Google Analytics - Track Funnel With Loop

Question

I've got a process on my website that I would like to track as a funnel, except I am unclear on how to do so since the process has a loop.

We are building a single-page tool that calculates the number of products the user needs for their home, which is based on how many rooms the home has and the details of each room. Here is an example workflow:

1. Create Home
2. Add Room 1, set details, click Save
3. Add Room 2, set details, click Save
4. Edit Room 1 details, click Save
5. Click Analyze

As you can see from steps 1 and 2, the user can add a variable number of rooms. From step 4 you can see that they can go back to edit a room after they've created it.

I would like to see where users drop off, so I'd like to see this funnel, minimally:

Create Home -> Save at least 1 room -> Click Analyze

If I track "Save Room" as a page view ( /save-room ) there will be a lot of drop off once users start to add more rooms: it will look like they exit the funnel at /save-room by going to /save-room ... right? Should I control this with Javascript to make sure that the /save-room pageview is only sent once per process? Is there a better way?

Additionally, I would like to track whether people with larger homes (more rooms) drop off more frequently. So if I prevent additional /save-room page views from being sent, I would lose this visibility. Should I track all of these operations as events as well?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Funnels do ( literally ) not have loops (that's one of the reasons Google introduced flow reports).

One possible way would be to create a session based custom metric. You set it to 1 at the first "save room" pageload, then instead of doing more "save room" pageviews you track an event for each additional room and increment the custom metric in the event (thus saving the number of rooms; you'd need to create a custom report, since custom metrics do not show up in standard reports, but you would get the info for the number of rooms and still be able to use the funnel visualization).