A sales funnel for a website is the path a person takes from the first visit to payment and a repeat order, split into stages at each of which some visitors drop off. Its value is not the pretty diagram but the numbers: once you know that out of a hundred visitors to a service page only two fill in the form, and out of ten leads three pay, it becomes clear where exactly the money disappears and what to fix first. Below we go through the funnel stages as they apply to a website, the metrics of each stage, the typical leaks and two examples of how it looks for a service business and for an online store.
The textbook model talks about awareness, interest, desire and action. For a website it is more practical to count specific, measurable actions. At Query we use this sequence.
Funnel stages are not necessarily linear: a person can return a week later from another device, and analytics will show two different visitors. So the numbers for the upper stages are always approximate, while the lower ones, where there is a phone number or an email, are exact.
There are two data sources: Google Analytics 4 for everything that happens on the site, and the CRM for everything after the lead. If there is no CRM, its role is temporarily played by a spreadsheet where the manager records every lead, its source and the outcome. Without this, the lower half of the funnel is invisible, and no analytics setup will help.
In GA4 the key actions (form submitted, call, order) must be marked as key events: then the "Traffic acquisition" report shows how many of those actions each source produced. This is the most important report for an owner, and it should be checked monthly, not once a year.
| Stage | Metric | Typical problem | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traffic | Sessions by source | Wrong audience | Separate info and commercial pages |
| View | Engagement, time, scroll | Leave in the first seconds | Speed, a clear first screen |
| Interest | Clicks on prices, phone | They read but do not act | "From" price, examples, reviews |
| Lead | Conversion to lead | A 9-field form | 2-3 fields, a button on every screen |
| Sale | Leads that became payments | Reply after two days | Reply within an hour |
| Repeat purchase | Share of second orders | The client is forgotten | Reminders, a useful newsletter |
From what we see on small and mid-sized business websites, money leaks through five typical holes, and none of them has anything to do with advertising.
A slow website. The page takes five seconds to load on a phone, and some of the people from the ads you paid for never even saw the offer. This is a hole right at the entrance, and it eats the budget quietly: reports just show "low time on site".
An unclear offer. The first screen says "Innovative solutions for your business", while the person searched for "washing machine repair Obolon". They could not tell whether they were in the right place and went back to the search results. The heading should repeat what they came for, not the company mission.
A monster form. First name, last name, email, phone, company, position, budget, "how did you hear about us", and a captcha. Every field filters out some people. For the first contact a phone number or a messenger is enough; the manager finds out the rest in conversation.
No reply for two days. The most expensive hole. The website did its job, the lead is there, and the manager saw it on Monday. Meanwhile the person wrote to three more companies and picked the one that answered in ten minutes. Here the question of how to increase sales is about process, not marketing.
No return path. The customer bought, and was forgotten. No email a month later, no reminder when it is time to replace the filter or renew the service. Every repeat sale has to be "bought" again with traffic.
The top of the funnel here consists of pages for specific services and districts that gather search traffic, plus blog posts answering "what to do if" questions. The interest stage: a tap on the phone number, opening the cost calculator, going to "Prices". Lead: a call or a messenger note, a two-field form. Sale: in the CRM or a spreadsheet, tagged with the source. Repeat purchase: a reminder after the interval typical for the service. The main metric to watch: the share of service-page visitors who made any kind of contact, and the manager's response time.
Top: categories and product cards in search, shopping ads, social media. Interest: viewing several cards in one category, adding to cart, comparing. Lead: a placed order or "buy in one click". Sale: an order paid and not returned. Repeat purchase: a second receipt within a few months. The step between cart and payment deserves special attention here: mandatory registration, an unexpected delivery cost, a "checkout" button that is not visible on a phone. Each of these shows up in GA4 as a gap between the "add to cart" and "begin checkout" events.
In both cases the numbers will be your own, and comparing them with "market averages" is pointless. Compare them with your own previous month.
Advertising pours in traffic for as long as you pay. Search and content work differently: a page that reached the top for "how to choose a water heater" brings people every month at no extra cost, and some of them will buy a week later. This is the cheapest top of the funnel there is, but it is slow: SEO promotion in Google shows a tangible result after months, not days, so it runs alongside advertising rather than instead of it.
Content works on two levels. Informational articles catch people who are still putting their problem into words and introduce them to the brand. Commercial service and category pages have to convert those who are already ready: what matters there is not the word count but the answer to "why you", the price, the proof. That kind of conversion copywriting is a separate job, and it only pays off when the lower funnel stages are no longer leaking; otherwise you simply bring more people to the same nine-field form.
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