User Journeys shows the paths people actually take through your product, built from the pages they viewed in each session. It's also called a Sankey, path analysis, or user flow report.

A funnel tells you how many people dropped out of a path you designed. A journey shows you where they went instead.

There's nothing to set up. Appcues derives the pages in your account from page-view traffic and keeps them current, so a journey works as soon as your account has traffic to chart.

Build a journey report

1. Go to Dashboards > User Journeys.
2. Under Page type, choose Pages to trace individual pages, or Page groups to trace whole areas of your product. Switching clears the starting page and any hidden pages.
3. Under Starting page, select the page you want to trace from. Use the search box to find it by name. If you chose Page groups, you pick a page group here instead.
4. Set URL matching to control where that page has to appear in the session:

• Starts with shows sessions that began on that page. This is the default.
• Contains shows sessions that hit the page anywhere.
• Ends with shows sessions where it was the last page.

5. Set Interval to the longest a session may run and still be included. The default is 30 minutes
6. Set Report range to the window you want to cover: the last 7, 14, 30, or 90 days. The default is 30, and 90 days is the maximum.
7. Set Pages / step to how many pages each column keeps: 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25. The default is 10. Anything past that limit folds into an Other node.
8. Add Accounts or Segments filters if you want to narrow the audience. The chart loads as soon as you pick a starting page.

Selecting several accounts matches users in any of them, and the same is true for segments. Using both filters together matches only users who satisfy both. Segment filters use current membership, so a user who left a segment last week won't appear even if they matched at the time.

What Interval measures

Interval is a cap on the whole session, not on the gap between two steps. Appcues measures from a session's first page view to its last, and drops the session if that span is longer than your configuration.

It counts every page in the session, including ones outside the path you're tracing, so a session can be dropped because of pages that never appear in your chart.

Trace page groups instead of pages

A page group is a set of pages from one area of your product, such as every page under Billing. Tracing page groups shows how people move between areas without the detail of every individual page.

Appcues creates page groups from the pages in your account, so this works without any setup. To change them, see Organize pages into page groups.

At the page group level:

• Each bar is a page group. Moving between two pages in the same group doesn't add a step, so a user who went from the billing overview to an invoice shows as one Billing bar.
• A page that isn't in an active page group is left out of the journey.
• Changes to your page groups apply to reports you already built, the same as renaming a page.

Read the chart

Each bar is a page at a position in the session, and each ribbon is the traffic moving between two pages. The numbers count sessions, not users. One person who ran the same path three times counts three times.

A few rules shape what you see:

• Repeated views of the same page collapse. A user who loaded Home twice in a row before moving to Pricing shows as Home, then Pricing.
• Coming back later does not collapse. Home, then Pricing, then Home again is three positions.
• A journey never crosses a session. Someone who leaves and comes back tomorrow starts a second journey.
• Two bars sitting next to each other were consecutive matched page views. Anything the user viewed in between that matched no active page was dropped, so they may have seen other pages along the way.
• End means the session had no further page view inside your report range.
• Other holds the pages that fell outside your Pages / step limit. A page you filtered on is always kept out of Other.

The chart shows five steps at a time. Use Previous step and Next step to move through the rest. The counter between them reads "Steps 1–5 of 12" so you know how deep the data goes.

Explore a journey

• Click a node to highlight everything upstream and downstream of it. The rest of the chart dims. Click it again, click the background, or press Escape to clear.
• Hover a node to reveal a hide icon in its top-right corner. Click the icon to remove that page from the chart.
• Hidden pages collect as chips in a Hidden tray above the chart. Click a chip to bring one page back, or click Restore all.

Hiding a page hides it at every position it appears. Hidden pages are stored in the URL, so a link you share arrives with the same pages hidden. Highlighting is not stored.

Save a view

Saving keeps the report configuration so you can come back to it.

1. Click Saved views above the chart.
2. Click Save current filters as view.
3. Enter a name, and a description if it helps others understand what the view is for.
4. Click Save view.

Saved views belong to the account. Everyone on your team can see, apply, and edit them, and there is no private view.

A saved view stores the length of the report range, not a fixed set of dates. A view saved as "Last 30 days" re-runs against the most recent 30 days every time someone opens it.

A saved view also keeps the page type, so a view built on page groups reopens on page groups.

Update, rename, or share a view

Open the Saved views menu and hover a view to reach its actions:

• Rename changes the name and description. The saved filters stay as they are.
• Copy link copies a URL that opens the full report.
• Delete removes the view for everyone in the account.

When you change a filter while a view is selected, an Edited label appears next to its name and the menu offers to update that view with the filters you're now using. To leave a view entirely, click Reset all filters, which clears both the selection and the filters.

Because Copy link puts the whole report in the URL, a link keeps the settings it had when you copied it. If someone updates the view afterwards, the old link still opens the old report, labeled with the view's current name and an Edited chip.

You can also ask Appcues AI to build and save a journey for you. It runs the report before saving and won't save one that matched no sessions.

Rename the pages in a journey

Appcues derives pages from your traffic and names them from their URL patterns. When those names are hard to read, rename them under Settings > Page Groups > Pages.

1. Go to Settings > Page Groups and open the Pages tab.
2. Find the page you want to rename and open its edit action.
3. Enter a new Name and click Save.

Two things to know before you edit:

• You can change the name, not the pattern. The URL pattern is fixed. To stop a pattern matching, disable the page instead.
• Edits apply to past reports too. Appcues resolves page names when a report runs, so a rename shows up in journeys you already built. There's no backfill to wait for.

The Pages tab lists the most general pattern first. Matching works the other way round: a page view is tested against the most specific pattern first and takes the first one that fits. The list order is not the matching order.

Each account can hold up to 1,000 active pages.

A page that a Funnel depends on can't be disabled. If you try, Appcues lists the Funnels using it and asks you to remove the page from each one, or archive the Funnel, first.

Organize pages into page groups

Appcues groups your pages automatically and adds new groups as new pages appear. It never changes a group that already exists, so your edits stay as you left them.

1. Go to Settings > Page Groups and open the Groups tab.
2. Click Create Page Group.
3. Enter a Name and, if it helps your team, a Description.
4. Click Create Page Group. The group appears in the list.
5. Open the group's edit action. Under Add a Page, search for each page you want in the group and select it. Each page is saved as soon as you add it.

Two rules shape how groups behave:

• A page belongs to one page group at most. Adding a page that's already in another group moves it. You can also move a page from the Pages tab with Assign to Page Group….
• Disabling a page group removes it from journeys. Its pages stay active, but at the page group level they drop out of the chart until you enable the group again.

On accounts that scope pages by domain, each page group also has a Domain, and only pages on that exact domain can join it. You can't change a group's domain after you create it.

The top of the Groups tab shows how much of your traffic lands in an active page group. Unassigned is traffic on pages with no active group, and Uncategorized is traffic that matched no page at all. Neither appears in a page group journey.

Why pages are missing from a journey

Appcues only charts page views it can match to an active page, meaning one that isn't disabled on the Pages tab. There is no bucket for everything else, so unmatched traffic is dropped rather than grouped.

The URL never matched a page. Open Settings > Page Groups > Uncategorized. It lists traffic from the last 30 days that matched no active page, with the host, path, and view count for each. That window is fixed and has no date picker.

The domain isn't connected. On the few accounts that scope pages by domain, host matching is exact, so traffic on app.example.com is skipped when only example.com is connected under Settings > Web. That traffic doesn't appear under Uncategorized either.

The page was disabled. A disabled page matches no traffic at all, so it drops out of every journey, including ones you already built. Appcues keeps collecting its page views, so enabling the page again brings its history back. While it's disabled, those views can land on a broader page whose pattern also matches. Check the Pages tab for its state.

The page isn't in an active page group. When Page type is Page groups, a page with no group, or whose group is disabled, is left out. Check the Page Group column on the Pages tab.

The page is folded into Other. Raise Pages / step, or filter to the page directly so it's always kept.

Sessions aren't being recorded. A page view with no user ID, no session, or an unreadable URL is skipped.

If the chart comes back with nothing at all, you'll see "No matching journeys". Widen the report range, raise the interval, or drop an audience filter.

Still stuck?

Collect the following and contact support:

• The journey URL from your browser's address bar, which carries the full report configuration.
• The starting page you selected and the report range.
• The domain the traffic should be arriving on.
• A screenshot of the chart or the empty state.