Journeys: Getting Started

The Customer Journeys feature analyzes your customer's most common paths (a flow of events starting from a given starting point, with some maximum length), and displays the aggregated customer journeys in a Sankey diagram.

• Visualize and measure the performance of step-by-step customer journeys
• Prioritize your product roadmap by identifying and eliminating points of friction
• Take a closer look at your customer paths by analyzing your Journey as a Cohort or Funnel query

To access our Journeys tool, select Analyze in the navigation bar at the top of your browser, and then select Journeys.

Note: Journeys results may be sampled.

Query Builder

To begin a Journeys query, select your starting point. The first event of a Journey is always required; a user must complete this event to enter the Journeys pathway. To gain a holistic view of your product, you'll typically want to select the event that represents your customer's first interaction with your product, such as a "Start Session" or "Splash Screen View" event. It is important to note that the starting event or first step on a journey can be one or more event names.

Once you have selected your starting event, the Journeys query is ready to run. The unit of measurement in Journeys is always the total amount of instances the event was performed. The more steps a Journey has; the more query performance will suffer.

Filter Where

In the query builder, you can filter an event to include or exclude users who meet certain criteria; for example if they have specific event property. To create a filter, you may only use event properties. There is no limit to the number of filters you can apply to a single query row.

In addition to is equal to, you may filter in the following ways:

• Is not equal to
• Contains
• Does not contain
• Is defined
• Is not defined

Query Menu

All Journeys queries may be customized further using the query menu. Moving left to right...

Date Range

In the date range dropdown, Enterprise customers may select from Analytics' 3 default date ranges: Last 1 Day, Last 7 Days, and Last 30 Days. Pro customers are limited to Last 7 Day Journeys queries.

You may also customize your date range. Select the +Add Custom Date Range button, and input the amount of days you want your Journeys query to look back. Please note that Journeys queries are restricted to a 30 day look back.

Repeat Events

Use the Repeat Events component to merge sequentially repeated events into one single event. For example, if you track a Page View event that fires with each page view on your website, your most common Journey is likely to be Page View to Page View to Page View to...you guessed it, Page View!

If you track meta-events such as the example above, you'll want to Collapse your repeated events into one single event.

If you don't track meta-events such as the example above, you're fine to leave your Repeated Events as Expanded.

This feature can impact query performance.

For example:

Path from A (ignoring repeated):

A → B → C → D → END

Paths from B (ignoring repeated):

B → C → D → END (3x)

Paths from C (ignoring repeated):

C → D → END (2x)

Events with Breakouts

This menu bar item will display any events that are broken out by an event property. Here, you may delete any such events. To break out events by an event property, see the Event Menu section below.

Excluded Events

This menu bar item will display any events that have been excluded from the visualization. Here, you may delete the excluded event to have it appear in the visualization again. To exclude events, see the Event Menu section below.

Percentage Threshold

On the right of the query menu, we have two additional options: Percentage Threshold and Number of Steps. Both of these settings impact the height and depth of your Journeys visualization.

The percentage threshold governs the height of your visualization. Each Journey label contains a percentage number. This percentage is the percentage of your total users who arrive at the selected event, at the selected step. In the Percentage Threshold menu item, you may select your percentage threshold. A lower percentage threshold means more possible Journeys. A maximum of 10 Journeys can be displayed in each step.

At each step, we only keep the events that account for at least X% of the total paths at that step. This is another report feature that reduces noise by allowing you to control what defines a significant percentage of users performing the next step.

Please note that query time may increase as you lower the percentage threshold.

Number of Steps

The number of steps governs the depth of your visualization. By default, Journeys displays 5 steps. You may add up to 15 total Journeys steps.

Please note that query time may increase as you add more and more steps.