Since all three of your goals have the same goal page, the overall goal conversion rate will be triple your actual conversion rate. There’s no way around this aside from differentiating the goal page. You’d have to do this on the back end of your site — for example, you could use a query parameter and have “checkout_success.php?type=new”, “checkout_success.php?type=existing”, “checkout_success.php?type=fast”. Then you could differentiate the goal page among the different kinds of checkout and get a fuller picture of the different conversion rates.

If there are pages in your goal process that you don’t define as funnel steps, you’ll see visitors exit from the funnel to those pages and then re-enter the funnel at the next step you’ve defined that the visitor reaches. (I’m assuming that you’ve got Google Analytics tracking code on all the pages, including the ones you don’t have defined as part of the funnel — if not, your results will be different.)

We’re looking at the abandon rate of the shopping cart on an ecommerce site for a client. I set up 3 different goals as there are 3 different ways through the cart:
1)New customer
2)Existing customer
3)Fast check out.

Each one has different steps but they all start from the same page, “login.php” and end at the “checkout_success.php” page. I have set up in the funnel reports and used “required step” to differentiate between them. The problem I have is as the end page is the same for all of them my conversion rate is triple what it actually is. Is there any way around this?

many thanks in advance

Dan

You’re on the right track, but that’s not quite right.

Step 1: ^/purchase\.php(?!(shipping|billing|confirm)) <– you also want to exclude the goal step here (”confirm”)
Step 2: ^/purchase\.php\?shipping
Step 3: ^/purchase\.php\?billing
Goal: ^/purchase\.php\?confirm <– none of steps 2, 3, or the goal need a lookahead because they don’t match the others anyway

Great post! I was in trouble regarding GA goal setting and I got this link from one of my friend. I am greatful to her and you too.

I am facing the same problems whatever you have mentioned above.

I want to ask you that one little confirmation about goal setting.

My current funnel steps are as follows :

Step1: ^/purchase\.php
Step2: ^/purchase\.php\?shipping
Step3: ^/purchase\.php\?billing
Goal : ^/purchase\.php\?confirm

and I have modified by it by as follows :

Step1 : ^/purchase\.php(?!(shipping|billing))
Step2 : ^/purchase\.php\?(?=shipping)
Step3 : ^/purchase\.php\?(?=billing)
Goal : ^/purchase\.php\?(?=confirm)

Any thoughts on this please!

Thanks,
Bhagawat.

Although it’s not entirely clear from the way the report is labeled, the numbers in the Funnel Visualization report are numbers of visitors, not numbers of pageviews. So if there are reloads or a visitor goes to the same funnel page more than once, they’ll still only be counted once in this report.

You wrote “GA simply looks through the visit to see if the goal page was viewed, and if it was, the visit counts as a conversion. So if a visitor repeats the funnel within the same visit, you’ll only see one conversion.”

One question: does GA looks the same for each step? For example, if I have a step that reloads if the user does not fill required information, will I see two views on this step or only one?

Thank you very much.

Very Good Jonathan!

I got that problem (100% conversion across steps). I read the negative lookaheads post but I am not whether I got it right…

Would we sort problem out if we use the following reg expressions:

Step 1: (?=/user)
Step 2: (?=/user/registerentry)
Step 3: (?=/user/register)

?

Thanks again,
Luciano.

You’re on the right track, but that’s not quite what you’re looking for. What you want to do is, match the first part of the URL (”/user”) ONLY IF it’s not followed by the second part (”/register”). In that case, you want something like this:

Step 1: /user(?!/register)
Step 2: /user/registerentry
Step 3: /user/register(?!entry)

These use a *negative* lookahead (?!) which says, don’t match if this is what follows. Also note that you must have Regular Expression set as the match type to use these expressions.

@Jeff Staub — One report available that I didn’t mention that might help you out in understand people who “skip” steps in a funnel is the Reverse Goal Path report. It lists the last few pages people visited before the goal page (up to five, I believe). They’re not limited to the pages you define in the funnel; whichever pages visitors went to before the goal. The report is kind of ugly and hard to read, but there is some additional information there you can’t get from the Funnel Visualization report.

@Jeff Hogg — Another suggestion that my colleague John here at LunaMetrics made was to check the Match Type you’re using in your goal (Head Match, Exact Match, or Regular Expression), then take a careful look at the exact URLs of your funnel pages and the values you’ve put into the funnel steps to make sure they’re actually matching. If the funnel page expressions don’t match, but the goal page does, that would be an explanation for your 100% entry at the goal page.