Demand and conversion
Funnel
An ordered model of the steps between first contact and purchase, used to locate where people stop rather than to describe how they think.
The funnel is a measurement instrument, not a theory of behaviour. Real buyers loop, leave, return through a different door and arrive already decided; the model is still useful because it tells you which step loses the most people, which is the only thing a diagnosis needs.
Its value is in the step-to-step rates rather than the end-to-end one. An overall conversion of 1.8 % says nothing actionable. Knowing that 84 % of the loss happens between viewing a product and beginning checkout points at one page.
Attention goes to the top of the funnel because it is where the volume is. The money is at the step with the worst transition rate, and that step is usually cheap to fix precisely because nobody has looked at it.
A definition proves nothing. These are the places on this site where this quantity was actually computed, with the period and whose figure it is stated beside each one.
288 of 717 candidates were filtered by the form itself, before any interviewer time was spent on them.
$230 to place an engineer, not $3,000 · 31 July 2025 · our measurement
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- CRM, websites and omnichannel
- One customer, one record. Every metric downstream depends on it.
- Business process audit
- Remove before you optimise. Most process debt is subtraction, not addition.
- Digital marketing for Dubai and the UAE
- Spend follows contribution margin, not volume.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.