your approach, and complement your findings with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights for performance optimization or Hotjar for user feedback. 

For further guidance, explore our posts on optimizing your website for lead generation, improving user experience, and A/B testing to improve conversion rates. 

Start analyzing your GA4 data today to create a seamless user journey and drive long-term business growth.