💡 What is a Funnel Exploration report?
GA4's Funnel Exploration report is a powerful analysis technique that lets you customize and visualize a specific journey or path users take through your website or app. It's especially well-suited for tracking on-site conversion flows — for example, how effectively a marketing content page drives traffic to a product or service page.
✨ Why does this matter for on-site traffic analysis?
Visualize the user journey: break down complex browsing behavior into clearly defined steps, so you can clearly see what proportion of users flow from one key page to the next.
Optimize on-site traffic flow: by analyzing the drop-off rate at each step, you can identify exactly where users most often abandon their journey, then optimize your site structure, copy, or navigation accordingly.
Track subdomain performance: since GA4 treats a subdomain (like blog.website.com) as the same domain as your main domain (www.website.com), UTM tracking isn't suitable here. The Funnel Exploration report is the best tool for tracking how effectively a subdomain drives traffic to your main site.
⚠️ Two core principles for tracking on-site traffic
UTM should only be used for tracking traffic from outside your site: never use UTM parameters between pages on the same domain (including your main domain and any subdomains) to track internal traffic — doing so will pollute your traffic source data.
Use one unified GA4 tracking ID: make sure your main domain and every subdomain share the same GA4/Measurement ID, so you can get the complete picture of your traffic and use the Funnel report to track across subdomains.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) | Funnel Exploration Report Setup Guide
This guide walks you through using the GA4 Funnel Exploration report to track how effectively a specific subdomain or group of on-site pages drives traffic to other conversion pages.
Step 1: Create a GA4 Explore report
Log in to your GA4 admin console.
Click "Explore" in the left-hand navigation.
Click "Blank report" to start a new Explore report.
In the "Technique" dropdown on the left, select "Funnel exploration."
Step 2: Define the funnel's first step
Click "Steps" on the right side to open the editor and set the starting point of the user journey.
Click "Step 1" and enter a name (like Subdomain content page).
Set starting condition 1: choose [Event] > session_start, which marks a user entering the site as the start of the journey.
Set starting condition 2: click "Add condition" and choose [Page location].
In the condition field, enter the starting page path or subdomain name you want to track:
Track a specific path: enter /howto/ (if you want to see traffic starting from your howto content page).
Track a specific subdomain: enter event.website.com (if you want to see traffic starting from a specific subdomain).
Step 3: Define the funnel's second step
Add and define the target page users are directed to from the Step 1 page.
Click "Add step" and enter a step name (like Service/product page).
Set the target condition: choose [Page location].
In the condition field, enter the target page's URL or path you want to track:
Track a page on your main site: enter /tw/ (if you want to see traffic that reached your service page).
Track a specific domain: enter www.website.com (if you want to see traffic that reached your main domain).
Step 4: Save the report and advanced applications
Once your steps are set up, click "Save steps" and return to the report.
GA4 will automatically calculate and visualize the data and drop-off rate as users flow from Step 1 to Step 2.
Advanced applications:
You can keep adding more steps (like registration, purchase, or other conversion events) to track a more complete marketing conversion flow.
You can click "Segments" on the left and add a condition to the session_start event — for example, narrowing traffic source to Google Search — to see how traffic that arrived via SEO continues through the funnel.