When funnels lie about drop-off

Ordered funnels assume a single path and a single identity. Products have neither. Someone starts checkout on a phone, finishes on a laptop, skips an optional address lookup, and still pays. Your funnel reports a massacre between step three and step four. Support has no tickets about step three. The map is wrong, not the customers.

Optional steps are not morals

If a screen can be skipped, it is not a gate. Putting it in an ordered funnel converts a courtesy into a cliff. Either mark the step as optional and measure completion of the job (paid, booked, submitted), or split the path. “We want everyone to see the upsell” is a wish. It does not make the upsell a required town on the route.

Identity is a ferry, not a vibe

Anonymous to logged-in is a join problem. If you funnel on `anonymous_id` until login and `user_id` afterwards without a stitch, you will count the same person as a disappearance. This is tedious warehouse work. Skipping it is how teams “lose” 40% of checkout and then A/B test button copy for a quarter.

An extra screen invents a new cliff

Design adds a confirmation. Analytics adds a step. Overnight, conversion “drops.” Nobody left; they paused on a screen that did not exist last Tuesday. Compare job completion — payment captured, appointment held — not step counts, when the route itself changed. Then, if you still care about the new screen, instrument it as weather (a property) or as its own small map, not as a lengthening of the old morality play.

We draw lattices in class: nodes for events, edges for observed sequences, thickness for volume. It is slower than a funnel widget and much harder to lie with. If you want the guided version, it is the four-week Funnel Geometry programme.