For goal funnels in Google Analytics with a destination URL, does the first step have to occur before the destination step?

Question

Setup: I want to make a simple goal funnel where I want my website's landing page to be the required first step and I want page X to be the destination URL. I want to measure how many people visit the landing page before visiting page X.

If a visitor first visits page X and then later on visits the website's landing page in the same session, will Google Analytics consider this a goal conversion even though the user didn't "funnel" in from the landing page to the goal page?

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2976313?hl=en indicates that the order of the sequence of pages doesn't matter but it doesn't speak on the order of the pages if the page in question is a required entry point to the funnel. Would love some thoughts on this, thanks!

Answer 1

If a user visits the goal page Google Analytics assumes that they must have hit all the previous steps in the goal. GA backfills all previous steps for that user.

So if your goal funnel is pages A -> B -> C and the user hits only page C, Google will increment page A, B, and C in your goal funnel.

Goals in Google analytics can't help you if there are multiple paths to get to a goal. Goals work best for linear flows to see where users drop out. The classic example is the checkout process:

1. Start checkout
2. Enter address
3. Enter payment information
4. Thank you page (GOAL)

Users can't get to the thank you page without hitting each and every step along the way.

If you want to track completed purchases from a specific landing page (out of many possible landing pages on your site), that is much harder to do with goals in Analytics. That kind of use case is usually better handled with conversion tracking.