Question

Specify starting page on funnel view

  • 19 June 2023
  • 6 replies
  • 333 views

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Hi there, I am using the funnel chart to track conversion across the pages of my site. 

However, I would like to be able to filter to just those visitors that started on a particular page. (I.e. visitors can be directed either to the homepage or to a detail page, and I want to see the conversion for *just* those who went straight to the detail page, vs. those who first went to the homepage and then to the detail page). 

Is there a way to specify this? 

Thank you so much!


6 replies

Userlevel 5
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@B Analytics welcome back! Great question, have you already tried building this in Pathfinder? It may give you the visual you’re looking for a bit more if you’re curious about other paths that stemmed from that particular page.

Userlevel 2
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If you are familiar with your event properties and/or if your page view event has properties

You might depending on how you instrumented your page view event. Do you have properties such as a page name or a page URL? What I do, is that I use the “filter by’ to specify my page name for the first (and any other) steps of the funnel.

This method is helpful if you already know your page name / url or any other page identifier. If you are not sure what you are tracking for properties, you can go to the ‘Data’ tab, events, look for your page view event, click on it and a drawer opens up where you can see the instrumented properties for that event under the ‘details’ section.

If you are using the old look, the filter is called ‘where’

If your page view event has properties but you don’t know the values (eg page name, page id, page URL) - This is def something I use on a daily basis!

Another way to find out the property and values is by using the Amplitude extension https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003032451-Debug-your-instrumentation-with-the-Amplitude-Instrumentation-Explorer and perform the steps you want to track in the funnel, then check in the extension for your logs where it tells you the events and properties for that event.

If your page view event has properties but you don’t know the values -alternative to using the extension:

Make your filter have the page view as the starting event, then use the group by for this first event

What this will do, is that it will create all possible funnels for all the starting points and, with this, you can identify which one is the one with the highest conversion, or just find the property value for the page you are looking for. It will give you something like this https://analytics.amplitude.com/demo/chart/new/pdnvi827

 

If you are using the old look, use the ‘broken down by’ function where the step number would be 1 (for your first bucket in the funnel) and select the property you want the grouping to happen by.

 

The pathfinder way

Pathfinder is a really great tool to find that prior step or validate your assumptions of whether a funnel you have in mind is the one that your users are performing the most. It does have the option to expand events by property which can help you in identifying the name of the page or any other identifier, just as I explained in the funnel options. I personally find the pathfinder ideal for discovery but not for when I have a specific tracking goal in mind (such as, went from home page to detail).

 

Hope this helps! :) 

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Thank you so much both! I’ve just seen that when creating a funnel you can choose Events “exact order” from the drop down. If I choose this, does that mean that the first event I choose (page view = experience detail page) MUST be the first page that a visitor goes to? Just checking that I am understanding correctly “users perform only these event in this order”. 

Thank you!

Userlevel 2
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Thank you so much both! I’ve just seen that when creating a funnel you can choose Events “exact order” from the drop down. If I choose this, does that mean that the first event I choose (page view = experience detail page) MUST be the first page that a visitor goes to? Just checking that I am understanding correctly “users perform only these event in this order”. 

Thank you!

The exact order means that the funnel only considers the users that went from one step exactly to the next step whereas the this order means that there could have been intermediary stops.

Let’s say we have this scenario: on the home page, there is a CTA button that says ‘learn more’ and, when a user clicks on it, they get redirected to the details page.

If I create a chart where exact order:

  • event 1: Page view = Home Page
  • event 2: Page view = details page

Then my funnel would have 1 user in event 1 and 0 users in event two. This is because the user can’t get to details page without clicking on a CTA first

If I create a chart where this order:

  • event 1: Page view = Home Page
  • event 2: Page view = details page

Then my funnel would have 1 user in event 1 and 1 users in event two. This is because the user did perform event 2 after event 1 regardless of intermediary steps.

FAQ regarding the exact order and this order https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040957432-Historical-Count-Track-user-behavior-for-different-instances-of-each-user-action

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To be able to identify a user that viewed the home page for the first time, you can use the property historical count though you should read this FAQ first as there are some nuances when using properties https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040957432-Historical-Count-Track-user-behavior-for-different-instances-of-each-user-action

Or you can use the pathfinder to select the path where a user Started session first, then viewed the home page if what you are looking for is users that started the session on that first page of your funnel. Pathfinder allows you to build funnels within it for any of the paths.

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Thank you @Azu_Saucedo - I think I’m getting there! I’ve created a funnel view with exact order and used page_view filters for page = experience detail. 

Is there any way in Amplitude of finding out which page was the first page a visitor landed on? (Ideally within this funnel view I would have landing page = experience detail)

I need to export the results to csv so I’m not able to use Pathfinder

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Thank you @Azu_Saucedo - I think I’m getting there! I’ve created a funnel view with exact order and used page_view filters for page = experience detail. 

Is there any way in Amplitude of finding out which page was the first page a visitor landed on? (Ideally within this funnel view I would have landing page = experience detail)

I need to export the results to csv so I’m not able to use Pathfinder

 

hmm, I think you could achieve this in the funnel chart by specifying:

  1. Event 1: Start session
  2. Event 2: Page_viewed grouped by your property (the one where you used the value ‘experience detail’)
  3. Event 3: Page_viewed= experience detail

This will break out the funnel into all the possible pages that were viewed prior to viewing the experience detail one, but using the ‘exact order’ carefully by considering if there were paths that might have taken intermediary steps and that you might be excluding by using the exact order. Pathfinder will help you validate the funnel you create though!

An example of how the funnel chart could look like (note I used the this order in this example) is here https://analytics.amplitude.com/demo/chart/new/p4sduvls where I wanted to find out what genre selection song/video was selected by the user prior to playing song/video where the content = song.

 

The start session will not do much in ‘this order’ for this example so it matches the numbers of the second section of selecting a video or song but if you have figured out what the exact order looks like for you, then it should give you what you are looking for. When scrolling down to the table though and when you export to CSV, you can see these flows a lot better focusing on the actual number count of users.

 

Alternatively, with pathfinder, you can do a ‘starting event = start session’ and filter by sessions that include page_viewed=experience detail, expand by property the event page_viewed (the property you used for the value experience detail) and identify the path that seems of interest. While you select all the event blocks in that path, a funnel will be built at the top of the screen. You can then use these steps to build your funnel chart which you can then export.

Pathfinder example for a path selection https://analytics.amplitude.com/demo/chart/new/ekowbcb8

And then you copy those funnel steps and properties in exact order funnel chart https://analytics.amplitude.com/demo/chart/new/lpr2iuzm

 

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