kapa.ai
Should the funnel's first step be the final submit click when measuring post-submission success rate?
Body:
I'm measuring a multi-step form (adding a beneficiary to a health plan) and I've split it into two separate metrics:
- 1.
Completion rate — form_start → click on the final submit button (step 6). This tells me whether users can get through the form itself. Currently 74%.
- 2.
Success rate — what I'm trying to build now. I want to know, out of the users who actually submitted, how many reached the success screen vs. the error screen.
My plan for the second metric is a two-step funnel:
Step 1: the final submit button click (step 6)
Step 2: form_submit_success
So the funnel starts mid-journey rather than at form_start, and the denominator becomes "users who submitted" instead of "users who started".
My questions:
- 1.
Is starting a funnel at a mid-journey event a valid/recommended pattern for isolating a sub-conversion like this, or is there a better approach in Mixpanel?
- 2.
Some users hit the error screen, fix their input and then reach the success screen in the same session. In a two-step funnel, will that user be counted as converted? Does Optimized Re-entry change anything here, given that step 1 (the submit click) may fire multiple times?
- 3.
I also want a complementary view of users who submitted but ended on the error screen and never succeeded. Is a funnel with an exclusion step (step 1 = submit click, exclusion = form_submit_success, step 2 = error event) the right way, or is there a cleaner way to split submitters into success / error / no-outcome so the three buckets add up to 100%?
- 4.
I tried approximating this in Insights with a formula (B/A * 100) where A was a cohort's total profiles and B was uniques of form_submit_success, and the result was clearly wrong — I assume because a cohort profile count is a cumulative stock while the event count is a daily flow. Is that the right read, and is Funnels the only reliable way to get this ratio over time?
