Sankey Diagram

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Overview

The Sankey diagram allows you to visualize all user journeys across your application to analyze the critical path.

The default Sankey diagram for an app

Each node represents a view the user visited. The thickness of each node represents the count of user sessions on that page. A page with fewer visitors will have a thinner node in the diagram.

If a user visits the same page multiple times during their session, that page is only counted once.

Actions are not supported in the Sankey diagram.

Build a Sankey diagram

View the default diagram

  1. Navigate to Digital Experience > Product Analytics > User Journeys.
  2. Click Sankey if it’s not already selected. This displays the default visualization, which represents the most popular user journeys in your application.

Start or end the diagram at a given view

You can use the Define Sankey menu to customize this diagram to display:

  • the steps users took after visiting a given view
  • the steps users took before visiting a given view

The example below displays the four steps that users in the United States take after visiting /department/lightning:

A customized Sankey diagram for an app

Graph all views containing a given phrase

Sankey diagrams support Datadog wildcards, allowing you to build a diagram of all views containing a given phrase.

To match multiple routes, type a wildcard instead of choosing a single view name. The example below displays the five steps that users take after visiting any view matching /department/*:

A Sankey diagram that uses a wildcard to match several routes

Analyze a Sankey diagram

You can hover over a diagram node to view the number of sessions that included visits to that view.

Click a node for a list of analysis options, such as viewing a sample Session Replay or building a Sankey diagram that starts with that view.

The actions menu of a Sankey diagram node

Convert the diagram to a funnel

  1. From the Sankey diagram page, click the Build Funnel button.
  2. In the Sankey diagram, click the nodes of the views you want to include in the funnel.
  3. Click Create Funnel from Selection.
A Sankey to funnel conversion in process

Troubleshooting

The Sankey diagram and the funnel show different view counts for the same view

The algorithms for the Sankey diagram and the funnel rely on two different computations. You may notice a difference in the count of views for the first step of both visualizations. Imagine the use case of building a funnel and a Sankey diagram that both start with the same view: /home.

  • The funnel counts all views that went to /home.
  • The Sankey diagram only counts views to /home where another view follows. If a user goes to /home and stays on that page or leaves the app, the Sankey diagram does not include their sessions.

In addition, funnels do not include active sessions, while Sankey diagrams do include active sessions.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles: