Low Funnel Conversion Rate: How to Find Where You’re Losing Leads?

You can’t guess your way to fixing a low conversion rate in your sales funnel. The overall conversion rate is a single number that captures all stages of your funnel.

It tells you that something is wrong, but it doesn’t tell you whether people are leaving your landing page, abandoning your form, ignoring your follow-up, or dropping out after a sales call.

The fix is to break the funnel into stages, figure out the conversion rate at each stage and compare those stages against one another. Usually you begin with the stage that has the biggest drop or the cheapest stage to improve. 

Here you will learn how to do this, what the typical causes of the leaks are and when it makes sense to consider a funnel fix service.

What’s a good funnel conversion rate?

There’s not a single number that works for every funnel. The conversion rate of a funnel depends on what visitors are asked to do, where the traffic comes from and how much the offer costs.

A free guide converts differently than a demo request, warm email traffic converts differently than cold ads. Benchmarks are still a good ballpark figure.

Unbounce’s 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report shows that the median conversion rate across all industries is 6.6% across 41,000 landing pages. Unbounce’s summary says the median is 3.8% for SaaS landing pages and 4.2% for ecommerce landing pages. 

The raw data can be found at Unbounce's report, along with their summary of what makes for a good conversion rate.

Handle those numbers with care:

• These track how many times visitors will take a single action on a landing page, such as filling out a form. They don’t track how many visitors turn into paying customers.
• The figures vary from source to source as different reports use different datasets and years.
• Even a lower rate can be profitable if your leads are high quality and you have a strong close rate.

The more useful comparison is your funnel to its own past performance, stage by stage. A funnel conversion rate benchmark is a starting point for questions – not a pass / fail grade.

How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate for a Funnel

There are two formulas for funnel conversion rate.

Stage Conversion Rate = (people completed stage/people entered stage) × 100

Overall funnel conversion rate = people who completed last step / people who entered top of funnel × 100

You need them both. The overall rate shows the result and the stage rates show where it originated from .

Example (fictitious figures): Let’s say that 5,000 people enter a lead generation funnel in a month.

Overall funnel conversion rate = 15 / 5000 = 0.3%. That number alone doesn’t tell you what to fix. From the stage view we can see that 50% of people that start the form do not finish the form and only 30% of people that click the call to action even start the form. Both are specific sites to explore.

You can set up a basic spreadsheet to calculate your funnel conversion rates. Put the stages in one column and the count in another. Then put in a third column and divide each count by the one above.

Where are your leads dropping out of your funnel?

Funnel drop-off analysis is about how many people leave between each pair of steps. This is probably baked into your analytics program.

In Google Analytics 4 funnel reports, each step has an abandonment rate. An example from Google’s documentation: if 200 users start a session and only 140 view a product, the abandonment rate for this step is 60 users or 30%.

These reports by default use a closed funnel. A closed funnel only counts users who go through each step in order, and a user who skips a step drops out of the later steps.

This is important if your form or checkout is accessible without navigating through all the previous pages. See the help page for Google’s Purchase journey report for how it works.

Don’t stop at the funnel to find the real leak. Break it up.

• By equipment. A funnel that works well on desktop but poorly on phones is a mobile problem.
• By source of traffic. If paid social traffic is falling off at the first step but email traffic is not, the issue may be traffic quality or message match, not the page.
• By step timing. Drop-offs between steps show up as slow pages and slow follow-up.

Google’s own guidance is helpful here. High abandonment at any point can be a sign of a technical problem, like a page taking too long to load. If the reasons are not clear, it recommends usability testing.

That's the proper order. Numbers tell you where to look, and watching real people go through the funnel tells you why.

Funnel bottlenecks and friction points you see most often

Funnel bottlenecks are where you have far less people continuing than you’d expect. Funnel friction points are the things that make that happen, like a vague headline, a long form or a slow page. Which stage is leaking determines the fix.

Top of funnel (Visitors that don’t interact)

• The ad or link promises something that the page does not deliver.
• Headline and offer not obvious in a few seconds.
• The page loads slowly or crashes on a mobile device.
• Traffic does not match the offer

Middle of funnel (visitors who engage but do not convert)

• "Form is too much, too early.
• No proof the offer works, e.g., reviews, case studies or clear info.
• It’s not clear what the next step is, or there are too many competing buttons.
• Pricing & Terms listed without context.

Bottom of funnel (leads that don’t become customers)

• The user submits a form and there is a slow response.
• Confirmation emails go to spam or just don’t arrive.
• Leads are misrouted in the CRM or follow-up stops after one email.
• Sales conversations begin without the context that the lead has already provided.

Tracking problems that resemble funnel problems

• Events happen to fire twice or never.
• A step is measured differently from the way it is described.
• Thank-you pages can be viewed without the action being taken.

Each is a potential cause, not a diagnosis. Two funnels with the same low conversion rate can have totally different problems, and fixing the wrong one is just a waste of time.

Why Does My Sales Funnel Not Convert?

If a funnel isn't converting, it's usually due to one of four things: the traffic, the offer, the experience or the follow-up.

The traffic. If the visitors aren't the right kind, no page change will save the numbers. Before you start designing, compare conversion by source.

Offer If the people get the page, but still don't act, then the offer, price or risk is the problem.

Experience. If there is friction in forms, navigation, load speed, or mobile layout, people won’t continue.

Follow Up. “ Even if the page itself is doing its job, if leads are coming into the funnel but never hearing back, or hearing back too late, that’s a leak.

Work through them in that sequence. It’s less expensive to verify the traffic is correct than to redesign a page for the wrong audience.

How Our Funnel Fix Service Increases Conversion Rates

Funnel Fix is for businesses who already have a funnel and traffic but are not seeing the results they expect. It begins with finding the problem. Not rebuilding everything.

The general approach is as follows:

• Look at your funnel data to find the biggest and most fixable drop-offs.
• Check your tracking, so you can trust the numbers.
• Look at the pages, forms and follow ups at the points where people drop out.
• Prioritize fixes by likely impact and effort.
• Make a change, measure the result, move to the next one.

A funnel can’t fix a bad offer or a bad traffic fit and there is no service that can promise you a certain lift. An audit can show you which factor is holding conversion back, so you’re not paying to fix the wrong thing.

If your store is on Shopify, our Shopify funnel services cover the store-specific side of this.

Funnel Audit: Identify and Repair the Leaks

A funnel conversion rate audit takes the whole path in a specific order so each finding builds on the one before it.

You get back a ranked list of problems with the evidence for each one, so you know what to fix, and why, and in what order.