Sankeys

The Sankey visualization in Xponent focuses exclusively on journey step data, helping you understand how customers move through their journeys from start to finish. It offers two key perspectives:

• Popular First Steps - Highlights where customers begin their journey with your brand and shows their subsequent paths.

• Popular Last Steps - Reveals what customers were doing immediately before stalling or completing their journey goal.

Both chart types display volume of profiles moving between steps and allow you to drill down for deeper insights, such as:

• Identifying bottlenecks and points of friction.

• Recognizing repeated steps that may indicate confusion or looping behaviors.

• Understanding positive, neutral, and negative outcomes tied to each step.

• Measuring performance with metrics like throughput, stalls, average time on step, and profile-level exploration.

Additional tools such as Sankey Flyouts, Outcome/Stalls toggles, View More/Less, and Journey Step Focus View provide layered context, helping you quickly find improvement opportunities while reducing visual clutter.

The Sankey visualization uses only journey step data.

Xponent offers two types of Sankey charts on the Journey Discovery Analytics Dashboard:

• Popular First Steps

  • Popular First Steps is designed to show how profiles initially interact with your brand and journey steps and highlight the flow behavior.

• Popular Last Steps

  • Popular Last Steps provides insight into what profiles were doing before they either stalled in their journey or completed the desired action.  

Within the Sankey charts, Xponent provides additional data points to help businesses establish baselines for identifying key bottlenecks for the customer experience and a way to drill down to view individual profile behavior.

• Sankey Flyout - shows details on the Journey Step or transition between Journey Steps.

• Sankey Toggles - shows extra detail on each Journey Step

Reviewing this documentation in detail is recommended to understand how best to leverage the various components within the Sankey to get the best understanding of how your journey is performing.

Popular First Steps Sankey Chart

This Sankey Chart shows the volume of individuals moving between journey steps. In the first instance, we have created a "left-handed" Sankey Chart that shows the initial step and up to four steps for groups of individuals as they move through the customer journey. The most popular first steps are shown from top to bottom on the left of the chart.

The Sankey chart shows a series of journey steps and data flow between them. For example, in the section of the Sankey chart below, it can be seen that the most popular first step is the "Manage Kruise" journey step.

A few of those visitors proceed to another product page - as evidenced by the size of the grey bar showing the flow out from the original step. Some viewers move to the "Caribbean Kruises" from the Manage Kruise step, but most people for the Caribbean Kruise come from the same journey step.

Journey steps can repeat throughout the Sankey. This repetition typically indicates that your customers are repeating their behaviors, which could be a symptom of the customer getting stuck and unable to move forward.

Xponent recommends investigating via the Performance Dashboard to understand the interplay between interactions and journey steps to get a fuller picture of customer activities.

Sankey Flyout

Clicking on a Journey Step will show the details for that step in a "drawer" on the right of the Sankey Chart. This shows the following content:

• Total

  • This is the distinct number of profiles that completed this step in the order shown in the Sankey per the filtered range.

• Outcome

  • This pulls in the outcome information as defined by the business when creating the Journey Step - positive, neutral, or negative result.

• Outcome Metrics

  • This is the total count of how many times profiles have taken the journey step per the filtered range. This number is not specific to when the journey step has occurred in the Sankey. As an example shown below, the drawer content was related to the “Kruiseline Review” step in the third column. However, the Outcome Metric shows how many times a profile has taken Kruiseline Review across all columns throughout the entire experience.

• Throughput

  • This is the percentage of profiles that completed a subsequent step per the filtered range. This percentage is always 100-Stalled

• Stalled

  • This is the percentage of profiles where this step is their final step per the filtered range. This percentage is always 100-Throughput

• Average Time on Step

  • The average amount of time a profile stays on a journey step before moving on to the next step. This number represents the average time of all step transitions per the filtered range. The time unit will be chosen to match the magnitude of the value.

Clicking on the link between two Journey Steps shows information about the number of profiles that have made that transition between the steps and also offers a drill-down opportunity to see a sample of the profiles. This also shows the Average Time between Steps. This is defined as the average of the amount of time a profile takes to move between two steps.

Individual Profile Selector

Clicking on the View Profile button within the journey step or journey step transition flyout will bring you directly to a randomly selected profile for that journey step or journey step transition. You will be able to view up to ten thousand profiles for that journey step or journey step transition.

Sankey Toggles

Outcome

The Outcome Toggle brings in the Journey Step outcome definition into the Sankey. This helps establish a quick visual baseline of whether or not profiles are taking a negative or neutral step in your journey orchestration or if profiles are consistently moving through positive journey steps. This allows businesses to understand if any areas require immediate attention. Turning on the Outcome Toggle will override any applied journey filter.

Stalls

Similar to the Outcome Toggle, the Stalls Toggle also helps establish a quick visual baseline of where major stalls could be happening in a journey. While you can still click on a Journey Step to see the stall percentage.

You can now also click on the Stalls Toggle to quickly get the information to see if there are potential areas for additional journey orchestration or further investigation.

Stalls Toggle is unavailable for the Popular Last Step Sankey. Popular Last Step Sankey is designed to provide insight into what customers were doing before they either stalled in their journey or completed the desired action.

Sankey Pagnation

The Sankey Pagination feature improves the usability of complex Sankey diagrams by breaking long customer journeys into smaller ranges. Users can view five steps at a time instead of scrolling through the entire flow. This makes navigation easier and faster. It also helps uncover insights that were previously hidden. As a result, analysis becomes more comprehensive and efficient.

• Step Range Navigation: Move forward or backward in increments of five or one step.

• Jump-to Controls: Quickly jump to the first or last step, or use quick navigation buttons for one-step or five-step jumps. The Sankey Pagination panel includes several navigation buttons:

  • First Step: A single arrow with a vertical line “|←” pointing left takes you to the first step.

  • Last Step: A single arrow with a vertical line “→|” pointing right takes you to the last step.

  • Five Step Backward: A double arrow “<<“ pointing left moves five steps backward.

  • One Step Backward: A single arrow “<“ pointing left moves one step backward.

  • Current Range: The center shows the current step range (for example, Steps 9-13). You can click the dropdown to select a different range. Also, you can enter a step number (For Example, “16”) to see all ranges containing that step, such as “12–16” or “16–20.”

  • One Step Forward: A single arrow “>” pointing right moves one step forward.

  • Five Step Forward: A double arrow “>>” pointing right moves five steps forward.

Best Practices

• Use 1-step pagination to maintain context when tracing paths.

• Use 5-step jumps for faster navigation through long journeys.

• Utilize the jump-to dropdown for precise navigation to specific steps.

Individual Profile Selector

Clicking on the View Profile button within the journey step or journey step transition flyout will bring you directly to a randomly selected profile for that journey step or journey step transition. You will be able to view up to ten thousand profiles for that journey step or journey step transition.

View More

The Sankey has a View More (View Less) button. When clicked, the Sankey will expand to show you all the Journey Steps that have been previously condensed into the “more” node.

The user can click on the "View More" button, and the Sankey now expands to show the additional journey steps previously condensed into the seven more steps. The user can click on the "View Less" button to regain the sankey to the default state.

Journey Step Focus View

The Journey Step Focus View allows you to isolate and analyze a single journey step in detail, without the distractions of the full positional Sankey view.

Instead of viewing only the first or last five steps in a journey, the focus view aggregates all occurrences of the selected step and displays its most common immediately preceding and immediately following steps. This helps you:

• Eliminate the "spider web" effect of complex journeys.

• Quickly identify friction points or successful moments.

• Prioritize journey optimization based on aggregated customer behavior.

Using Focus View

1. Select a required step

   • In the Sankey view, click on a journey step (node). For Example: Purchase Products and Services

     

   • A bottom toolbar will appear and remain visible while scrolling.

   • The toolbar contains the selected step name with an “X” icon to deselect and the Focus View button (anchor icon).

     

2. Open Focus View

   • Click on the Focus View button to anchor the selected step.

     • Enabled State - Focus View is available for this step.

     • Disabled State - The step represents aggregated steps; the tooltip says "Focus View not available for aggregated steps".

   • When active, the Sankey switches to Focus View:

     • The anchored step appears in the center.

     • Left Column - Most common steps that happen immediately before the anchored step.

       

     • Right Column - Most common steps that happen immediately after.

       

     

     Data is aggregated across all journey positions.

   • The toolbar now displays a Full View button to return to the standard Sankey while keeping the step selected.

3. Navigate Between Steps

   • In Focus View, click on any step in the before or after column to replace the anchored step, which will display the steps that occurred immediately before and after the newly selected anchored step.
     

   • Continue exploring different before and after steps for the selected anchored step.
     

   • Use View More to expand and see the long tail of additional steps.

     

4. Return to Full View

   • Click on the Full View on the toolbar to switch back to the regular Sankey.

   • The selected step remains highlighted.

   • Click the “X” icon to clear the selection entirely.

Tooltip Behavior

Tooltips in the Journey Step Focus View are designed to give quick, contextual information about a step (node) or the connection between steps without requiring additional clicks. They appear when you hover the pointer over a step within the sankey visualization.

• Hover over a step in the Focus View to see details of steps that occurred immediately before or after the anchored step.

What it shows

• Step Name - The name of the step connected to the hovered link. For Example: Purchase Products and Services

• Profile Count - The number of unique profiles (customers) that took this specific path.

• % of Total Profiles - The percentage of all profiles in the view that followed this path to or from the anchored step.

How it shows

• If a step that happens immediately before the anchored step is hovered over

  The tooltip displays the step name before the arrow (→), indicating it is the preceding step to the selected anchored step.
  

• If a step that happens immediately after the anchored step is hovered over

  The tooltip displays the step name after the arrow (→), indicating it is the following step to the selected anchored step.
  

Truncation Tooltip

Hover over a step name in the sankey that is cut off due to length (truncated with an ellipsis “…”) based on available space.

What it shows

• The full step name is in a simple tooltip, so you can read it in full.

• If the name is fully visible (not truncated), this tooltip will not appear (follows the existing sankey behavior).

  

Key Benefits

• Faster analysis - No need to manually filter and guess; all relevant occurrences are automatically aggregated.

• Clearer insights - Focus only on immediate cause-and-effect relationships.

• Reduced noise - Cuts through complex visualizations in large journeys.

• Supports optimization - Identify and prioritize high-impact journey improvements.

• Consistent access - Floating toolbar keeps key actions visible during scrolling.

Best Practices

• Use Focus View when investigating a specific step’s performance or relationships.

• Combine with Outcomes or Stalls toggles for deeper insight.

• Avoid filtering out too many steps before entering Focus View, as it may hide valuable connections.

Popular Last Steps Sankey Chart

The Popular Last Steps Sankey highlights the popular last steps of user Journeys. Similar to other Journey Discovery features, this is based on the actual pathways taken by individuals, identified by listening to their journey steps and interactions. This is designed to provide insight into what customers were doing before they either stalled in their journey or completed the desired action.  

The Sankey Chart shows the volume of individuals moving between journey steps. In this instance, we have created a "right-handed" Sankey Chart that shows the final step and up to four prior steps for groups of individuals as they move through the customer journey. The most popular last steps are shown on the chart from top to bottom.

The Sankey chart shows a series of journey steps and data flow between them. For example, in the section of the Sankey chart below, it can be seen that the most famous last step is the "Call Center Journey Start" journey step. About a third of individuals have a prior step before "Call Center Journey Start," - as evidenced by the size of the grey bar showing the flow to the final step.

Clicking on a journey step will show the details for that step in a "drawer" on the right of the Sankey Chart. This shows the throughput and the new entrants (people who never made any prior steps in this time period) for that journey step, along with the same additional information as seen in the Popular First Step Sankey.

• Total

  • This is the distinct number of profiles that completed this step in the order shown in the Sankey per the filtered range.

• Outcome

  • This pulls in the outcome information as defined by the business when creating the Journey Step - positive, neutral, or negative result.

• Outcome Metrics

  • This is the total count of how many times profiles have taken the journey step per the filtered range. This number is not specific to when the journey step has occurred in the Sankey. As an example shown below, the drawer content was related to the “Kruiseline Review” step in the third column. However, the Outcome Metric shows how many times a profile has taken the Kruiseline Review across all columns throughout the entire experience.

• Throughput

  • This is the percentage of profiles that completed a subsequent step per the filtered range. This percentage is always 100-New Entrants.

• New Entrants

  • This is the percentage of profiles where this step is their first step per the filtered range. This percentage is always 100-Throughput

• Average Time on Step

  • The average amount of time a profile stays on a journey step before moving on to the next step. This number represents the average time of all step transitions per the filtered range. The time unit will be chosen to match the magnitude of the value.

There is a call to action button in the drawer that allows you to View Profiles. This drill-down shows a set of profiles, up to ten thousand profiles, on their activities.