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Funnels and Goals: Find Where the Money Leaks

Cross-session funnels, goals with a dollar value, heatmaps and cursor replay. See which step loses customers, how much it costs you, and which channel brings the ones who make it.

3 min read

Traffic tells you people showed up. Funnels tell you where they left, and how much that costs you. Datalenk ties every step to revenue and to the channel that brought the visitor, without a data team.

What it does

  • Goals, with no code: a goal is a URL reached (/thank-you, /checkout/success) or a custom event you fire. Give it a dollar value and it reports as revenue, even if nothing is charged on-site: a booked call, a filled form, a downloaded PDF.
  • Cross-session funnels: 2 to 8 steps, followed per visitor, not per session, so a prospect who lands on Monday and pays on Thursday counts as one funnel, not two failures.
  • Drop-off and revenue per step: see where the money leaks, and how much is leaking. Plus the time to convert, so you stop reading a 30-day sales cycle as a 7-day failure.
  • Broken down by entry channel: which channel brings people who make it to the end, and which one fills the top of your funnel with tourists.
  • Journeys and individual paths: click any visitor and read their whole path, page by page, from the first visit to the payment.
  • Cohorts and retention, including retention in revenue: group visitors by the week or the month they first showed up, then read the triangle: who came back, and how much each cohort kept paying you after the first visit. One condition: a cohort has to recognize the same person weeks later, so this view needs the Persistent layer switched on (the default cookieless layer deliberately cannot do it).
  • Heatmaps and lightweight replay: scroll depth, the elements people actually click, and a replay of the cursor and scroll trail of a real visit. Coordinates only, no video, no keystrokes, recorded only with your visitors' consent.

How it works

  1. Add the script, and connect your payments (Stripe, Paddle, LemonSqueezy, PayPal and eight more, or the payments API) so the money side flows in.
  2. Create your goals: pick a URL, or fire datalenk.track('signup'). Put a value on the ones worth money.
  3. Pick 2 to 8 goals in order and read the funnel: drop-off, revenue and time to convert at every step, split by the channel people came from.

One honest note on multi-day funnels. By default the tracker is cookieless and stitches visits server-side within the day. For a funnel that spans several days, either switch on the Persistent layer (opt-in, consent required) or call datalenk.identify(email) at login. One line, and the visitor stays one person across sessions and devices.

Why this matters

A funnel counted per session reads a prospect who leaves for Stripe and comes back as a drop-off. Counted per visitor, the same path is one conversion, which is the conversion rate you actually have. Putting a dollar figure on each step then tells you which leak to fix first, and the channel split tells you whether the leak is a page problem or an audience problem.

Go deeper

A simple guide to reading retention without a data team: ↗. Why profit per customer is the metric underneath it all: ↗.

See exactly where you lose customers, and money. 14-day trial, card required, cancel in two clicks. Start your trial.

FAQ

What is funnel analysis? Measuring drop-off across an ordered sequence of steps, so you find the exact point where prospects leave before converting or paying. Datalenk adds the part that matters: how much revenue that step is costing you.

Do I need to write code to track a goal? No. A goal can be a URL reached, matched exactly, by prefix or by pattern, with a preview of how many pages match. Custom events are one line if you want them.

Do funnels cost extra? No, funnels are a measurement feature. Every measurement feature is in every plan; A/B tests come with Business and above. Plans differ on volume, number of sites, number of people and retention.