Google Analytics Goal funnel tracking wrong conversions

Question

I believe this to be a Google Analytics bug, but I wanted to reach out and see if anyone would expect the below behaviour:

We have a Google Analytics goal set up to track a funnel journey, this funnel ends by directing the user to a page that can be accessed from various other locations through the site.

Because the end goal page can be reached through other means, we only want to track the funnel goal on the journies that have gone through at least step 1 of the funnel also.

So here's our goal funnel structure:

Goal URL: /list-page

1. /step-1 ( required )
2. /step-2
3. /step-3

GA is, unfortunately, tracking every view of the goal page (/list-page) as a Goal, regardless of if the first page in the funnel is viewed which is set to be 'Required' in the Funnel setup. As a result, this is greatly skewing our data at present.

I would have expected the goal to not track the conversion on the end goal URL unless the required criteria were met.

What does everyone else expect to happen in this scenario?

Here's a mockup of exactly our goal set up with just the URLs simplified:

Answer 1

I think you're looking at the wrong report. Required step works only for Funnel Visualization report .

If you make the first step of the funnel mandatory, the conversion count for the funnel Visualization report will include only those users who reached the goal via that first step. Otherwise, the conversion count for the goal will be the same in all reports.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1116091?hl=en