Sales & Advertising Funnels: Understanding Conversion Flow
What Are Funnels in General Overview?
The Sales Funnel and Advertising Funnel in General Overview visualize how users move through your business from visibility to purchase.
Instead of showing only final results (such as revenue or orders), funnels break performance into stages. This allows you to identify where users drop off and where performance weakens.
These funnels answer two key questions:
- Are users converting organically?
- Are paid campaigns converting efficiently?
The Logic
A) Funnels represent step-by-step user progression
Each funnel is built as a sequence of stages. Users move from one stage to the next, and performance is measured at each step.
Total Sales Funnel:
- Page View → Session → Order → Unit
Advertising Funnel:
- Impressions → Clicks → Ad Orders → Ad Units
Each stage represents a different part of the conversion process, from visibility to final purchase.
B) Each stage includes key performance metrics
Every step in the funnel shows a core metric and a related rate:
Sales Funnel includes:
- Page View → total visibility
- Session → active visits
- Order → completed purchases
- Unit → number of items sold
With conversion rates such as:
- Session rate
- Conversion rate
- Unit per order
Advertising Funnel includes:
- Impressions → ad visibility
- Clicks → user engagement
- Ad Orders → purchases from ads
- Ad Units → quantity sold via ads
With performance metrics such as:
- CTR (click-through rate)
- CVR (conversion rate)
These metrics help explain how efficiently users move through each stage.
C) Drop-offs indicate where performance weakens
Funnels are designed to highlight where users stop progressing.
A large drop between two stages signals a problem in that part of the journey.
Examples:
- High Page Views but low Sessions → weak engagement or poor listing relevance
- High Sessions but low Orders → conversion issue (pricing, content, reviews)
- High Impressions but low Clicks → weak ad creatives or targeting
- High Clicks but low Ad Orders → poor landing page or mismatch between ad and product
By comparing stages, you can identify exactly where performance is breaking.
D) Comparison reflects performance change over time
Like KPI cards, funnel metrics are calculated within the selected date range and compared to the previous period.
This allows you to see not only where drop-offs exist, but also whether they are improving or worsening over time.
Why This Matters
Revenue alone does not explain performance.
Funnels show the process behind revenue, allowing you to understand whether issues come from:
- Traffic (not enough users entering the funnel)
- Engagement (users not interacting)
- Conversion (users not purchasing)
This makes funnels essential for diagnosing performance problems.
Key Value Pillars
Full visibility into the conversion process
Funnels break down performance into stages, making it easier to understand how users move from awareness to purchase.
Clear identification of bottlenecks
Instead of reviewing metrics in isolation, users can identify exactly where performance drops.
Separation of organic and advertising performance
The Sales Funnel reflects overall behavior, while the Advertising Funnel isolates paid performance.
Faster problem diagnosis
By locating the stage where performance declines, users can move directly to the relevant analysis or action.
Pro Insight
Always identify the stage where the largest drop occurs before taking action.
Improving the wrong stage will not fix the problem. For example, increasing traffic will not help if the issue is conversion, and improving conversion will not matter if users are not reaching the page.