At Equals, we just launched a Google Analytics connector. Sounds simple enough. But what it really got me thinking about is why it’s so damn hard for SaaS companies to build a clear view of their funnel.
A funnel should be a pretty basic thing to set up: visitors at the top, paying customers at the bottom, a few steps in between. But most companies mess this up. Here’s why.
Step one: your funnel needs to be made of steps
A funnel isn’t a collection of random activities. It’s a sequence of discrete, irreversible moments.
You start a trial. You can cancel later, but you can’t un-start it.
And to become a paid customer, you had to have started a trial. You can churn, but you can’t go back to “never paid.”
Each step has to be mutually exclusive and sequential. You can’t skip ahead. This is what makes conversion rates meaningful.
Too many companies blur these lines. They’ll count things like “invited a teammate” as funnel stages. That’s not a step, that’s an action. If your funnel isn’t a clear staircase, it’ll become a maze to untangle what’s going on.
Step two: everything must tie together
The biggest mistake I see is companies not having a common identifier across their funnel.
They know someone signed up for a trial.
Separately, they know someone became a paying customer.
But they can’t prove it was the same person.
Why? Because the identifiers don’t connect. The cookie in Google Analytics never got tied to the trial account, which never got tied to the billing record.
And once you lose that chain of custody, your reporting system falls apart. You can’t answer the most basic questions about acquisition, retention, or payback.
It also means you’ll never be able to do a proper LTV to CAC analysis. If you can’t tie a customer’s cookie from a paid ad all the way through to their lifetime value, you’ll never know whether that marketing channel is truly profitable.
Step three: make it operational
A funnel isn’t a dashboard. It’s a system. It should run like a product… with an owner and a feedback loop.
Most companies build a giant dashboard, glance at it once, and then move on. That doesn’t work. I recommend companies treat their funnel as a daily pulse. The data is structured in a way that’s simple, digestible, and consistent. Everyone knows when and how often to look at it.
You review the same funnel stages, in the same sequence, every day or every week.
You track volume, conversion, and growth… metrics that are simple enough for everyone to understand and rally around.
You make it part of the team’s operating rhythm.
This consistency does two things.
First, it plays defense: you catch problems quickly, before they become existential. If trials from paid ads suddenly drop, you’ll know right away.
Second, it turns into offense: by building the habit, you spot opportunities others miss. Maybe a bump in conversion shows up early, or a new channel is quietly outperforming the rest. With a daily pulse, those signals don’t get lost.
When you operationalize your funnel this way, it stops being a static report and becomes the heartbeat of your growth engine.