Pathways

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Overview

Pathway diagrams allows you to visualize all user journeys across your application to analyze the critical path.

The default Pathways diagram for an app

Each node represents a view the user visited. The thickness of each node represents the count of user sessions on that page. A page with fewer visitors have a thinner node in the diagram.

If a user visits the same page multiple times during their session, that page is only counted once.

Actions are not supported in the Pathways diagram.

Build a Pathways diagram

View the default diagram

  1. Navigate to Digital Experience > Product Analytics > User Journeys.
  2. Click Pathways if it’s not already selected. This displays the default visualization, which represents the most popular user journeys in your application.

Start or end the diagram at a given view

You can use the lefthand menu to customize this diagram to display:

  • the steps users took after visiting a given view
  • the steps users took before visiting a given view

The example below displays the four steps that users in the United States take after visiting /department/lighting:

A customized Pathways diagram for an app

Graph all views containing a given phrase

Pathways diagrams support Datadog wildcards, allowing you to build a diagram of all views containing a given phrase.

To match multiple routes, type a wildcard instead of choosing a single view name. The example below displays the five steps that users take after visiting any view matching /department/*:

A Pathways diagram that uses a wildcard to match several routes

Analyze a Pathways diagram

You can hover over a diagram node to view the number of sessions that included visits to that view.

Click a node for a list of analysis options, such as viewing a sample Session Replay or building a Pathways diagram that starts with that view.

The actions menu of a Pathways diagram node

Convert the diagram to a funnel

  1. From the Pathways diagram page, click the Build Funnel button.
  2. In the Pathways diagram, click the nodes of the views you want to include in the funnel.
  3. Click Create Funnel from Selection.
A Pathway to funnel conversion in process

Troubleshooting

The Pathways diagram and the funnel show different view counts for the same view

The algorithms for the Pathways diagram and the funnel rely on two different computations. You may notice a difference in the count of views for the first step of both visualizations. Imagine the use case of building a funnel and a Pathways diagram that both start with the same view: /home.

  • The funnel counts all views that went to /home.
  • The Pathways diagram only counts views to /home where another view follows. If a user goes to /home and stays on that page or leaves the app, the Pathways diagram does not include their sessions.

In addition, funnels do not include active sessions, while Pathways diagrams do include active sessions.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

PREVIEWING: rtrieu/product-analytics-ui-changes