Flow visuals enable us to explore user behavior across a sequence of discrete time-stamped events, towards a pre-defined goal. They only plot data that achieves this goal.
Flows are an implementation of a Sankey plot: blocks represent individual events, and the width of the connection is proportional to the size of the measurement connecting any two events. The plot is defined by a path, or sequence, through time-stamped events. To learn how to identify and define events of a dataset, see Events.
Keep in mind the following 'best-practices' when defining the path of a flow visual:
For contrast, see Funnel Chart.
The following steps demonstrate how to create a new flow visual on a dataset Campaign. This dataset is based on data previously imported into Arcadia from the datafile campaign.csv.
In the visuals menu, find and click Flow (row 3, column 3).
All shelves, except Filters and Top K, are mandatory.
Populate the shelves from the available Fields:
timestamp
and place
it on the Time shelf.user_id
and place it
on the Session shelf.Start
and place it on the
Path shelf. Similarly, add to the right All
non-purchase application events
and Purchase
, in that
order.Record Count
and
place it on the Measure shelf.Click Refresh Visual.
The flow visual appears.
Note that each connection has only two segments, which does not model the real business case.
To model more of the path that satisfies the event conditions, set minimum/maximum range
for the intermediate event, All non-purchase application events
, through
the following steps. Note that setting a higher maximum models more of the data.
All non-purchase application
events
field, click the icon (down arrow).Click Refresh Visual.
The flow visual appears, showing multiple paths towards a Purchase
outcome. Note that in this form, the numbered steps include the
Purchase
event along the way, and each Purchase
block
terminates the flow of connections that flow to it, in a step-down manner.
Notice also that we can specify the Goal of the flow visual, to generate a plot with a single terminating goal block. Perform the following steps:
Purchase
field, click
the icon (down arrow).Click Refresh Visual.
The flow visual appears, showing multiple paths towards the Purchase
event. Note that in this form, the numbered steps exclude the
Purchase
event, which collects all flows on the extreme right, and then
terminates them.
To remove the Goal option from an event, do the following:
Purchase
field, click
the icon (down arrow).You may wish to examine a particular business case scenario, such as how card impressions influence the final decision to purchase. To see this path, simply click on a flow leading to the first card impression, and the flow highlights the entire path.
If the path is complicated, you can change the order of the nodes in any step of the flow visual, simply by clicking on that node and dragging it up or down.
In the following visualization, we arranged the nodes to place all card impressions at the top, and all purchases at the bottom of each step.
Consider the Tooltips in the following chart.
Click (pencil icon) next to the title of the visualization to edit it, and enter the new name.
Campaign - Flow
.At the top left corner of the Visual Designer, click Save.
Lastly, remember that flow visuals only show data that achieves the desired goal, in the specified number of steps. The visuals above cover 5 intermediate steps (specified as maximum), and contains 35 purchases.
Contrast this with a visual that covers 20 intermediate steps (specified as maximum); it contains 51 purchases.