Overview

The User Paths module of MoEngage Analytics helps you visualize how users are interacting and navigating your websites and mobile apps. The user path analysis is the analysis of a user event trail. It analyses events that users are performing before or after performing a specific event.

User paths help you identify the most popular paths that the users take and any bottlenecks or friction points in the user experience. They are multiple sequences of events, that start from, or lead to, the desired event in your product during a specified time. The measure is the event count performed by users.

Use Cases

Here are a few use cases where User Path Analysis can be deployed:

• 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 a notification and completing a purchase?
• How to analyze and optimize the user onboarding journeys?

How Does User Path Analysis Work?

To perform User Path Analysis:

1. Navigate to MoEngage Dashboard > Analytics and click User Paths.
2. Choose between a Forward User Path and a Reverse User Path.
3. Select the event and its attributes to set the starting event or the ending event. 
4. Filter users based on your segments.
5. Set the User Path Window, User Path Steps, and Date Range for the analysis and click Apply. 

User Event for Paths Analysis

Forward User Paths

Forward user paths provide all user paths after the selected event. Set path analysis to Starting with to analyze this.

For instance, analyze the user paths Starting With the event App/Site Opened. 

Reverse User Paths

Reverse user paths provide all user paths before the selected event. Set path analysis to Ending with to analyze this.

For instance, analyze the user paths Ending With the event Checkout completed. 

Events and Filters

Select the Event that starts or ends the user path. You can also use filters to add specific event attributes to this event. 

These can be Event Attributes, User Attributes, Device Attributes, or a combination of them. To do that, click Add Filters and 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 are all applied or just one of them. Toggle the switch between AND/OR based on what you are looking for.For instance, if you need the combined data across 2 cities, you would 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 would want to use AND.

Filter Users

By default, the user path analysis is performed on all users present in the MoEngage system. It can also be performed on a group of users. Groups of users are created using User Properties, User Activity, User Affinity or Custom Segments, or any other combinations.

To perform this for a group of users, click Filter users by. 

You can also create a segment for the users you want to analyze and then run a User Path analysis on this segment. For more information, refer to creating user segments and custom segments.

You can also exclude the users you do not want to include in the user path analysis by clicking Exclude Users and selecting the group of users that you want to exclude.

User Path Options

User Path Window

Provide the desired time window to analyze user paths performed in a specific time duration. The option considers 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 4 hours. Users can opt for any unit of Day, Hours, and Minutes.

For example, analyze different user paths performed after the App/Site Opened event within 10 hours by setting the User Path Window limit as 10 hours. 

User Path Steps

For some user actions, you might want to analyze the path analysis for a specific number of steps even though all steps were completed in a specific amount of time. You can have up to 15 steps in user paths.

For example, analyze the first three actions of the user after they receive a push notification by setting the User Path Steps.

Date Range

After defining 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
• Select your own custom date range

By default, the date range selected is yesterday. User paths cannot be analyzed for more than 30 days at a time.

Understanding the Chart

User paths are represented in the Sankey Chart analysis, which represents paths and steps flowing from left to right. Nodes are representing the event. A vertical combination of nodes represents the step. The area or cord joining two nodes represents the path. See them in the following image:

A user path can be analyzed by looking into consecutive nodes and paths. The Forward user path starts from an event and gets 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 the Forward User Paths

When a node is hovered, the total number of users for that event is shown, as well as a percentage. You can also see the percentage of users who went to the next step and the percentage of users who did nothing after the current step and dropped off. In this scenario, the end nodes do not display any information about the drop-off and the next step because no information is available.

Drop off node represents the total number of times users have dropped off from the previous step and the percentage for the first node.

Paths represent the number of times users went from one node to another, the origin and destination node names, and the percentage for the origin node.

Chart for Reverse User Paths

When a node is hovered, the total number of users for that event is shown, as well as a percentage. For the reverse user paths, the popup shows the percentage with respect to the last node. You can also see the percentage of users who came from the previous steps and the percentage of users who went directly to the current step/node. In this scenario, the start nodes do not represent any entry, and the information on the previous step is not available.

Entry node represents the total number of times users have entered into the next step and the 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 Hide to combine the sequence into one event and click Show to view the entire sequence.
Click Apply Filters to generate the report with the specified Show or Hide filter.

Exclude events

Resolution

Split By

You can use the split by option to group and compare data based on a specific attribute. This feature distributes events according to the event property or user property you select. When you choose only one split by attribute, the distribution displays the analysis of available values for that property. When you split an event, the path will be split by the selected attribute at each node where the event is present.

Alternatively, you can add the split by attributes directly on the nodes. To do so, perform the following steps:

1. On the user paths chart, click a desired node. The Perform action dialog box appears.
2. Under Actions, select Split by.
3. From the Select attributes list, select the desired split by attributes. You can split an event by up to five attributes.
4. Click Apply.
   

Add and Remove Steps

Download

After you view the chart, you might need to share it with your team. Click Download Chart in the upper right corner to download it. The chart will be saved in PNG format.