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PulseAnalyticsUser Journeys

User Journeys

Explore the paths visitors take through your site with stepped columns or a Sankey flow diagram.

User Journeys shows you the actual sequences of pages visitors navigate in a session — not a predefined funnel, but the organic paths that emerge from real usage.

Navigate to Sites → your site → Journeys.

Visualisation modes

Columns

A stepped layout where each column represents a position in the journey (step 1, step 2, step 3 …). Each node shows a page and the number of sessions that visited that page at that step. Branching paths appear as separate nodes side by side.

Use Columns when you want to compare relative volume across paths at each step.

Flow (Sankey diagram)

A Sankey diagram where the width of each band represents the volume of sessions flowing from one page to the next. Convergent paths merge visually; divergent ones fan out.

Use Flow when you want to see which paths dominate and where sessions consolidate or scatter.

Controls

ControlWhat it does
DepthNumber of steps to show (2–6)
Paths per stepMaximum branches to display per column (5–50)
Entry pointFilter to journeys that start on a specific page
Date rangeScope sessions to a time window

The total session count for the current filters is shown above the diagram.

Note

Increasing depth and paths per step can make the diagram harder to read on sites with many distinct pages. Start with the defaults (depth 4, paths 5) and expand from there.

Warning

Very short sessions (single-page visits) appear as one-step journeys. Set depth to 2 or higher to see only multi-page paths.

What each number means

Step

One column of the journey. Step 0 is the pages sessions started on; step k is where sessions were after their k-th recorded hop. A row's count is how many sessions were on that page at that step, out of the step's total.

Entry point

The page a session started its tracked journey on. Filtering by an entry point narrows the whole canvas to sessions that began there.

Depth and Paths

Depth is how many steps the canvas plots (2–6). Paths per step is how many individual pages each step keeps before rolling the rest into (other) (5–50).

(other)

Pages beyond a step's Paths limit are rolled into one (other) row instead of being dropped: the session count is kept, only the individual page identities are collapsed. A hop from (other) to (other) is treated as noise and is not drawn.

Note

(other) is a display convention, not a filter — no sessions are discarded when a page falls into it. Raising Paths per step reveals pages that were already counted inside (other); it does not add sessions that weren't already in the data.

Drop-off

The change in session count from the previous step to this one: negative when fewer sessions reached this step, positive when several paths converged into it. Step 0 always reads 0%, having no prior step to compare against.

Lens

Pinning a page as the lens highlights every hop connected to it, traced forwards and backwards across every step it appears at, and dims the rest. Hovering a row without pinning it highlights only that row's own flow, not every other appearance of the same page.

Exit

Sessions that were on the pinned lens page at that step and made no further tracked hop — the lens page's session count minus everyone who moved on. It appears as a red (exit) row in the column immediately after the lens.

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