Flows

Overview

Flows identifies the most frequent paths taken by users to or from any event. Use Flows to understand how your users sequentially perform events in your product and analyze drop-offs or unsuccessful behavior.

Use Cases

Here are some of the sample questions you can answer in Flows:

• What did users do immediately after signing up?
• What are the most common sets of actions taken after opening the app?
• What actions lead up to creating a channel?
• How do users navigate between account creation and sending their first message?

Quick Start

Building a Flows report follows the same high level steps as building any other report. You can read about report building basics here.

Building a report in Flows takes just a few clicks, and results arrive in seconds. Let's build a simple report together. Using a B2B messaging example, imagine you wanted to answer the following question:

What are the top paths leading Chrome users from Landing Page to Sign Up?

Step 1: Choose Events

Events are the basic building block of a Flow. In this case, since we want to know how users navigated from the landing page, to signing up, we would add two events, "Landing Page" and "Sign Up" within the "Steps" section.

Step 2: Choose Steps Before/After Events

Above and below your selected events, you can choose how many steps to show before and after each event, respectively. In this case, we're curious to see at least 3 steps after our first selected event, so we input "3" below "Landing Page." At this point, your query should look like this:

Step 3: Choose Filters

Filters exclude unwanted data. In this case, we only care about events performed by Chrome users. Therefore, add a "Browser" filter, where Browser equals "Chrome". At this point, your query should look like this:

Step 4: Choose Breakdowns

Breakdowns segment data into groups. In this case, we don't need to apply a breakdown since we already have the query in place to answer our question. However, if we wanted to see how the flow varies by city, we could add a "City" breakdown.

Step 5: Analyze Results

Flows features two visualizations to help you view the results of your query in the clearest chart type. By default, Flows displays the User Flows chart, which uses a Sankey diagram to visually display multiple paths on the same chart. This visualization excels when trying to identify different variants of a similar path, or following one particular trail.

User Flows displays a Sankey diagram where the height of the bar is proportional to the number of users who perform that specific event, and the height of the lines that connect bars are proportional to the number of users who perform the the two events in sequence.

In the above example, more users moved from the A event “Exit Tutorial” to “Experiment Started” than any other path. This is graphically signified by the height of the line.

Hover over a stage of the diagram to highlight it and see details of that section. This includes the total number of unique users who moved between those two steps on that path, as well as the percentage.

Select any blue node representing an event on the Sankey chart to highlight the most popular paths that led to or from that node. The selected node is indicated in a lighter blue.