What it means: A checkout funnelRepresents the step-by-step process users take before completing a conversion, such as making a purchase or signing up. is the series of steps a customer goes through between deciding to buy something and actually completing the purchase. Think of it like a real funnel: many people enter at the top, but some drop off at each step, and only a portion make it all the way through. The typical steps include viewing the cart, starting checkout, entering shipping details, choosing a payment method, and placing the order.
Why it matters for your WordPress site: If you only track the final purchase, you know how many people bought, but you have no idea how many people almost bought. Maybe hundreds of visitors add items to their cart each week, but most abandon before they finish. Without tracking each step, you cannot tell where people are dropping off, or whether shipping costs or a confusing payment page are the cause. Checkout funnel tracking shows you where the problem is so you can fix it and recover lost sales.
Example: Here's a made-up example. A store sells handmade candles through WooCommerce, using CheckoutWC for its checkout. After turning on checkout funnel tracking, the owner sees that 300 people begin checkout each week, but only 80 make it past the shipping step. Flat-rate shipping turns out to be too expensive for small orders, so the owner adds a free shipping minimum. The next week, 200 people make it past shipping, and completed purchases nearly double.
How Conversion Bridge helps: Conversion Bridge has checkout funnel tracking for CheckoutWC, a checkout plugin for WooCommerce. It can track each distinct step in the checkout process: viewing the side cart, starting checkout, selecting a shipping method, choosing a payment method, applying a coupon, adding order bump products, and removing items from the cart. Each step you turn on fires as a separate conversion event that goes to your connected platforms, including Google Analytics 4, Meta, TikTok, and the others you have enabled (Google Ads also needs a conversion label for the event). You can then build remarketing audiences based on specific checkout steps (like targeting people who added shipping info but never completed payment), analyze your funnel in your analytics platform, and give your ad platforms step-by-step data to optimize for the actions you care about.