Question from user:
Hoping someone can help. I manage a smallish website that specialises in hotel bookings.
We’re reviewing drop off rates at various stages of our website based on funnel exploration. Customers have an option to do a quick booking via a general search page or click into a hotel landing page, review and then proceed to book.
The issue is both the search page and individual landing pages are seen as a “View Product” stage in GA4.
Has anyone any experience of how these two can be separated in the funnel exploration to view individual drop offs?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
view_item events for multiple product pages in GA4 funnel reports? Your challenge of differentiating between a “quick booking” path and a “detailed review” path, both currently grouped under the view_item event (or similar product viewing event) in GA4’s Funnel Exploration, can be solved by adjusting how you implement your Google Tag Manager (GTM) events to capture an extra piece of information, known as a Custom Dimension.
You need to modify your existing view_item event to include a parameter – for example, page_type – that clearly identifies the page as either search_results_view or hotel_landing_view.
Once this parameter is registered as a Custom Dimension in GA4, you can use it within the Funnel Exploration report as a filter or breakdown to separate and analyze the drop-off rates for each distinct path.
The long answer is:
This is a classic dilemma in event-driven analytics, particularly when a single, standard event like view_item is used across multiple user experience touchpoints that represent different stages of intent.
Your goal is to move from a generic “What did they view?” to a specific “Where did they view it?”.
Since both the general search results page and the individual hotel landing page lead to booking, they both logically fire a product view event, but they represent different levels of user engagement.
To separate them in the Funnel Exploration, you cannot rely solely on the GA4 ‘Page path’ dimension because the Funnel Exploration report only lets you define steps by Events or Screens.
The most robust solution is to modify your GTM implementation to include a Custom Parameter with your standard event.
You should keep the view_item event name the same but add a parameter – perhaps named page_context or engagement_type – with a value like Quick_Search when fired from the search page and Detailed_Hotel when fired from the specific hotel page.
After pushing this parameter into the Data Layer and mapping it to your GA4 event tag in GTM, you must register this parameter as an Event-scoped Custom Dimension in the GA4 interface.
Once processed, you can then use this Custom Dimension within the Funnel Exploration report.
You would define a single step, view_item, and then apply a Filter to that step based on your new Custom Dimension – for example, filtering to include only engagement_type equals Quick_Search for one funnel and Detailed_Hotel for another, effectively creating two distinct funnels for analysis.
While this GTM and Custom Dimension approach fixes the immediate reporting issue, for advanced cross-platform analysis and blending this drop-off data with other business metrics from your booking system, a more comprehensive data engineering approach is excellent.
Specifically, combining the Google Analytics Data API with the Looker Studio API, powered by GTM and potentially a server-side tagging solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, provides the best long-term solution.
The Google Analytics Data API allows you to programmatically extract the raw, enriched event data – including your new Custom Dimension data – outside of the GA4 interface.
You can use this to feed the data directly into a tool like Looker Studio.
The Looker Studio API then allows for the creation of completely custom, business-logic-driven funnels that are not limited by the GA4 interface’s constraints.
You could calculate and visualize highly specific drop-off rates, join the GA4 session and event data with your actual booking system data (which is where Stape or GCP become vital for server-side data blending), and create a funnel that is perfectly aligned with your business’s definition of success, going far beyond the capabilities of the native GA4 Funnel Exploration report.
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