Journeys

What you are looking at

Every visitor takes a path: they land somewhere, click through a few pages, and either convert or leave. Journeys stacks those paths on top of each other and draws the result as a flow that reads left to right.

• Each colored bar is a page on your site (its URL path).
• The columns are steps in sequence: Step 1 is the page visitors were on, Step 2 is where they went next, and so on.
• Each ribbon is a group of visitors moving from one page to the next. The thicker the ribbon, the more visitors took that hop.

Hover any bar or ribbon to see the exact visit count and what share of all journeys it represents. So instead of guessing how people reach your checkout, you watch the actual traffic flow into it.

Reading a journey

Pull any single thread out of the board and it reads like a sentence: this page, then this page, then this one. Here are three routes from the same site:

The first route is the money path - home to a course page to checkout to the thank-you page. The second is people who price-shop first and then book a call. The third skips the homepage entirely because the visitor landed straight on a lead page from an ad. Seeing them side by side tells you which entry points actually carry visitors toward a sale.

Controls

• Steps - the slider sets how many hops to show, from 2 up to 6. Two steps answers "where do people go from each page"; more steps follows longer routes deeper into the site.
• Journeys - the second slider caps how many distinct paths are drawn, from 10 up to 200. Keep it low for the clearest, highest-volume routes; raise it to see the long tail.
• Date range - the period picker (top right) scopes the board to a window, for example the last 60 days.
• Filter - the standard filters (country, device, browser, referrer, and so on) narrow the board to a segment, so you can compare how, say, mobile visitors flow differently from desktop.

Filtering to a specific path

Each step has its own Path filter box. Type a URL path into one and the board only shows journeys that passed through that page at that step, which is how you answer a specific question instead of reading the whole map.

Two wildcards make the filters flexible:

• * matches a single path segment. /course/* matches /course/bp-w-v1 and /course/semsccsbe, but not /course/bp-w-v1/lesson-2.
• ** matches multiple segments. /checkout/** matches /checkout/book, /checkout/gmiplzk, and anything deeper under /checkout/.

For example, put /checkout/** in the last step and Journeys shows only the routes that ended at a checkout page - the exact paths that lead to a sale, and how many visitors each one carried.

What it is good for

• Find the dominant route into checkout, and double down on the pages that feed it.
• Spot detours - pages where visitors loop back or wander off instead of moving forward.
• See which landing pages actually carry traffic toward a booking versus which just bounce.
• Compare segments (set a Filter) to see if paid, mobile, or international visitors travel a different path.

To follow one specific person's activity rather than the aggregate flow, open their profile from Users instead.