Google Analytics Conversion Funnel

Yesterday I promised to post some more about Google Analytics. Well, here it is. It's about the Conversion Funnel.
I set it up last week to see how many of my visitors reach the Install Recent Posts Widget-button on my Widget Download and Installation Page. So, after reaching my Blog (by Google, by reference, or otherwise) at the Recent Post Widget Updated post, my visitor has to navigate to the Downloads page, and then has to click the button. Those 3 steps are called a Funnel, and a visitor who reaches the destination is called a Conversion.

Let's take a look at my Funnel:

As you can see, the first step of the Funnel is my post called "Recent Posts Widget Updated". There have been 75 visits to this post. People reach this post through Entrance Points, displayed at the left. From this 75 visitors 52% move on through the funnel to the downloads-page, and 48% leave to another blog-page (the Exit Points, to the right). In the end, only 16% of the visitors reach the end of the Funnel, and click the Install-button.

Setting up a Funnel is easy, you just have to enter a list of all the page urls that are part of the funnel. The Funnel information is very usefull if you have e-commerce goals, and want to know how people are reaching your payments-page (browsing the products, adding stuff to their shopping-cart, ordering, paying is a typical e-commerce funnel), but as a blogger you can use it to track how people reach your most valuable information.

You can also monitor clicks on external links, such as my Install-button, by adding some extra code to the link. This is clearly explained in the help-section of Google Analytics.