Funnel Drop Off/Abandonment Rate

Drop off or abandonment rate measures the number of visits/visitors who left a conversion process (funnel) without completing it. Any process with 2 or more actions on the site can be considered a conversion process, what you define as a conversion depends on the purpose of your site and your business objective. Some of the commonly used conversion funnel are shopping cart, newsletter signup and document downloads.

Abandonment rate helps identify the steps in the funnel that are causing the users to drop off. Conducting analysis of those steps will help us take necessary steps to minimize the drop offs and optimize the conversions.
There are 2 ways to calculate Drop off rate and each of them provide the data in slightly different ways. Both of them are correct ways to calculate.

Drop off/Abandonment rate = (Visits of the current Conversion Step-Visits of first Conversion Step)/Visits of the First Conversion Step. Let’s assume that we want to use Product as the first step of the conversion process and that step gets 10,000 visits. But of those 10,000 only 7,000 continued to the next step of adding the product to shopping cart. Then in the next step only 200 out of total 10,00 that started the process continue to Registration form and finally 1,200 out of 10,000 got to the final confirmation page. This means we saw 30% abandonment between Step 1 and Step 2 ie. (7,000 -10,000)/1000. Abandonment was 80% from Step 1 to Step 3 (2,000 – 10,000)/10,000. Final abandonment rate was 88% (1,200 – 10,000)/10,000. Though this calculation gives us a good idea of final drop off rate and conversion it is a little hard to understand.


Drop off/Abandonment rate = (Visits of the current Conversion Step-Visits of the previous Conversion Step)/Visits of the Previous conversion Step. This calculation takes into account the previous Conversion Step and the current Conversion Step. Fore e.g. In the Funnel, we notice 7000 visits are measured on the Add to Cart page (Step 2) and only 2000 Continue to the Registration form which means that the calculation based on the formula would be (2000-7000)/7000 which would be -71%.

Based on the above formulas, it looks like the first one seems better in terms of Funnel visualization but personally I like the second formula better. I say this because in the second funnel we are only considering the respective Conversion steps in the calculation and not Step 1 (Products) because Step 1 is entirely a separate user experience. According to me the Drop off rate should be calculated based on the 2 Conversion Steps as they are independent of the user acquaintance on the other pages of a Funnel. These 2 pages alone can determine how we can improve the conversion rate at each step as these are not based on the Products page experience. For e.g. The Registration form design and involvement is totally different than what it is on the Products page. I hope you like this post and would really appreciate if you can share your opinions.