Funnel Drop-Off Rate, How In-App Surveys Can Help You Reduce it

Funnels are integral to nearly every digital product, including sign up, onboarding, key tasks, and even subscription cancellation, which are generally structured as funnels. Therefore, optimizing the funnel drop-off rate at each step is a crucial objective for product teams. Minimizing this drop-off rate ensures that users are progressing toward achieving their goals, bringing them closer to recognizing the value of your product—a top priority for SaaS companies.

Product analytics tools are invaluable in this regard. They all facilitate the visualization of your funnels and help monitor the conversion rates. If your current funnel app doesn’t offer these capabilities, it might be time to consider switching to a more effective solution. However, while analytics can pinpoint where users drop off, they don’t elucidate WHY such drop-offs occur. You can see the problem, but understanding the underlying reasons remains elusive. This is where in-app surveys prove beneficial. By identifying why users exit your funnel and providing insights for enhancing the user experience, these surveys can significantly improve your long-term performance and reduce funnel drop off rates through effective drop-off analysis.

Be sure that you collect your key funnel events

Before beginning to optimize your funnel, it's crucial to ensure that your tracking is set up correctly. At a minimum, you need to track when users enter the funnel and the event you deem a success—the conclusion of your funnel. Naturally, tracking every step and action within the funnel is ideal. However, if that’s not possible, the essential events to monitor are when users enter the funnel and when they complete the key action of the funnel, such as validating a subscription or creating an account. These two points are critical to accurately measure and improve your funnel's performance and to conduct a thorough drop-off analysis, thereby reducing the funnel drop-off rate effectively.

🆕 Discover how to track events in Screeb with Google Tag Manager!

Start by looking at two (and only two) metrics

When your events are tracked, the first thing you need to do is going in your analytics solution. We'll need two metrics to know where and when to deploy our in-app surveys.

The first metric we need to have is obviously the conversion rate from one step to another. If it's really good from Step A to Step B but bad from Step B to Step C, we don't need to ask questions on Step A and we'll concentrate on Step B.

So start by understanding where are your biggest drop-off in your funnel. This will be our priority.

The second metric you need to look for is the average time spent on a step before going to the next one. If you see that people are spending 50 seconds on Step B and that only 40% of them are converting to Step C, you may want to display a survey right before they leave to understand what could have make them stay.

At the end, you should have a table like this:

This simple table will be your most powerful tool to reduce your drop-off!

🥇 Display surveys in the funnel right before drop-off

Now that we have identified where the highest funnel drop-off rates occur and how long users linger on the page before exiting, we'll utilize this information to implement a survey within the funnel. This survey aims to gather feedback on potential improvements for specific screens to decrease the drop-off rate.

Ask a simple question like "How could we make this screen easier to understand?" or "Do you need more information to perform this action?" and let people answer in an open field.

Display this survey on the page of the Step with the lowest conversion rate. In our table, that would be /funnel/step-b/.

But don't display it too soon, you would disturb people and worsen your conversion rate. Use the Average Time Spent data to display your survey once we reached this delay, or even a bit after it. In our example, you would wait for at least 50 seconds before displaying your survey.

Be careful: don't wait too long, you would also miss a lot of people! Conduct tests and find the right balance between too soon and too late to optimize your response rate.

This is REALLY easy to do and you'll get tons of insights about how to improve your funnel.

🥈 Ask those who succeeded what was hard to do

The fact that some people succeed in going through your funnel doesn't mean that your funnel is working and that nothing has to change. Some of them maybe really wanted to go through. Maybe others didn't have a choice because their boss wanted them to complete the task.

Asking to those people what could have been improved is a great way to collect feedback and spot areas of improvement. But you have to do it as soon after the completion of the funnel as possible, for them to still have all their feelings in mind and share them with you. So we'll use the success event that we were speaking about above to display a specific survey to this group of users.

In Screeb, select the Customer Effort Score template. It's a survey designed to identify the level of effort needed to complete a task in your product.

To start, keep the survey as general as possible. It will help you see if every respondent giving a bad CES talk about the same issue. Over time, you'll refine your questions and be more and more precise about a part of your funnel.

Display this survey on the page that is reached after completing the funnel, and only if the success event has been triggered. This way, you'll ask questions right after the completion - so people didn't forget the experience they had - without risking to disturb them during the funnel, and while being sure you'll collect answers only from people who went through every step of the funnel.

🥉 Target those who dropped

Even if with 🥇 and 🥈 you already identified key opportunities to improve your funnel, you still may not have a 100% conversion rate for every step. It means that some people will continue to drop. That's ok, if you tap on this group to continue to understand what you could do better.

To do that, you'll use the two key events we were talking about above: entering into the funnel, and your success event. You'll target people who triggered the first one but not the second one. In other words, it means that you'll display a survey to people who entered in the funnel, but left it before the end.

In Screeb, you'll do that by setting your User Segmentation with your first event count greater that 0 and your success event count smaller than 1. Read more about it here.

In your survey, ask simple questions and use variables to engage with your users. For example, you could ask something like "Hey {firstname}! We've noticed that you didn't go to the end of our funnel. Could you tell us why and help us improve your experience?".

A simple question like that, asked at the right moment to the right group of people will be a tremendous help for you when you'll want to reduce your drop-off rate.

3 surveys? I don't want to spam my users!

With this 3 surveys, you'll get all the information you need to improve your funnel. But you may think that 3 in-app surveys is too much and that you risk to "spam" your users.

First of all, keep in mind that thanks to an event-based segmentation, your users will only see the second OR the third survey, not both. These are not 3 consecutive surveys, but more like a conditional workflow.

Also, in Screeb, we have a capping feature that let you decide how many surveys you want to display to your users per session. This way, you're sure they'll never be bothered by your questions.

With 3 simple surveys, displayed at the right moment thanks to the data you have in your analytics solution and thanks to some key event tracking, you'll build a strong list of improvement for your funnel. You'll be able to reduce your drop-off rate by a lot and increase your conversion performance!