Back in 2017, I lamented the lack of any option to create funnel visualizations in Data Studio (now known as Looker Studio.) 

So many clients needed a way to visualize their customer’s behavior through key conversion paths on their site, that I found some clever workarounds to bring funnel-like visualizations to life. 

In addition to the methods outlined in my old blog post (and the great posts of others), there were several Community Visualizations available. 

I’m so excited to see that now, funnel visualizations are available natively in Looker Studio! So let’s check them out. 

Under Add a chart, you’ll now see an option for funnel visualizations: 

They are essentially the same three charts (same setup, etc) but just three different ways of viewing it: 

1. Sloped bar 
2. Stepped bar
3. Inverted triangle (note that while this funnel style may be visually appealing, its size doesn’t really tell you about the actual conversion rate, meaning that your users will still need to read and digest the numbers to understand how users convert. Aka… it’s a data visualization, that doesn’t actually visualize the data…) 

My personal favorite is probably the Stepped Bar, so I’ll use that for the following examples. 

The setup is surprisingly simple (certainly, much simpler than the hoops I used to jump through to create these visualizations in 2017!) 

You just need to specify one dimension and one metric. 

For a dimension, you could use: 

• Page Path and Query String
• Event Name 
• A calculated field that takes some mix of different dimensions (based on a case statement.) 

Obviously if you included every page, or every event, that “funnel” chart would not be terribly useful, as it would include every page/event, and not narrow it down to those that you actually consider to be a part of the funnel: 

You’ll therefore want to use filters to narrow down to just the events or pages that actually form your funnel. For example, you could filter to just the specific events of view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase. 

Another option would be to create a specific dimension for use in your funnels, that uses a combination of events and pages (and/or, collapses various values of a dimension into just those you want included.) 

For example, let’s say you want to analyze a funnel including: 

• Session on the site (tracked via an event)
• Viewed a page of your blog (tracked via a page_view event, but might have many different possible values, so we want to collapse them all into one)
• Submitted a lead form (tracked via an event) 

You could create a CASE statement to combine all of those into one dimension, for easy use in a funnel: 

(You would then exclude “dimension IS NULL” from your funnel.) 

For your metrics, you could use something like Total Users, Sessions, etc. 

Formatting options: 

• You can choose to show the dimension value (or not) 
• You can choose to show the funnel numbers as the raw number, the conversion percentage (from the very first step) or the conversion rate from the previous step. Warning: If you show the conversion rate from the previous step, the funnel visualization still shows the conversion rate from the start of the funnel, so this might be confusing for some users (unless you show both, via two charts.) 

You can choose to “Color by” a single color (my recommendation, because this is garish and awful – I said what I said.) 

Your funnel can include up to 10 steps (which is on par with funnel in Explore, and definitely better than the “create a blended data source” hack we used to use, that only allowed for 5 steps.) 

Have you had a chance to play with the new funnel visualizations in Looker Studio yet? Share what you think in Measure Chat’s Looker Studio channel!