Journeys

The Journeys page shows you the real routes people take through your site, page by page, drawn as a flow diagram. A funnel asks “did people follow the path I expected?”. Journeys answers a different question: “what paths do people actually take, including the ones I never thought of?”. You do not guess the steps. leadmaps reads the real visits and draws the map for you.

The diagram is a Sankey chart. That is a fancy word for a flow picture where the width of each band shows how many people went that way. Picture water flowing through a set of pipes that split and join. A wide pipe carries a lot of water, a thin pipe carries a little. In Journeys, water is people and pipes are the moves from one page to the next.

What you see

From top to bottom, the page is built from a few clear parts.

• A page title that reads “Journeys”, with the date range shown nearby, for example “Last 7 days” with the calendar dates spelled out.
• The flow diagram itself, which fills most of the page. It is read left to right. On the left is the page where journeys begin. Moving right, you see the next page people went to, then the page after that, and so on. Each page is drawn as a labeled block (a “node”), and the bands between blocks are the moves people made.
• The thickness of each band tells the story. A thick band means many people made that move. A thin band means only a few did. The thickest band leaving a page is the most common next step, which is the route most of your visitors take.
• An “Other” node. A single page can lead to dozens of different next pages, and most of them carry only a handful of people. To keep the picture readable, leadmaps gathers all those rare moves into one block called “Other”. You can open it in place to see what is inside, so the detail is never lost, just tidied away until you want it.
• Numbers on the blocks and bands. Each shows how many visitors took that move, so you can read the flow in real counts, not just by eye.

A “node” is just one page in the diagram. A “band” (sometimes called a link) is the flow of people from one page to the next.

How to read it

Read the diagram left to right, and follow the thick bands first.

Here is a worked example. Say you pick “Last 7 days” and your starting page is the home page. You might see:

• Home page on the left, with 5,000 visitors starting there.
• From the home page, a thick band of 3,000 people goes to the “Products” page. A thinner band of 1,200 goes to the “Blog” page. A small band of 800 falls into “Other”.
• From “Products”, a band of 1,500 goes to a single product page, and 700 go to the “Pricing” page, while the rest scatter into “Other”.

What does this tell you? Most people who land on your home page head straight to “Products”, which is exactly what you want for a store. A healthy share also reads the “Blog”, which is fine. Now look at the “Other” band of 800 from the home page. If you open it and find that 300 of those people went to a broken or forgotten page, you just found a problem you did not know you had. The thick bands confirm what you expect. The surprises usually hide in the thinner bands and inside “Other”.

A useful trick is to follow one thick band all the way across. Start at the home page, follow the widest band to “Products”, then the widest band out of “Products”, and so on. That traced line is the single most common journey through your site, the path your typical visitor walks.

Customize it

You shape the diagram with the controls on the page. Here is each one and when to use it.

• Starting page. Choose which page the journeys begin from. Set it to your home page to see where most people go first. Set it to a campaign landing page to see what people do after they arrive from an ad or a newsletter. Set it to a product page to see whether people go on to buy or wander off. The whole diagram redraws around the start you pick.
• How many steps to show. Choose how many moves deep the diagram goes, for example two steps, three steps, or more. Use fewer steps when you only care about the very next move and want a clean, simple picture. Use more steps when you want to trace a longer path, like landing page to product to cart to checkout. More steps means more detail but a busier diagram.
• Date range. Use the calendar to pick the period, such as the last 7, 30, or 90 days, or a custom start and end day. The diagram updates to match. Use a short range to study a recent campaign. Use a longer range to see the steady, typical flow once daily noise is smoothed out.
• Open the “Other” node. Click the “Other” block to unfold it in place and reveal the rare moves it grouped together. Do this when a chunky “Other” band makes you curious, because surprising or broken paths often hide there. Closing it tidies the picture again.
• Drill into a step. Click a page in the diagram to focus on it and see what came just before and just after. Use this when one page matters to you, for example to learn what people do right after they read a certain article, or what page sent them to your pricing page in the first place.
• Light or dark theme. Use the theme switch in the top bar to flip the dashboard between a light look and a dark look. Pick whichever is easier to read. It changes only how the diagram looks, never the numbers.

Use cases

• Find surprising paths you never planned. Set the starting page to your home page and show three steps. Follow the bands and look for any thick route you did not expect, or open “Other” to see where stray visitors go. Action: if a lot of people are taking a detour to a page you forgot about, add a clear link to it from the home page, or fix it if it is broken.
• See the detours people take before they buy. Set the starting page to a product page and show several steps. Watch the path toward checkout, and notice where people wander off to “Pricing”, a “Shipping” page, or back to search. Action: if many people detour to a “Shipping info” page before buying, your shipping cost or time is a worry, so show it earlier on the product page and see if the detour shrinks.
• See what people do after a campaign landing page. Set the starting page to the page your ad or newsletter points to. Follow where those arrivals go next. Action: if most people leave right after the landing page instead of moving deeper, the page is not pulling them in, so strengthen its main call to action and re-check the flow after the next send.

Tips

• Follow the thick bands first. They are where most of your visitors really are, so that is where a change will reach the most people. Thin bands are interesting, but they move fewer people.
• The surprises hide in the thin bands and in “Other”. The thick bands usually confirm what you already expected. To learn something new, open “Other” and read the small flows.
• Pick the number of steps to match your question. One or two steps answers “where do people go next”. More steps answers “what is the whole path”, but the diagram gets busier, so add steps only when you need the depth.
• Drill into a single page when one page matters most. Seeing what came right before and right after a key page often explains a number you saw somewhere else, like why a certain page gets so much traffic.
• A brand new site has no paths to draw yet. The diagram needs real visits moving between pages before it can show a flow, so give it some traffic first. An empty Journeys page on a fresh site is expected, not a fault.