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Where do visitors drop off before signing up?

Turn each step of your sign-up path into a goal, put the goals in order as a funnel, and read where sessions stop. Hoot Lens shows how many sessions reached each step, and for each drop-off it gives you up to five sessions to watch, opened at the moment that session last reached the funnel. The funnel tells you where visitors stop. The replay shows what happened there.

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What you need

Hoot Lens installed on the pages in the path, and the project owner to create the goals and the funnel in the workspace. An agent can read goals and funnels but can never create or change them. Goals count from the day they are added, so create them before you start measuring.

Steps

  1. In Settings, Goals, add one goal per step. A goal is either a click (matched by CSS selector, by a data-hoot-id on the element, or by text in the element's label) or a visit to a page (matched by a path pattern). A typical path: visit the pricing page, click Create account, reach the confirmation page.
  2. Put data-hoot-id on the elements that matter, for example <button data-hoot-id="signup-submit">. It survives redesigns that change class names, and Hoot Lens matches it on the clicked element or its parents.
  3. Open Funnels, choose New funnel, and pick 2 to 8 goals in the order visitors go through them.
  4. Pick a date range, then filter by device class, language or starting page group. Cohorts are never mixed, so a mobile drop-off is not hidden by desktop visits.
  5. For the step with the biggest drop, choose Watch session on a drop-off to open the replay at the moment that session last reached the funnel.
  6. Look at the snags on that page (pile-ups, no-shows and misfires) before you guess a cause. A drop-off right after a no-show on the Create account button is a different problem from a drop-off after a long scroll.
  7. Change one thing and log it. See how to test a landing page change without an A/B tool.

How a session counts

A session reaches step 2 only after it reached step 1, and each goal's first hit must come at or after the previous step's first hit. A visit that clicked the button before it reached the page you named as step 1 counts for step 1 and not for the click. Each step shows the share of the step before and of step 1, with a 95% range. The numbers start when the newest step goal was created, and the funnel page says so. Funnels read the newest 5,000 sessions that reached step 1.

Ask your coding agent to do it

With the Hoot Lens connector at https://mcp.hootlens.com/mcp (see how to give your coding agent real user behavior data), these are the exact tool calls.

list_projects {}
list_goals { "projectId": "PROJECT_ID" }
list_funnels { "projectId": "PROJECT_ID" }
get_funnel { "projectId": "PROJECT_ID", "funnelId": "FUNNEL_ID", "deviceClass": "mobile" }
get_session_narrative { "projectId": "PROJECT_ID", "sessionId": "SESSION_ID" }
review_findings { "projectId": "PROJECT_ID" }

get_funnel returns the sessions that reached each step, the continuation rates with their ranges, and for each drop-off up to five example sessions with a recording ID and a time. get_session_narrative turns an example into a short written account of the visit. Take the session IDs from the get_funnel result; do not guess them.

How much to trust it

The examples describe what visitors did, not how they felt or why. Report the step counts and the recording IDs next to every claim. A funnel with few sessions at step 1 is a lead, not a finding. Funnels do not count visits recorded before funnels shipped, and a goal that is used by a funnel cannot be deleted.

See it on your own site

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Start freeSee the example workspace