How to Add A Flow
User Flows
We define a flow point as an important, granular step a user must complete in a specific order for finishing a desired flow. Flowpoint matches user sessions to flows to build funnel analysis.
For example, when we monitor a registration flow, the key flow points we are looking for are:
Mouse clicking on a "Create Account" button
Visiting the website's registration URL (www.example.com/register(opens in a new tab))
Mouse clicking on a "Complete Registration" button
Each website has its own user flows which must be monitored. During your onboarding process, Flowpoint can automatically analyse your website and provide some of the most common user flows.
You are still able to add or customize your flows through the dashboard.
When adding or updating a user flow, Flowpoint will also reanalyse all your past users' sessions, so you can build and visualise any flow analysis without ever losing anything.
Adding your own flow
Step 1: Understanding your website's goals
The most useful user flows are the ones that are reflecting a user journey that brings a certain outcome to your business.
Ex: In the case of an e-commerce shop, the most common user journey would be the purchasing flow, the goal that we are interested in being to track the conversion rate on the checkout button.
Step 2: Translating your goals into flowpoints
To achieve the goal described at Step 1, a user will usually have to go through a set of steps on your website. This set of steps will bring your user from an initial touch point (ex: landing on the product page) to the actual action of purchasing the product (ex: clicking on the checkout button)
We call flowpoints all these touch points that a user has to follow. Defining them is crucial to be able to create a complete flow and analyse conversions.
Step 3: Creating your first flow
Creating a flow is easy.
Going to the https://dashboard.flowpoint.ai/funnels/flows/add(opens in a new tab) will open the dashboard on the flow creation page.
Here you can define the flowpoints (touch points) that we talked about at Step 2.
Step 4: Creating your flowpoints
Defining a flowpoint requires you to set up multiple values:
Flowpoint title – this can be any title you want if it helps you remember and identify the right touch point on the screen.
Flowpoint type –
navigating to a URL:
starts with – a touch point being loading a particular URL from your website that starts with the given key phrase
contains – a touch point being loading a particular URL from your website that contains the given key phrase. For more accurate results, if the key phrase is either at the beginning or at the end, please use the "starts with" or "ends with" values.
ends with – a touch point being loading a particular URL from your website that ends with the given key phrase
is – a touch point being loading a particular URL from your website which exactly matches the given key phrase. This matching rule will provide the most accurate results; however, please only use it if you are 100% sure that the key phrases are a perfect match.
is homepage - if the URL is just the homepage of the website
is anypage - when you need an intermediary flowpoint that could be anything on a user journey
is regular expression - here you might need a regex string to configure a dynamic URL pathname. You can generate one from a regex generator website or reach out to us, and we will generate a regex string for you
clicking on an element (formerly "clicking on a button"):
starts with – a button or URL which has text that starts with the given key phrase
ends with – a button or URL which has text that ends with the given key phrase
contains – a button or URL which contains the given key phrase. For more accurate results, if the key phrase is either at the beginning or at the end, please use the starts with or ends with values
is – a button or URL has text which exactly matches the given key phrase. This matchmaking rule will provide the most accurate results; however, please only use it if you are 100% sure that the key phrases are a perfect match.
is media with currentSrc
is a href
is a href that starts with
is a href that contains
is a href that ends with
The key phrase can be a fraction of a path from a URL, an entire path from a URL, or the text on a particular button that we want to track.
Ex: The example below shows a flowpoint defined for reaching the profile page.
Considering that the flowpoint is set as "starts with", any page that begins with https://flowpoint.ai/profile(opens in a new tab) will be tracked, ex: https://flowpoint.ai/profile/vlad
Similarly, a flowpoint defined by clicking on a button can be configured as the following:
Which means that any button containing the word "purchase" will be considered.
Anything like "Purchase product" or "Purchase today" or "Best purchase" will be considered when configuring the flowpoint as in the example below:
Step 5: Defining Flowpoint variants
A Flowpoint variant is a flowpoint which can act as an alternative to a standard Flowpoint within a Flow.
Ex 1: In a particular step within a Flow a user could either click "Pay with card" or "Pay with Apple pay". In this situation we would like to track both buttons which are part of the same step of the user flow.
Ex 2: (below) A user going to the home page and then a the second step we are interesting in tracking him either on the /path1 or /path2
Step 6: Definining Multi-Domain flowpoints
In Flowpoint, a user flow can be defined across multiple websites that you own, for example: User visits your blog website, then comes to your website on a particular landing page and then goes to your sofware dashboard and registers. In this situation we track the activity of a particular visitor across all three domains: blog, website and dashboard.
In order to set multi-domain tracking, all you need to do is install the Flowpoint tracking code in all the websites that need tracking.
Flowpoint will then automatically detect incoming sessions from each domain and when you set up a flowpoint you will now be able to select the domain you want a particular action to happen from a simple dropdown.
Step 7. Saving your flow
When saving a flow, Flowpoint will beging analysing your data to populate the flow with traffic data from your users.
By default, Flowpoint will consider your entire acumulate data for the analysis, however you can specify if you only want to analyse from a particular timeframe.
How to Analyse Flows
After saving the flow, Flowpoint initiates the analysis of all your user sessions and begins populating your flow. Please note that this process may take a few minutes to complete.
This analysis is automatically triggered whenever a user saves or edits a flow. You have the flexibility to perform this action as many times as you like.
How to Duplicate A Flow
Duplicating a flow can be done by going on the dashboard on the main flows page: https://dashboard.flowpoint.ai/funnels/flows(opens in a new tab) then follow the below steps:
Right click on the menu button
Select whether you want your new flow to include an analysis based on your entire data set or just a particular timeframe.
How to Edit a Flow
Editing a user flow can be achieved by entering in the visualisation mode of the flow, then clicking on "Edit Flow" on the top right hand corner
This will bring you to the edit visualisation where you can modify the flowpoints / delete them or add new.
Saving the new flow will trigger an instant process of analysation and the updated flow will be automatically populated with your user sessions.
If you already received insights on this flow, the insights might become obsolete after you change the flow.
New insights will arrive soon once the AI reanalyses your new flow.
Deep Session Exploration
Flowpoint gives you an eagle eye overview of your user sessions, however if you want to deep dive into what happened precisely with each user that encountered a particular issue, or just see who are the users who reached a particular step in your flow, you can filter your sessions by just clicking the number of users displayed in the flow visualisation as seen in the image below:
How to Extract Insights Manually
A quick way to extract insights yourself is to open a flow which has been analysed and look between each two flowpoints.
Take a look at the problems and their conversion rates. The most impactful issues will be at the bottom and will be easily visible because they will have the highest amount of users that are affected.
Identifying what can be wrong can be done by testing your user flows on your website, trying to identify the errors Flowpoint is rising.
Some of the times, issues can only occur on user sessions because of their devices or network conditions. Replicating those yourself might not work, however it could give you an overview of where to look and what can be addressed while you are waiting for the AI to process the insights for you. (Read point 6 for further information about how to best leverage the automatically generated insights)
How To Understand The Funnel
Flowpoint provides a client-side script (JavaScript) which can be embedded through a <script> tag. Once loaded, the script collects granular user actions, such as website navigation, mouse clicks, page scrolling, tab switching etc. Flowpoint is then able to see when an user has started, completed or abandoned any flow point in his journey.
Flowpoint is also able to look for bad patterns in a user’s journey. It detects behavioral issues, such as confusion when scrolling up and down looking for something in particular, or frustration when clicking multiple times on the same website element which does nothing. By correlating users’ encountered problems with their flow analysis, Flowpoint is able highlight which website issues are the most impactful to your flows’ conversion rates.
Understanding the funnel
After you save your flow and there are at least some user sessions processed that are relevant for your flow, you will start seeing something like in the image below:
This funnel analysis shows the traffic of your users through the flow you have created and more importantly in between each flowpoint it will highlight the issues that have occurred and their impact.
At the moment some of the issues we highlight are:
Lost focus – a user which is switching between tabs can trigger a "lost focus" behaviour issue
Page reload – if a user reloads the page. This action can be the reason of bad UX or a page not loading properly.
Rage click – If a customer is rage clicking (clicking multiple times on the same element) can be caused by elements which look like buttons but in reality they are not. This could generate confusion and frustration and usually this means users are leaving your website.
Confused scroll – If your content on a particular page is confusing, users might end up scrolling up and down multiple times without taking a proper action o taking an action too slow. Improving the content on the page can reduce the % of people getting confused, thus increasing the conversion rates.
Slow loads – A website loading slow is one of the main factors that drives users away. Detecting this and the reasons behind could save you a significant % of your users.
Back/forward navigation – navigating back and forth on a website is also sometimes triggered as a sign of confusion, as your users instead of moving through the website using the given navigation elements, they instead go back and forth using the browser arrows.
Technical errors – technical errors are also on the top of the list when it comes to issues driving customers away. Nowadays, with the advancements of technology and the multitude of devices and internet browsers is almost impossible to account for all the potential technical errors out there. However, being aware of the most impactful ones and fixing them as soon as possible is key in a fast moving scene.
How to Check User Sources
Where are users coming from?
Each defined funnel is a horizontal representation of your user journey. On the left hand side, Flowpoint automatically detects from which pages on your website your users are coming from before entering your monitored funnel.
Monitoring marketing campaigns
Flowpoint will automatically detect your marketing campaigns that are relevant for your monitored flow and will display them on the bottom left corner.
You will be able to filter your sessions based on the marketing campaign by clicking on the eye icon.
How To Audit My User Flows
Flowpoint's AI-Genererated Recommendations are tight to each flow you create, such that it empowers you with just the right insights that you need to optimise a particular user flow that you are interested in.
In order to access the Flow Audit, please go to the flow visualisation by going to the https://dashboard.flowpoint.ai/funnels/flows(opens in a new tab) and select the flow that you would like to optimise.
Once you reach the flow page, click on the "Flow Audit" button on the left hand side.
The Flow Audit tab will open showing you a list of recommendations (technical, ui/ux or content related) Remember: Your account needs to have at least 1000 total user sessions recorded in order to receive the technical recommendations and ui/ux and content recommendations.
Expanding and reading your recommendations
Clicking on each recommendation will expand the left hand side tab and offer more details about how the algorithm generated the recommendation based on particular findings, what the recommendation is and what the benefits could be.
A highlighted user path will also be shown, pointing you to what issues this recommendation could resolve.
Remember, a Flowpoint expert is just one click away to offer you a helping hand in understanding your data. You don't need to worry, just get in touch with us via our live chat support.