What is a funnel, and how many steps can it have?

An ordered sequence of goals, showing how many people made it to each step and how many fell out between.

Two steps minimum, eight maximum. Every step is a goal you’ve already created, so build the goals first.

A signup funnel usually looks like this:

1. Viewed /pricing
2. Started signup
3. Verified email
4. Made a first project

You get numbered horizontal bars, visitors at each step, the conversion rate, and “{count} dropped · {rate}” between them. The header tells you the overall completion rate. The value isn’t the total - it’s spotting that step three loses 60% of everyone, which is a Tuesday afternoon’s work to fix and worth more than a month of traffic.

Two matching modes, and picking the right one matters:

• Sequential - the steps happen in order, but other things can happen in between. This is what you want almost always. Real people browse.
• Strict - the steps must be consecutive events with nothing between them. Use it when the sequence is a genuine machine-like flow and any detour means failure.

Choose Sequential unless you have a specific reason. Strict on a normal website will show you a near-zero completion rate and it won’t be telling you anything.

Set them up under Site settings → Funnels, then read them in the Funnels tab of the Behavior card.

Two limits worth knowing. Funnels inherit the no-backfill rule from their goals - a funnel is only as old as its youngest step. And if you want to know where people went instead, the Explore tab does that: pick a page and walk forwards or backwards through where visitors came from and left to, with explicit entry and exit rows.