Flow analysis is a way of analyzing your customers' journey - how they move through your website. It tracks the actions that your customers take, such as which pages they visit and how long they spend on each page. This allows you to identify the most common paths from a specific starting point or towards the purchase.

Watch this short introductory video about this feature:

Why should you use Flows?

Flow analysis is a key tool for e-commerce businesses looking to grow and succeed. Customers leaving after frustrating website experiences cost you. If you're looking to improve them, look no further!

Flows allow you to understand the behavior of your customers and help:

identify any bottlenecks or areas of friction that may be causing customers to abandon their shopping carts or leave the website without making a purchase. You can use this to improve the overall user experience and make the website more user-friendly.
highlight the most popular pages of your website, which can help you optimize their website design and layout to better serve their customers
explain how customers interact with your website and what actions they are taking, which can provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences

Learn how your customers browse the website after clicking on a banner advertisement or link from your marketing campaign, and understand which events lead to a purchase or session end. Understand why they leave to make sure no more customers will!

How to Create a Flow Analysis

1. Create a new Flow Analysis.

a. Navigate to Analyses -> Flows.

b. Click on the + sign next to the Flow item in the drop-down menu.

c. You will now see the edit window with a new, empty Flow definition.

2. Edit the Flow Definition

a. Click on the Select an event drop-down menu.

b. Choose the event that you want to analyze.

c. Select whether this event is a `Source event` or `Target event
by clicking on the `Starts with` or `Leads to` button.

d. Press Preview to generate and view the chart.

3. Edit the Chart

a. Click on a box in the chart to access the editing menu.

b. Choose Drill-down to split a path by its attributes into multiple flows.
A page_visit event, for example, can be split up by its individual web pages
showing the flows for each of these instances.

c. Choose Hide to hide the selected path

d. Press Preview to generate and view the chart.

d. Choose Extend to view the paths that emerge from an event.
This option is only available for the last step and will add an additional step.

In the screenshot above you can see the customer behavior after visiting homepage. Only the session end, view_category, view_item, and purchase events are selected. At the second step, view_category is extended further.

Other Settings

📘
To learn more about Date, Customer, and Event filters, read our Filtering data article.

Event/Customer Toggle

On the right side above the 'Event selector' box, you'll find a toggle that allows you to switch between Events, which counts all events, or Customers, which counts the first occurrence of an event in a day.

First occurrences only Checkbox

Tick this box if you want the algorithm to use the first occurrence of an event in a customer's history. The algorithm uses all events by default.

Included events

The resulting chart shows all events by default. However, you can also choose to view the paths between a specified set of events. Add these events by clicking on Add event in the Included Events region of the Flow Definition box.