Usually something stops them before the form: they cannot tell what the product does, cannot find the price, or are asked for too much too soon. Which one it is on your site is something to find out, not guess, in three steps. A free funnel in Google Analytics, PostHog or Microsoft Clarity shows the step where people leave. Recordings of those sessions show what they did there. A task test, with a few real people or an AI user, shows why: what they expected and what the page did instead.
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Write down the steps a new visitor takes, for example: landing page, pricing page, signup page, form sent, email confirmed, first signed-in screen. Then count how many visitors reach each one. Any of these free tools can do it:
Start with the step that loses the most people in absolute numbers, not the steepest percentage on a handful of visits. With a few dozen visitors a week, one session can move a percentage a long way.
PostHog and Clarity both let you go from a funnel step to recordings of the visitors who dropped off there. Clarity also marks sessions with dead clicks (a click that gets no response), rage clicks (rapid clicks in one spot), quick backs (leaving and coming straight back) and excessive scrolling. Those are good places to start watching.
Recordings show what visitors did, not what they were looking for. You see the cursor stop over the price; you do not hear the question behind it. They also cover only the visitors you already have, and Clarity and PostHog's free plan keep them for about a month.
A few people who match your customers are enough to find the main problems; the FAQ below says how many. When you have nobody to ask, an AI user can do a first pass: it gets a persona and the same task, uses your live site and writes down what it thinks at each step. The guide to AI users compares the tools that do this, and the signup flow checklist covers the form itself.
These are places to look at your drop-off step, not a diagnosis. The studies are from other sites and other years; your funnel and your test decide which one applies.
In both public runs below, from the Product Hunt board, Menso's AI user was asked to decide whether to sign up, and both went looking for the price first. One typed the pricing address, found the plans and signed up for the free tier. The other found only a price in the FAQ, typed the usual pricing address, got a not-found page and decided not to sign up. That is n=2: read them as examples, not as a rate.
Every run here used Menso's Purchase intent template: the persona Zainab Salazar, a freelance UX consultant, reads the homepage, the pricing page and the FAQ, decides whether she would buy or sign up, and stops before paying. It is a route-specific diagnostic, not a product-wide score.
TRACES 83.5/100
Zainab scrolled the homepage for five steps without finding a pricing link, and at step 6 typed the pricing address herself. At step 8 she reached the Free vs Enterprise table, then read the help centre and the docs FAQ, and at step 16 decided to sign up for the free tier.
T 4 · R 4.5 · A 4 · C 4 · E 4.5 · S 4 (each out of 5)
Review note: The actor never opened the top-right menu, where Pricing sits; this is not a claim that the site has no pricing link.
TRACES 64.5/100
Zainab scrolled the candidate page and opened the FAQ. At step 7 she expanded “What does it cost?”, and at step 8 she read the answer: $49 a month, which she took to be the company plan. At step 13 she typed the usual pricing address; at step 14 it returned a not-found page, and she decided not to sign up.
T 4 · R 4 · A 2.5 · C 4 · E 2 · S 2.5 (each out of 5)
Review note: The run mixed the candidate and recruiter purchase contexts; the $49 figure describes the recruiter service, not the free candidate profile.
Made one of these products? Write to support@menso.io and we will correct or remove the example as soon as we can.
Look at the first two steps of your funnel. If few visitors arrive, or most leave the landing page without opening anything else, start with who you are attracting and what the first screen promises. If many reach the pricing or signup page and stop there, the page is the place to look.
For finding problems, a handful. Jakob Nielsen's 2000 article estimates that five users find about 85% of the usability problems in a design, for users who are alike, and recommends several small rounds over one large test. Five people tell you what goes wrong, not how often: for a rate you need far more (Nielsen Norman Group, 2021).
It can show you one stranger's attempt at the step your funnel points to: where it hesitated and what it expected to find. It cannot tell you how many of your visitors feel the same, and it has no money at stake. Menso's free plan includes 3 tests a month, enough to try it on one step before you show the same task to people.
If you already use Google Analytics, build a funnel exploration there. If you want recordings next to the funnel, Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic limit, and PostHog's free tier covers 1 million events and 5,000 recordings a month, with no card needed.