A marketing funnel is the path a person takes from first hearing of you to paying you and coming back. When sales disappoint, one stage of that path is usually losing more people than it should. Count the people at each stage, find the weakest one and fix it before you spend more on ads.
What is a marketing funnel?
Picture a kitchen funnel. Lots of people go in at the wide end and a smaller number come out of the narrow end as customers. Every business loses people along the way. The useful question is where you’re losing more than you need to.
You’ll also hear “sales funnel” and “conversion funnel”. Neither has an official definition, but a sales funnel usually means the later stages, once someone is talking to you. A conversion funnel usually means the steps on a website towards one action. That action is the conversion: a sale, a booking or a form sent.
What are the marketing funnel stages?
Take an imaginary plumber. These figures are invented to show the method, so please don’t treat them as targets.
| Stage | What happens | Plumber’s month | Share who carry on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seen | People see an ad or listing | 20,000 views | |
| Clicked | They visit the website | 400 clicks | 2% |
| Enquired | They call or send the form | 24 enquiries | 6% |
| Bought | They book a job | 6 jobs | 25% |
| Came back | They rebook or leave a review | 2 customers | 33% |
A café has the same shape, though “Enquired” might be someone asking for directions and “Bought” happens at the counter.
Every stage narrows, so a low figure in the first row is no cause for alarm. Compare each share with your own past months, because a plumber and a café can’t sensibly be held to one figure. Then ask where a small gain would matter most. Moving from 25% to 50% booked would give this plumber 12 jobs from the same ad spend. Doubling clicks would probably cost about twice as much.
Are the right people seeing you?
- What to measure: how many people saw your ads and where they are. On a Google Business Profile, look at views, calls, direction requests and website clicks.
- What a problem looks like: few views, or views in places you don’t serve.
- What to fix: limit ads to the area you cover and the hours someone can answer. Keep your profile’s details and opening times up to date.
Do people click when they see you?
- What to measure: click-through rate, which is the share of people who saw an ad and clicked. Watch what each click costs too, because click prices vary a lot by city.
- What a problem looks like: plenty of views and very few clicks.
- What to fix: say what you do, where you do it and why someone should choose you. Test a new image or headline, one change at a time.
Do visitors get in touch?
- What to measure: the share of visitors who call, book, buy or send a form. Google Analytics has a funnel report that shows where people drop out of a set of steps.
- What a problem looks like: good traffic and an empty inbox.
- What to fix: send each ad to a page that matches it. Make your phone number tappable and cut the form to what you need. Test speed with PageSpeed Insights, a Google tool. Google’s target is for the main content to load within 2.5 seconds.
Do enquiries turn into customers?
- What to measure: the share of enquiries that become paying customers, how long you take to reply and how many calls you miss.
- What a problem looks like: a busy inbox and a quiet diary. Quotes go out and nothing comes back.
- What to fix: reply faster, ring back missed calls and follow up every quote once. Ask people who said no why they did. Be clear about price too. If you sell to consumers, the Competition and Markets Authority says your price must include mandatory fees, and if you can’t work out the total in advance, you must explain how it’ll be calculated.
Do customers come back?
- What to measure: repeat customers, new reviews and referrals each month.
- What a problem looks like: nearly everyone is new, so your ad spend has to replace your customers every month.
- What to fix: ask happy customers for a review. Keep in touch, with their permission: a yearly boiler service reminder, or a loyalty card at a café.
Why am I getting clicks but no sales?
Work through these in order, because the early checks take minutes.
- Check the sales are really missing. Someone may see your ad, then ring you or walk in, and no report will show it. Compare your own records with your ad reports. Google Ads can count calls from ads, and a minimum call length filters out the short ones.
- Check what you asked the platform to find. On Meta’s lead ads, the system looks for people likely to complete the event you selected. Ask for clicks and you may get people who click and little else.
- Check who clicked. The search terms report in Google Ads shows the real searches behind your clicks. A plumber might find “plumbing courses” in there. Add words like those as negative keywords, which stop your ad showing for them.
- Check the page loaded. On Facebook and Instagram ads, compare link clicks with landing page views. Meta says a gap can mean the page isn’t fully loading.
- Check the page matches the ad. If the ad says “boiler repair today”, the page should open on boiler repair and show how to book it.
- Be your own customer. On your phone, click your ad, read the page, ring the number and send the form. See how long the reply takes.
- Check the offer. Look at your price, your reviews and what a competitor shows on the same search. If everything works and people still don’t buy, the offer may be the problem, and better ads won’t fix that.
How do I find my weakest stage?
- Pick the last full month.
- Write down your five numbers from your ad accounts, website analytics, Google Business Profile and your own records.
- Work out the share moving between stages, then do the same for the two months before.
- Put your ad spend, new customers and profit into our cost per customer calculator.
- Fix one stage, leave it a month and compare.
If you can’t fill in a row, start there. A missing number usually means a tracking gap, and until it’s closed you’re guessing at everything below it.
Questions people ask
What’s a good conversion rate?
No single figure works for everyone. It depends on what you sell, what you count as a conversion and where your visitors came from. Your own trend tells you more.
Should I fix the top or the bottom of the funnel first?
Usually the bottom, because a gain there makes all your existing ad spend work harder. The exception is when so few people see you that later numbers mean very little.
Do I need funnel software?
No. A spreadsheet with five rows is enough for most small businesses. Add tools later if the numbers show you need them.
What to do next
Start with your five numbers. You don’t need us for that, and you may well spot the problem yourself. The cost per customer calculator will show what a customer costs you now. If you’re not sure what kind of help would suit you, Help me choose asks a few questions, and you don’t need to give an email address to see the result. Our goal pages cover more leads and more foot traffic. If you’d like someone else to look, an Ads health check is £425: a look at one ad account, fixes in plain English and a 30-minute walkthrough.
Related guides
- Do you have good tracking on your website? A checklist
- How to audit your ad account, step by step
- Is your sales target too ambitious or too conservative?
This guide is general information based on publicly available sources, correct when written in November 2026. It isn’t legal, financial or tax advice, and ad platforms change their rules and menus often, so check the latest guidance before you act.