Everyone has seen the drawing. An upside down triangle with awareness, interest, desire and purchase written across it. It is so familiar that it has stopped teaching anything. People memorise it, leave the session, and still have no idea what to do with it on Monday morning.
So let us put the drawing away and walk into a shop instead. A clothes shop on a street, with an Instagram page.
A funnel is a count at four moments, not a shape
The funnel is not a theory. It is counting people at four different moments and seeing how much the number drops between one and the next.
First moment: how many people learned the shop exists. They walked past the window, or the post reached them. Second: how many were actually interested, meaning they came inside or read to the end. Third: how many tried something on or asked the price. Fourth: how many paid.
Those four numbers always fall. The funnel is just the name we give to the falling. If a hundred walked past, twenty came in, six tried something on and two bought, you already have a funnel and you did nothing to get one. The only thing the drawing adds is that you look at all four together instead of staring at the sales figure alone.
Why that helps: it tells you where the problem is
A shop owner whose sales dropped says one sentence: the market is slow. That sentence leads to no decision at all.
With four numbers it becomes specific. If the number walking past fell, the problem is not selling, it is that nobody knows you exist. If footfall held and the number coming in fell, the problem is the window or the price on display. If the number coming in held and the number buying fell, the problem is in the last five minutes: the price, the payment, or somebody hovering in a way that makes people leave.
Three completely different problems, with three completely different responses. And all three look identical in the sales figure: down.
The split between marketing and sales is visible here too, the early numbers being one and the last being the other. I worked through that with a single example from start to finish in the difference between marketing and sales.
The last moment leaks most, and there are numbers on it
In a shop you will never know exactly how many people tried something on and left. Online that number is measured, and measured a lot.
The Baymard Institute tracks the cart abandonment rate, and it is a research outfit that works on ecommerce user experience rather than a vendor with a product to sell. Their figure is 70.22 per cent, and they state plainly that it is the unweighted average of 50 studies published between 2006 and 2025.
Seven out of every ten people who put something in a basket left it there. Not one study in one year: an average across fifty studies over nineteen years. That stability is itself the information. A leak at the final step is not a sign that something is uniquely wrong with you.
And here is the honest part: not every leak is a leak
Stopping at 70 per cent produces the wrong conclusion. The same page asks people who abandoned why they did, and the largest single reason is that they were just browsing and not ready to buy. 42 per cent of US online shoppers said so.
Read that twice. Roughly four in ten of the people who abandoned were never buying in the first place. If you treat all seventy per cent as lost sales, you are trying to fix something that is half not broken. That is the fastest known way to burn money on discounts and follow-up messages aimed at people who were never going to buy.
This is the difference between reading numbers and using them. The funnel does not tell you that everyone who left is a loss. It tells you where people leave, and then you have to judge which of them came to buy.
The reasons you can actually fix
Set the browsers aside and the same page lists other reasons. These ones are in your hands:
| Reason | Share who cited it | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Extra costs too high: shipping, tax, fees | 40% | The number they saw at the end was not the number they decided on |
| Delivery was too slow | 20% | Delivery time is part of the price, not a logistics detail |
| Did not trust the site with card details | 19% | Trust is built before the payment page, not on it |
| The site wanted them to create an account | 18% | A step you added, costing you one in five |
Three of those four are not problems with the product or the price. They are problems in the last five minutes. The shop on the street has the same three in different clothes: a queue at the till, a card machine that is not working, or somebody asking for your phone number before they will ring it up.
If the sale happens on a landing page, the detail of that moment matters a great deal, and the colleagues at KF Agency went through the technical half of it in their Arabic article on building a high converting Arabic landing page, which is in Arabic.
The limits, and why the funnel misleads
The limits have to be said, because the funnel gets sold as a law and it is not one.
First, people do not move in one direction. Someone sees a post, forgets, hears about you from a friend a month later, and buys. On the drawing that person dropped out. In reality they are a customer. The drawing assumes a straight line and there is no straight line.
Second, the numbers at the top are harder to measure than the ones at the bottom, which means people measure the bottom and ignore the top. That is precisely why plenty of businesses have excellent sales data and no idea why sales fell.
Third, and most important: the funnel describes, it does not explain. It tells you sixty per cent left between two moments. It does not tell you why. The why comes from asking people or changing something, not from looking at the number harder.
The Baymard figures have a limit of their own. That is online retail data, and most of it from Western markets. The first reason, browsing, I believe holds anywhere. I am not going to tell you the detailed percentages are the same in Egypt, because I have not seen an Egyptian study of that size that I could point you to.
Three numbers are enough, the rest can wait
If you run a small business and are not about to build an analytics stack, three numbers will do: how many people your message reached this month, how many asked, how many paid. Write them on a piece of paper every month.
After three months you will have something more useful than any drawing: a direction. You will know which number is moving and which is stuck. That is the order that works, and it is part of a larger system I set out in what a growth system for a business actually is, with the measuring itself, in four numbers, in how to measure marketing results.
And if the words themselves are still slippery, what promotion actually means clears up part of the confusion before any of this.
This sits in the goals part of the growth system: how to tell you are on track before sales themselves move. In Growth Engine I go through the north-star metric and its inputs, and the empty-metric test that exposes numbers which look good and say nothing. Read Part 2, Goals: where are you going; it is free, written in Arabic.