Published August 28th, 2017 by Assaf Trafikant

The Golden Ratio – The Real Conversion Rate

In my previous article (cracking the funnel), I described a cool method for looking at your funnel a little differently. Instead of seeing a static picture according to the dates you’ve chosen, I showed you how to look at the funnel over time and get results without messing around with the date selector. This time, I want to talk about the golden ratio.

What’s The Golden Ratio?

Every time Google Analytics shows a funnel, it presents a percentage at the bottom: the percentage of people who completed the funnel, compared to those that entered it. Keep in mind, this isn’t the regular conversion rate you see in all of the reports (that’s calculated as the ratio between the number of conversions and sessions), but the conversion rate that we in the industry like to call True Conversion Rate, and it deserves our attention.

The Golden Ratio in the funnel below is 25%, meaning 1,172 unique views for the Thank You page, compared with 4,578 views at the first stage of the process.


If you want to see how this ratio changes over time, you have to change the date over and over to see the numbers. Instead, I’m going to give you an elegant solution, but it can only present and calculate data from this moment onward. If you want to see historical data, you’d have to export it to excel and calculate things over there. I’m going to show you the solution offered by Google Analytics.

The Elegant Solution For Showing Real Conversion Rate Along Time

  1. We’ll create a goal that refers to the first stage of the funnel.
  2. We’ll create calculated metrics that calculate the ratio between the new goal and the one that already exists and represents your regular conversion.

Part 1

Let’s look at the original funnel description:

We can see that the first stage of the funnel would be anyone who visited the page /step1/personal-details. Copy this line and create a new goal that looks like this:

When you go back to the list of goals, you’ll see a serial number by each goal. You’ve got 20 of them. Let’s say the goal you’ve just created is number 8, and your original goal (the one with the full funnel) is number 7. Remember these numbers – they’re going to take you to the next step.

Part 2 – Calculated Metric

  • Head on over to the Google Analytics Admin panel.
  • Create a new calculated metric.
  • Give it a catchy name like “Funnel Conversion Rate”.
  • In Formatting Type, choose Percent.
  • Start typing “goal 7 completions” and choose whatever Google suggests. Remember, goal 7 is my original goal. You’ll take your original goal.
  • Type the division sign: / .
  • Now, start typing “goal 8 completions” and choose whatever Google suggests. Remember, goal 8 is my new goal. Yours is the new goal number.
  • The result should look something like this:

We just told Google to take the number of visits that include views of the last page in the funnel, and divide it by the number of visits that include views of the first page in the funnel. The result is the Golden Ratio.

Where can we see the Golden Ratio graph?

Because you’ve just created a new goal, you’d have to wait several days or even weeks until enough data has accumulated, so let’s jump forward in time.
Once you’ve created calculated metrics, you’ve created a new metric that can be added to all of your reports and charts. You can create a new report under Custom Reports, and add this new metric:

Based on this data, I can see, for example, that starting at noon, my conversion rate is about 12%, but until then, it’s pretty much all over the map. It’s worth checking how much traffic we’re talking about and whether it’s a regular trend or just a one-day thing.

Now, you can also create a Source/Medium report to see which of your marketing channels, gains the highest rate, and that’s really awesome

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