User Paths module of MoEngage Analytics helps you visualize how users are interacting & navigating in your web and mobile apps. User path analysis is the analysis of a user event trail. It answers which events users are performing after, or before performing any specific event.
User paths help you identify the most popular paths users take and any bottlenecks or friction points in the user experience.
User Paths are multiple sequences of events, that start from or lead to, the desired event in your product during a specified time. This is measured by event count performed by users.
User path analysis can be used to answers questions like:
- What are my users doing right after installing or opening the app?
- What do users do right before making a purchase or uninstalling the app?
- What paths do users follow between clicking on a notification and completing a purchase?
- How to analyze and optimize the user onboarding journeys?
Let’s dive a little deeper and see how it works :
To access user paths on the navigation tab click on Analytics and then click on User Paths or click here.
User Path Types
There are two different kinds of analysis that can be performed on the user path analysis:
Forward User Paths
Forward user paths provide all the user paths (event trails) after the selected event. Select Path analysis Starting with to analyze this.
Reverse User Paths
Reverse user paths provide all the user paths (event trails) before the selected event. Select Path analysis Ending with to analyze this.
Using Filters
You can use filters to select the start/end event with specific event attributes. These can be Event Attributes, User Attributes, Device Attributes, or a combination of them. To do that, click on Add Filters and then select appropriate filters from the Filter By section. Select the Case Sensitive checkbox if you want the report to match the exact case of the value you specify.
If you add multiple filters, you can choose whether they’re all applied or just one of them. Toggle the switch between AND/OR based on what you’re looking for.
For instance, if you need the combined data across 2 cities, you’d set it to OR. If, on the other hand, you want to get data for a specific city and are looking for transactions that exceed a minimum amount among a specific user demographic, you’d want to use AND.
User Path Settings
User Path Window
To analyze user paths that are performed in specific time duration, you can provide the desired time window. This option will only consider the events that are performed within the specified time after the starting event or before the ending event.
By default, this option is set to 1 day. Users can opt for any unit of Day, Hours, and Minutes.
For instance, if you’d like to analyze different user paths performed after App/Site Opened event within 10 hours, you can do so by setting this limit as the User Path Window.
User Path Steps
For some user actions, you might want to analyze the path analysis for a specific number of steps. whether all the steps were completed in a specific amount of time.
For instance, if you’d like to analyze what users are doing in the first 3 actions after they receive a notification, you can do so by setting this as the User Path Steps.
Date Range
Once you’ve defined the User path window and User path steps, select the time frame for which you want to analyze the user path analysis. You can choose from “Yesterday”, “Last 7 Days”, “Last 30 Days”, “This Month”, “Last Month”, or select your own custom date range.
By default, the date range is selected for the last 2 days, which is 3 days including today. User paths can not be analyzed for more than 30 days of time duration.
Paths for a Segment
By default, the User path analysis is performed on all users preset in the MoEngage system. User path analysis can also be performed for a group of users. This group of users can be created using User Properties, or User Activity or Custom Segments, or any combination of the 3 - This is very similar to creating a segment and analyzing these users on User path analysis.
Know more about creating user segments here and about custom segments here.
Whitelisted Events
User path analysis only performed on the whitelists events. If any event is not whitelisted, that event will not appear in the path analysis. Click on the Mange whitelisted events to add or remove any whitelisted event.
Manage whitelist events opens up a popup -
- Any specific event can be searched using the event search.
- Click on Show dropdown to view All events, Whitelisted events, or Non-whitelisted events.
- n/50 Whitelisted - This show that n out of 50 events are whitelisted.
- Whitelist Suggested events - This option removes all the whitelisted events present now, and whitelist the 25 events based on the event count for the User Path analysis.
- Whitelisted events have a green tick mark in front of them. Whitelisted events can be removed from the whitelist by clicking on the Remove button.
- Non-whitelisted events can be whitelisted by clicking on the Whitelist button present in front.
By default, 50 events are allowed to be whitelisted to optimize the chart look and query performance. This limit can be modified for specific use cases. Please contact support to change this limit.
Understanding Chart
User paths are represented in the Sankey Chart analysis which represents paths and steps flowing from left to right in. Nodes are representing the event. A verticle combination of nodes represents the step. Area or cord joining two-node represent the path. See them in the image provided below.
A user path can be analyzed by looking into consecutive nodes and paths. Forward user path starts from an event, get bifurcated into multiple paths that different users take after the first event. In reverse user paths, different paths get merged into the final selected event.
Chart for Forward User paths
On hovering a node, it represents the number of times that event has been performed. For the forward user paths, the popup shows the percentage with respect to the first node. It also shows the percentage of times users went to the next step and the percentage of times the user did nothing after the current step and dropped off. In this scenario, the end nodes do not represent any drop-off and move to the next step as there is no info available.
Drop off node represents the total number of times users have been dropped off from the previous step and percentage with respect to the first node.
Paths represent the number of times users went from one node to another, origin node and destination node names, and percentage with respect to the origin node.
Chart for Reverse User Paths
On hovering a node, it represents the number of times that event has been performed. For the reverse user paths, the popup shows the percentage with respect to the last node. It also shows the percentage of time users came from the previous steps and percentage of times the user came directly in the current step/node. In this scenario, the start nodes do not represent any entry and move from previous step info as there is no info available.
Entry node represents the total number of times users have entered into the next step and percentage with respect to the last node.
Paths represent the number of times users went from one node to another, origin node and destination node names, and percentage with respect to the origin node.
Chart Settings
Repeated Events
Repeated events are a sequence of a single event executed multiple times in succession by users. Click on Hide to combine the sequence into one event and click on Show to view the entire sequence.
Click on Apply Filters to generate the report with the specified show or hide filter.
Excluded events
Zoom chart
Add & Remove Steps
Download Reports
Once you’ve viewed the report, you might need to share it with your team. You can download the report in order to do that.
Charts can be downloaded in PNG, JPEG, SVG, and PDF format.
