How to Create a Funnel Chart in Looker Studio

A funnel chart is one of the best ways to spot bottlenecks in your marketing or sales process, but creating one in Looker Studio isn't as straightforward as you might think. Don't worry, it's completely doable with a couple of clever workarounds. This article will guide you through two practical methods to build a beautiful and insightful funnel chart for your Looker Studio dashboards.

What Exactly Is a Funnel Chart?

Before we build one, let's quickly cover what a funnel chart does. It’s a visualization that shows the stages of a process, with each stage representing a smaller value than the one before it. Think of a real-world funnel - wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. This visual makes it incredibly easy to see where people are “dropping off” in a sequence.

You can use a funnel chart to track things like:

• Sales Pipeline: Leads > Qualified Leads > Meetings Booked > Deals Won
• Website Conversion: Visited Website > Viewed Product > Added to Cart > Completed Purchase
• Marketing Campaigns: Ad Impressions > Clicks > Landing Page Views > Sign-ups

Its primary superpower is instantly highlighting the biggest point of friction in a process. For example, if you see a massive drop-off between "Added to Cart" and "Completed Purchase," you know something on your checkout page might be broken or confusing users.

First, Get Your Data Ready

For any funnel chart to work, your data needs to be structured in a specific way. It’s pretty simple - you just need two things:

1. A "Stage" Dimension: A column that lists the names of each step in your funnel (e.g., "Homepage," "Pricing Page," "Sign Up," etc.).
2. A "Value" Metric: A column with the corresponding number of users, sessions, or events for each stage.

Your data in a tool like Google Sheets or a database should look something like this:

The most important thing is that the values consistently decrease with each step. Once you have your data source connected to Looker Studio and formatted correctly, you're ready to start building.

Method 1: Use a Community Funnel Chart

Looker Studio doesn't have a built-in, native funnel chart type like it does for bar or pie charts. However, there are a handful of funnel charts created by third-party developers available as "Community Visualizations." This is often the quickest way to get a funnel up and running.

Here’s how to add one:

1. In your Looker Studio report, navigate to the toolbar and click Add a chart.
2. At the very bottom of the chart selection panel, click the Community visualizations and components icon.
3. This opens a new window where you can explore available components. Search for "Funnel" to see the available options. You'll likely see a few versions from different creators.
4. Select one you like (the Funnel Chart by PowerMyAnalytics is a popular choice), click it, and grant permission for it to access your data. This is an important step - you're allowing a third-party component to process your information.
5. Once added, click where you want it on your report canvas.

Setting Up The Chart

With the community funnel added to your report, the setup is straightforward:

• Data Source: Make sure it's connected to the right data source containing your funnel stages and values.
• Dimension: Drag your "Stage" dimension into the Dimension field.
• Metric: Drag your "Users" (or sessions, leads, etc.) metric into the Metric field.

The chart should automatically render a funnel. You may need to go into the chart properties panel and sort the dimension by your metric in descending order to make sure the funnel flows from largest to smallest.

Pros and Cons of This Method

Pros:

• Fast and Easy: This is by far the quickest method. You can have a working funnel chart in a couple of minutes.
• Minimal Effort: It requires no data manipulation or clever workarounds.

Cons:

• Less Customizable: Styling options are often limited compared to native charts. You get what the developer gives you.
• Can Be Unreliable: Community components can sometimes break with Looker Studio updates, have bugs, or be discontinued.
• Slight Performance Hit: Some custom visualizations can load slower than native ones.

Method 2: Create a Custom Funnel with a Stacked Bar Chart

This method has a few more steps, but it gives you complete creative control and uses native Looker Studio charts, making it stable and reliable. We're going to trick a stacked bar chart into looking like a perfectly centered funnel.

Step 1: Create the Basic Step-Down Chart

First, we’ll build a chart that looks like a series of descending steps.

1. Add a chart and select Stacked bar chart. Don’t choose the regular bar chart - it must be stacked for this to work.
2. Place it on your canvas. In the setup panel on the right, make sure it’s configured like this:

• Dimension: Your funnel "Stage" dimension.
• Metric: Your "Users" metric.
• Sort: Sort by your "Users" metric in Descending order. This ensures the widest bar is at the top.

1. Now, click over to the Style tab.
2. Scroll down to the bar chart options and uncheck "Stack bars." Or if you want a horizontal funnel, change the orientation to Horizontal.

At this point, you have something that resembles half a funnel. The bars correctly get smaller, but they're all aligned to the left side.

Step 2: The Centering Trick (Calculated Field Magic)

To make the bars centered, we need to create some invisible "padding" on the left side of each bar. This padding will push the visible bar toward the center.

1. Navigate to your data source. You can do this by clicking Resource > Manage added data sources > Edit on your source.
2. In the top right, click ADD A FIELD.
3. Give your new field a name, like "Spacing."
4. Enter the following formula in the formula box. Replace Users with the name of your metric field:

(MAX(Users) - Users) / 2

What does this formula do? It's simpler than it looks! It finds the maximum value in your funnel (the very top bar), subtracts the value of the current bar, and then divides the result by two. This gives us the precise amount of spacing needed on each side to keep the bar centered relative to the largest bar.

Click Save and go back to your report.

Step 3: Add the Spacing to Your Chart

Now we add our new helper field to the chart:

1. Select your stacked bar chart again.
2. In the Setup tab, find your new "Spacing" field in the list of available fields.
3. Drag the "Spacing" field into the Metric section and drop it before your original "Users" metric. The order here is very important!

Your chart should now show two bars for each stage. Don't worry, we're about to make one invisible.

Step 4: Final Styling

This is where it all comes together. Go to the Style tab for your chart.

1. Find the color mapping section (it's often called "Manage dimension value colors" or corresponds to series 1 and series 2).
2. Set the color for the first metric (your "Spacing" field) to transparent or to the same color as your report's background.
3. Set the color for your second metric (the "Users" field) to whatever color you like.
4. You can now add data labels to show the values, hide the legend, and adjust the colors to be on-brand. The result is a sharp, perfectly centered funnel chart that's all yours.

Bonus: Adding Conversion Rate Numbers

A funnel chart is great for showing volume drop-off, but the real insight comes from knowing the conversion rate at each step. To do this, you can add Scorecard charts next to your funnel.

• Create calculated fields to determine the conversion rate from one step to the next. For example, to get the rate from 'Added to Cart' (500 users) from 'Viewed Product' (2,500 users), the formula would be: SUM(Added to Cart Users) / SUM(Viewed Product Users)
• Show these percentages in Scorecard charts placed between the steps of your funnel. This gives your audience the complete context of not just how many people dropped off, but what percentage was lost at each stage.

Final Thoughts

By using either a quick community visualization or the more robust stacked bar chart method, you can add powerful funnel analysis to your Looker Studio reports. Both approaches turn raw numbers into an easy-to-understand story, helping you spot exactly where to focus your optimization efforts.

Manually creating these reports and bringing all your data together into a single Google Sheet or source can be a tedious weekly chore. That's why we created Graphed. We connect directly to your marketing and sales tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, and ad platforms, and let you create entire dashboards instantly. You can simply ask, "show me a funnel chart of my Shopify sales performance," and get a live, automated report in seconds, freeing you up to act on the insights instead of wrestling with data prep.