miji.beA funnel is a marketing model that visualizes the staged process from initial awareness to a final action such as a purchase or sign-up. Because users drop off at each stage, the number of people decreases as you move down, forming a funnel shape.
A marketing funnel can be divided, for example, into four stages: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Action. For an e-commerce site, this translates into concrete steps: site visit, product view, add to cart, and purchase completion.
Funnel analysis identifies which stage loses the most users. For example, if 30% of users who add items to their cart complete a purchase, the other 70% drop off between those two steps. The Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate, calculated from 50 studies, at 70.22% (2026 edition).
Short URLs play a role at every funnel stage. Short links in social posts and ads at the awareness stage, in newsletters at the interest stage, and to comparison pages at the consideration stage each count clicks. Assigning different UTM parameters to each stage's short URL lets an analytics tool tell which stage's link the traffic came from.
Google Analytics 4 offers Funnel exploration, where you define custom steps and run funnel analysis. A notable capability is switching between an open funnel (including users who enter mid-funnel) and a closed funnel (only users who start at step one).