Understanding User Journeys in Rybbit

This guide will help you understand how users navigate through your website or app, identify where they get stuck, and discover the paths that lead to your most important outcomes.

What Are User Journeys?

User journeys represent the actual paths people take as they move through your website or application. Instead of looking at isolated pageviews or events, journey analysis shows you the sequence of actions users take, revealing how they flow from one page or feature to another.

Think of it like watching footprints in the sand. You can see where people started, which direction they went, where they paused, and ultimately where they ended up. This complete view helps you understand not just what users do, but how they navigate and why they might be getting stuck.

Why Journey Analysis Matters

Understanding user journeys gives you insights that simple traffic metrics can't provide:

Discover unexpected behavior. Users rarely follow the exact path you designed. Journey analysis reveals the routes people actually take, which might surprise you. Maybe users are navigating to your pricing page from an unexpected source, or perhaps they're taking a circuitous route to find information that should be easier to access.

Identify friction points. When you see where users commonly drop off or backtrack, you've found friction in your experience. These are the moments where your design, content, or functionality isn't meeting user needs.

Optimize conversion paths. By understanding which sequences of actions lead to conversions and which don't, you can remove barriers and encourage users down more successful paths.

Validate your design assumptions. You might assume users will navigate your site in a certain way, but journey analysis shows you the reality. This evidence can inform design decisions and help prioritize improvements.

How to Read the Journey Visualization

Rybbit's journey visualization presents user flows as a connected diagram, showing how users move between different pages or events on your site.

Nodes

Each circle or box in the visualization represents a page, screen, or event. This could be your homepage, a product page, a signup form, or any tracked action. The node shows the name of the page or event and typically includes a count of how many users reached this point.

Connections

The lines or arrows between nodes show the flow of users from one step to another. The thickness or prominence of these connections usually indicates how many users took that particular path. Thicker connections mean more users followed that route, while thinner connections represent less common paths.

Flow Direction

The visualization typically flows from left to right or top to bottom, showing progression through time. Users start on the left (or top) and move toward the right (or bottom) as they navigate through your site.

Multiple Paths

You'll often see nodes with multiple incoming and outgoing connections. This is completely normal. It shows that users reached this page from different sources and continued to different destinations. This branching reveals the reality of user behavior: there's rarely just one path through your experience.

Key Patterns to Look For

The Happy Path

Look for the most common route from your starting point to your goal (like a signup or purchase). This is your "happy path," the journey that most successfully converts users. Understanding this path helps you optimize it further and encourage more users down this route.

Drop-off Points

When you see a node where many users enter but few continue, you've found a drop-off point. This could indicate:

Confusing content or design
Missing information users need to proceed
Technical issues preventing progression
A natural endpoint where users found what they needed

Context matters here. Not all drop-offs are problems. If users reached a help article and then left, they might have found their answer. But if users are abandoning your checkout flow, that's definitely worth investigating.

Backtracking and Loops

When you see users moving backward or returning to the same pages repeatedly, it often indicates confusion or difficulty finding information. Users might be:

Unable to locate what they're looking for
Comparing options back and forth
Encountering unclear navigation
Looking for information that's missing

Alternative Routes

Sometimes you'll discover that users reach important pages through unexpected paths. Perhaps most conversions come from your blog rather than your marketing pages, or users frequently access your pricing page from your documentation instead of your homepage.

These discoveries are gold. They reveal what actually works, not just what you intended to work.

Interpreting Different Journey Types

Entry Point Analysis

When you start your journey visualization from an entry point (like your homepage or a landing page), you're asking: "Where do people go from here?" This helps you understand how effective different pages are at guiding users forward and whether your navigation and calls-to-action are working.

Goal-Based Analysis

When you work backward from a goal (like a purchase or signup), you're asking: "How did successful users get here?" This reveals the paths that lead to conversion, helping you identify which content and touchpoints are most valuable in driving desired outcomes.

Full Journey Mapping

Looking at complete journeys from entry to exit shows the big picture of user behavior. You'll see common patterns, unusual detours, and the overall flow of traffic through your site. This holistic view helps with information architecture and navigation design.

Using Journey Insights to Take Action

Simplify Complex Paths

If users are taking many steps to reach important pages, consider creating shortcuts. Add direct navigation links, implement better search functionality, or restructure your information architecture to reduce friction.

Fix Drop-off Points

For pages where users commonly exit, investigate what might be causing the problem:

Review the content for clarity and completeness
Check for technical issues or slow load times
Ensure calls-to-action are clear and compelling
Test whether important information is missing

Amplify Successful Paths

When you identify paths that lead to high conversion rates, make them easier to follow:

Create more entry points to these successful routes
Add prominent navigation to pages that perform well
Use these journeys as templates for improving other paths

Reduce Backtracking

If users frequently return to previous pages, improve your navigation and information design:

Make key information more visible
Add breadcrumbs or progress indicators
Provide better page-level navigation
Consider whether related information should be combined

Tips for Effective Journey Analysis

Start with a Question

Don't just open the journey visualization and stare at it. Start with a specific question:

How do users reach our pricing page?
What do users do after reading our blog posts?
Where do people go when they abandon checkout?
Which paths lead to the highest conversion rates?

Having a clear question helps you focus on relevant insights.

Segment Your Analysis

Different types of users often take different journeys. Consider analyzing journeys separately for:

New vs. returning visitors
Different traffic sources (organic, paid, referral)
Mobile vs. desktop users
Different user demographics or behaviors

This segmentation reveals nuances that might be hidden in aggregate data.

Focus on Volume

While it's interesting to see every possible path users take, focus your attention on the most common routes. The paths followed by the majority of users will have the biggest impact if you improve them. Don't spend time optimizing journeys that only a handful of users experience.

Look for Changes Over Time

Journey patterns can shift when you make site changes, launch campaigns, or experience seasonal variations. Regularly checking your journey visualization helps you spot these changes and understand their impact.

Combine with Other Data

Journey visualization is powerful, but it's even better when combined with other analytics:

Use heatmaps to understand behavior on specific pages
Check session recordings to see why users behave certain ways
Review form analytics to understand drop-offs in conversion flows
Compare journey data with user feedback and surveys

Common Use Cases

Onboarding Optimization

For products with signup flows or onboarding sequences, journey analysis helps you see where new users get stuck and how successfully they reach activation milestones.

Content Performance

Understanding how users navigate through your content reveals which articles drive further engagement, which are dead ends, and how your content ecosystem connects.

E-commerce Checkout

Mapping the journey from product browsing to purchase shows you exactly where shoppers abandon and which product discovery paths lead to the highest conversion rates.

Feature Adoption

In applications, journey analysis helps you understand how users discover and adopt features, revealing whether your in-app guidance is effective.

Technical Considerations

Event Tracking

The quality of your journey visualization depends on your event tracking. Make sure you're tracking the pages and actions that matter to your analysis. If key steps in the user journey aren't being tracked, you'll have blind spots in your visualization.

Session Definition

Journey analysis typically groups actions within user sessions. Understanding how Rybbit defines sessions (usually based on a period of inactivity) helps you interpret the data correctly. Very long sessions might actually represent multiple distinct journeys.

Privacy and Data Sampling

Keep in mind that privacy settings and data sampling can affect journey visualization. If you have Enhanced Privacy mode enabled, journey tracking may be limited. Also, for sites with very high traffic, Rybbit might sample data to maintain performance, which means you're seeing representative patterns rather than every single journey.

Getting Started with Your Journey Analysis

Ready to dive into your user journeys? Here's how to begin:

Identify your key pages or events. What actions matter most to your business? Start by analyzing journeys related to these critical touchpoints.
Choose a starting point. Pick either an entry point (to see where users go) or a goal (to see how users get there). Don't try to analyze everything at once.
Look for the obvious patterns. Start with the most common paths. What do most users do? This gives you a baseline understanding.
Investigate anomalies. Once you understand the norm, look for unusual patterns. High drop-off rates, unexpected routes, and excessive backtracking all warrant investigation.
Form hypotheses. Based on what you see, develop theories about why users behave certain ways. Why might they be taking this path? What might be causing this drop-off?
Validate and act. Use other data sources to validate your hypotheses, then make improvements. After implementing changes, return to the journey visualization to see if behavior shifts as expected.
Iterate continuously. Journey analysis isn't a one-time activity. Make it part of your regular analytics routine, checking in weekly or monthly to spot new patterns and measure the impact of your changes.

Making Journey Analysis Part of Your Workflow

The most successful teams use journey analysis regularly, not just occasionally. Consider:

Setting up alerts for significant changes in common journey patterns. If your main conversion path suddenly sees a drop-off increase, you want to know immediately.

Reviewing journeys in planning meetings when discussing new features or site changes. Understanding current behavior helps you design better solutions.

Sharing journey insights across teams so designers, developers, marketers, and product managers all understand how users navigate your experience.

Documenting your findings so you can track how journey patterns evolve and measure the impact of improvements over time.

Remember: Users Don't Follow Scripts

One of the most important lessons from journey analysis is that users are unpredictable. They don't follow the neat paths we design. They explore, backtrack, take shortcuts, and find creative ways to reach their goals.

This isn't a failure of your design. It's the reality of human behavior. Journey analysis helps you embrace this reality and design experiences that work with how people actually navigate, not how we wish they would.

Conclusion

Journey analysis can reveal profound insights about your user experience, but it can also raise more questions than it answers. If you're seeing patterns you don't understand or want help interpreting your journey data, reach out to our support team. We're happy to help you make sense of your users' paths.

Every journey tells a story. Your job is to listen to what your users' journeys are telling you and use those insights to create better experiences. Happy exploring!

Related Reading:

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