Can I Use Snowplow Data to Build Sankey Diagrams of User Journeys?
Blog post from Snowplow
User journey visualization, particularly through Sankey diagrams, is a compelling method for understanding user behavior on websites or apps, and Snowplow's event data facilitates creating these visualizations by offering session-level and page-level events with timestamped navigation sequences. Unlike tools like Google Analytics, Snowplow provides granular, first-party data that allows for custom, flexible, and privacy-respecting journey mapping. To generate a Sankey diagram, data must be structured into pairs of sequential steps with flow counts, which can be achieved using tools like dbt, SQL, or Spark. While Snowplow does not offer built-in Sankey visualizations, it integrates with various BI tools and visualization libraries, such as Looker, Tableau, D3.js, and Plotly, enabling users to tailor the visualization to their needs. Best practices for creating effective Sankey diagrams include limiting unique steps, using meaningful labels, segmenting audiences, and pre-aggregating data to enhance readability and performance.