The Difference Between Analytics Goal Funnels & Marketing Funnels

In promoting your business and meeting your revenue targets, the building of funnels is very important. For success, it is important to understand that marketing funnels differ from analytics funnels. Plus, the methods for engineering them are very different.

The Analytics Funnel

In Google Analytics and most other web analytics tools, you can build goal tracking funnels to track both the progress and the abandonment rates your customers have when interacting with your brand online. An analytics funnel shows specific pages that visitors have accessed before abandoning or, preferably, completing your desired goal.

Defining such a funnel has value to you because it allows you to see where visitors enter and exit your planned conversion process. By identifying bounce points in your funnel, you can make adjustments to the customer experience – your conversion process – so as to reduce the proportion of visitors who abandon the process before completion. This is a form of conversion optimization that is will get more visitors to complete your goal actions.

It’s important to note that goal funnels are not directly related to just keywords or landing pages. They represent each step in your conversion process.

Metrics to track in Analytics Funnel:

• Abandonment Rate
• Entrance paths
• Exit paths
• Visit duration (time in the funnel)
• Funnel conversion rate

Consider also threshold goals, or KPIs, that track customer engagement. These are behaviors that the visitor must take immediately prior to the goal completion.  For example, if you sell insurance and need more leads, one of the KPIs is a visitor’s progression from the home page to the contact page.  Once they land on that contact page, a KPI could represent the very first action when filling out your contact form. Consider this: just because someone enters their name in the first field, does not mean they will complete all of the fields and submit the contact form. We need to know not only what proportion of visitors complete the contact form, but also what proportion reached the page and did not complete the form.

The Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel represents a source of customers or potential future prospects. For example, Google Adwords or your Amazon Store. Conceptually, the marketing funnel is a sales funnel with a much wider and taller mouth. Instead of the prospects entering the sales funnel ready to choose a vendor, marketing prospects are at a much earlier stage of the buyer’s journey: they need to be nurtured to – eventually – realize they have a need and to later to be ready to make a purchase decision. The goal of every business should be to build as many profitable marketing funnels as possible. In fact, if you only build only one funnel, then your business is at high risk of failure. It is smarter to have diversity. That is, have four to ten different funnels to mitigate risk.

The more funnels you build, the more revenue you will generate and the more stable your company will become. What’s more, your company can choose the scale, either by growing the funnels individually or by adding more funnels.

Indeed, you can optimize your business by comparing marketing funnels to see what strategies are working better and which are not. Then either copy what works best, or remove the less effective funnels and invest more in the better ones.

Metrics to track in a Marketing Funnel:

• Conversion Rate
• Cost per lead
• Cost per acquisition
• Sales Volume
• Overhead or cost to manage

Hence the analytics funnel focuses on customer behaviors: what they do and what can be changed to influence the customers’ behaviors.  The Marketing funnel is about optimization: the data shows what elements of each funnel is yielding the better KPI results.

At Funnel Science, we have a team of experienced AdWords and PPC experts who will give you the help you need to maximize your lead generation.