Why users leave
Two questions to answer: where they leave, and why.
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If you have visitors but they aren’t converting, you’ve got two questions to answer: where are they leaving, and why?
Both need an answer before you start changing things. Otherwise you’ll waste a weekend rewriting a form that wasn’t the problem to begin with.
Find the where
Open Funnels. The Flow view auto-draws every multi-step path your visitors took, with drop-off percentages on each edge. Your target is whichever step has the biggest drop.
If you have a specific flow you care about (signup, checkout, etc.), define a custom funnel for it. The step view will show completion and drop-off per step.
Narrow the why before you watch
Before you start watching session replays, let the dashboards tell you what they already know. They have aggregate signals that point at the cause faster than scrubbing through individual sessions.
- Dashboard: the experience card tracks how many sessions were frustrated this period (rage clicks, dead clicks, errors, repeated form retries) and lists the top frustrating pages by URL. If the leaky funnel step is on that list, you already have a strong starting hypothesis.
- Form Analytics: if the step is a form, this shows which fields people focus on and bail, and which ones they retry. Field-level abandonment is rarely the field you'd guess.
- Heatmaps: click and scroll heatmaps for the step's URL show where attention concentrates, and more usefully, where it doesn't. A button below the fold on iPhone is a classic.
You’re not looking for proof yet. You’re looking for a hypothesis. “It’s probably the shipping cost on mobile” beats “let’s start watching sessions blind.”
Confirm by watching
Now open Sessions, sort by Frustration descending, and filter to people who landed on the leaky step.
Watch the most recent abandons at 2x. With a hypothesis from the dashboards, you know what to look for: the moment fingers stop moving on the field Form Analytics flagged, a rage click on the button the heatmap showed unreached, a cookie banner overlapping the payment modal. When you see the same thing repeat across several sessions, that’s confirmed.
Common culprits worth checking against:
- Address autocomplete firing off-screen on mobile
- A payment modal blocked by your cookie banner
- Shipping costs appearing on a page nobody scrolls past on iPhone
One session is a coin flip. Multiple sessions hitting the same wall is a finding.
Then act
The funnel told you where. The dashboards narrowed the why. The replays confirmed it. Why is the only thing you can fix, so don’t ship a guess.