Journey Tile

A Sankey diagram of the channels converting users moved through, built straight from user-level event rows. Use it to see the common channel sequences that end in a conversion.

Journey tile: ribbons from organic, cpc and email into a green purchase node, sized by converting users. — Illustration with the numbers from the Example below

What it shows

The Journey tile is a Sankey diagram. It takes every user who converted in the date range, lists the channels they came through in the order they first appeared, and draws a link for each step from one channel to the next. Each user's last channel links to a final node named after your conversion event. Link width is the number of users.

Use it for	Not for
Seeing which channel usually comes before which, for converting users	Users who did not convert (they are left out)
Spotting single-channel conversions against multi-channel ones	Following one person's full path across many steps (each link is a single step)
A quick view straight from an event table, with no attribution table to build	Paths you have already built as a column (use Flow)

Example

An events table has client_id (the user key), utm_medium and event_name. In the date range, the users who purchased came through these channels, in this order:

Channels, in order of first appearance	Converting users
cpc	200
organic, then cpc	90
organic	140
cpc, then email	40
email	20

Setting	Value
Type	Journey
User Key	`client_id`
Channel Dimension	`utm_medium`
Conversion Event Dimension	`event_name`
Conversion Event Value	`purchase`

The tile draws these links:

From	To	Users
cpc	purchase	290
organic	purchase	140
organic	cpc	90
email	purchase	60
cpc	email	40

cpc to purchase is 290: the 200 cpc-only users plus the 90 who ended on cpc after organic. Hovering over a link on the board shows, for example, "organic to cpc, 90 users". The purchase node is green.

Data it needs

A user key that identifies a person across rows.
A channel dimension, such as utm_medium or utm_source.
A conversion event dimension and the value that marks a conversion.
A real event time on each row, so channels can be put in order.

Rows with an empty channel are shown as (not set), drawn in grey.

Settings

Setting	What it does	Default
Title	The tile header. Required	Empty
Description	Optional text behind an info icon	Empty
Type	Journey	KPI
Size	Small, Third, Medium or Large	Medium
Data Table	The table to read	None
User Key	The dimension that identifies a user. Required	None
Channel Dimension	The dimension that holds the channel. Required	None
Conversion Event Dimension	The dimension that holds the event name. Required	None
Conversion Event Value	The exact value that counts as a conversion. It also names the final node. Required	Empty
Cohort (optional)	Limits the tile to users in one cohort built on the same table	All users (no cohort)
Date range	Shown in the editor, but this tile always follows the board's date range	Inherit from board

How it calculates

Converters. Lens finds the users with at least one row in the board's date range where the conversion dimension exactly equals the conversion value. With a cohort, only cohort users are kept.
Channels per user. For each converter it takes every row in the range and keeps each distinct channel once, at the time it first appeared. Empty channels become (not set).
Order. The channels are numbered by that first-appearance time.
Links. Each pair of consecutive channels becomes a link, counted in distinct users. Each user's last channel links to the conversion node.
Cut-off. Links are added up across users and the 100 largest are kept.

Each channel appears at most once per user, so a user who went cpc, organic, cpc counts as cpc then organic. All of a converter's rows in the range are used, including rows after the conversion.

If no user converted in the range, the board shows "No journey data found" and the public report shows "No data available".

What viewers can do

Action	Board	Public report
Hover a link	From, to, and the number of users	From, to, and the number
Hover a node	The channel name, and its links are highlighted	Same
Info icon	Shows the tile description	Same
"How to read this" icon	Opens a short guide to the diagram	Not shown
AI button	Summarizes the diagram, when AI features are on for the property	Not shown
Change the date range	The tile reloads	Same

Nodes cannot be dragged or clicked, and there is no export.

Limits and gotchas

One link is one step. The diagram counts pairs of consecutive channels. It cannot show that the users on one link are the same users on the next.
A channel can appear more than once. When a channel is both reached from another channel and leads on to another, the diagram draws it as separate nodes with the same name, so it never loops. Hover the links to read the counts.
Only the 100 largest links are drawn. Rare paths drop out on busy tables.
Order is by first appearance, and repeats are dropped. Returning through a channel the user already had does not add a step.
Rows after the conversion count. A channel a converter first used after buying still appears in their sequence. Keep the range tight around the conversions you are studying.
The public report colors the final node green only when the conversion value is purchase. On the board it is green for any conversion value. The report can also split repeated channels into nodes differently from the board, so the two drawings may not match node for node, although the link counts are the same.
Board filter chips do not apply, and the tile's own Date range setting is ignored: the tile always uses the board's range. Use a cohort to narrow the users.
Dates are the table's stored dates. For sources stored in UTC, such as Echo, the range is matched on the UTC date. See Dates and Time Zones.
Rows with an empty user key count as one user. Use a user key that is always filled.