How to Use Funnel in Power BI

A funnel chart is one of the most effective ways to spot bottlenecks in your business processes. Whether you're tracking a sales pipeline, a marketing campaign, or an e-commerce checkout flow, this simple visual instantly shows you where people are dropping off. This guide will walk you through exactly how to prepare your data and build a clear, insightful funnel chart in Power BI, step-by-step.

What Exactly is a Funnel Chart?

Think of any process in your business where you're trying to move a group of people from a starting point to an endpoint. A funnel chart visualizes the stages of that process, showing the number of items or individuals at each stage as progressively smaller bars.

The width of each bar represents the quantity at that stage, creating a funnel-like shape. A wide top shows the total starting volume, and a narrow bottom shows the final number who completed the process. The drop-offs between stages are immediately obvious, highlighting where you're losing the most people.

It’s exceptionally useful for processes like:

• Sales Pipeline: Tracking leads as they move from New Lead → Qualified Lead → Demo Scheduled → Proposal Sent → Closed-Won. You can quickly see if too many deals are dying after the proposal stage.
• E-commerce Conversion: Analyzing customer behavior from Visited Website → Viewed Product → Added to Cart → Started Checkout → Completed Purchase. A huge drop-off between "Added to Cart" and "Started Checkout" might signal issues with your cart page.
• Marketing Campaigns: Measuring campaign effectiveness from Ad Impressions → Clicks → Landing Page Visits → Form Submissions. This helps you understand if your landing page is failing to convert the traffic your ads are generating.
• Hiring Process: Visualizing your HR pipeline from Applications Received → Phone Screening → First Interview → Final Interview → Offer Extended → Hired.

The primary benefit of a funnel chart is its clarity. With a quick glance, anyone on your team can understand the health of a key process, identify the largest "leaks," and start asking the right questions to fix them.

Preparing Your Data for a Funnel Chart

Before you can build an effective funnel chart, your data needs to be structured in a specific way. Power BI is smart, but it needs a clean foundation to work with. If your chart looks wrong, faulty data structure is usually the culprit.

At a minimum, you'll need two columns in your data table:

1. A "Category" column: This contains the names of each stage in your funnel (e.g., "Lead," "Qualified," "Negotiation").
2. A "Values" column: This contains the total count or numerical value for each corresponding stage (e.g., the number of leads).

A simple example table in Excel or a database would look like this:

A Quick Note on Sorting Your Stages

Power BI defaults to sorting your funnel stages alphabetically. Often, that's not the order you want. "Demo Scheduled" comes before "Filled Out Form" alphabetically, but that’s backward for the actual process.

The best practice to avoid this is to add a third "Sort Order" column with a number indicating the sequence of each stage.

Even if Power BI gets the order right initially, adding a sort column is a good habit that prevents headaches later on when your stages have less intuitive names.

Step-by-Step: Creating a Funnel Chart in Power BI

Once your data is clean and loaded, creating the chart itself is surprisingly straightforward. Let's walk through it.

Step 1: Get Your Data into Power BI

First, you need to load your dataset. In the Home tab of Power BI Desktop, click on Get data. Choose your data source (e.g., Excel workbook, SQL server, etc.). Navigate to your file or connect to your database and load the table containing your funnel data.

If you created a sort order column, be sure to set it up correctly in the Data view. Click on your Funnel Stage column, go to the Column tools tab at the top, and select Sort by column. From the dropdown, choose your Sort Order column. This tells Power BI to always order the stage names based on that numerical column.

Step 2: Add the Funnel Chart Visual to Your Report

Go back to the Report view. In the Visualizations pane on the right-hand side, find the funnel icon and click on it. A blank funnel chart placeholder will appear on your report canvas.

Step 3: Map Your Data to the Visual

With the new visual selected, drag your data fields from the Fields pane into the appropriate buckets in the Visualizations pane:

• Drag your Funnel Stage column to the Category field.
• Drag your Lead Count column (or whatever your value is named) to the Values field.

Just like that, your funnel chart will appear! It’s a basic version, but it’s a great start.

Customizing Your Funnel Chart for Better Insights

A default chart shows the raw numbers, but the real magic comes from formatting it to show conversion rates and highlight key information. With your funnel visual selected, click on the paintbrush icon (Format your visual) in the Visualizations pane.

Add Meaningful Data Labels

The default labels only show the absolute values. To get to the insights, you need conversion rates.

Expand the Data labels section. Here you can customize what information is shown on the funnel itself. The most powerful options are under the Label contents dropdown:

• Data value and Percent of first: This shows the raw count for each stage along with what percentage it represents of the very first stage. This is great for understanding your overall conversion rate from top to bottom. (e.g., you converted 2% of total website visitors into customers).
• Data value and Percent of previous: This shows the raw count and the conversion rate from the immediately preceding step. This is useful for identifying specific stage-to-stage bottlenecks. (e.g., 90% of people who filled out a form were contacted by sales, which is great! But only 22% of those contacted scheduled a demo, which is a problem area).

Choosing the right label content depends on what you're trying to analyze—overall success or specific leaks in the process. Often, analysts will build two side-by-side funnel charts showing each percentage type.

Refine Colors and Titles

In the Format visual pane, you also have several other options:

• Colors: You can change the colors of the bars to match your company's branding or to highlight certain stages.
• Title: Change the default title to something more descriptive and clear for your audience, like "Q3 Marketing Campaign Funnel" instead of "Sum of Lead Count by Funnel Stage."

Advanced Tips & Tricks

To take your funnel analysis even further, here are a couple of additional tips.

Make it Interactive with Slicers

A funnel chart becomes infinitely more useful when it's dynamic. Add a Slicer visual to your report page. Drag a categorical field into it, like 'Campaign Name', 'Lead Source', or 'Month'. Now, your end-users can click a source like "Social Media" and the funnel chart will instantly update to show the pipeline for just that source. This is how you move from just seeing what is happening to understanding why.

Leverage Tooltips

Sometimes you want to provide more context without cluttering the main visual. Drag additional data fields into the Tooltips bucket of your funnel chart setup. For example, you could add an "Average Deal Size" field. Now, when a user hovers over the "Closed-Won" stage, the tooltip will show them not just the count of new customers, but their average value as well.

Final Thoughts

Creating a funnel chart in Power BI is a fantastic way to transform lists of numbers into a clear, actionable story about your business processes. By carefully preparing your data and customizing the visual, you can quickly spot drop-off points and gain valuable insights into the health of your sales, marketing, and operational pipelines.

Building these visuals is an essential skill, but we know the work doesn't stop there. The real challenge is often gathering and unifying the data from platforms like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Shopify, and HubSpot in the first place. That’s why we created Graphed. We connect to your tools in one click, replacing the manual process of creating charts with simple, natural language. Instead of spending hours building reports, you can get real-time answers and dashboards just by asking questions, letting you focus on making decisions, not wrestling with data.