Guides · Activation

How to see the paths users take through your SaaS app

A funnel tells you where people drop. Paths tell you where they went instead. How to build user flows that are readable, avoid the usual traps, and find the pages that lead to activation.

2026-10-14 · 3 min read

A funnel answers how far do people get. It can't answer which way do they go: the detour to the settings page before they give up, the template that people who stay all seem to open, the billing page nobody reaches from the dashboard. That's what paths are for.

Path charts have a reputation for being unreadable. They don't have to be. This guide is what makes them useful for a small SaaS.

What a path is

A path is the pages one person opens in one visit, in order. Three choices decide whether the result means anything:

• Split by visits. 30 minutes without activity ends a visit. Otherwise Monday's session and Friday's run into one long, meaningless path.
• Group pages by route. /projects/123 and /projects/456 are the same page. Replace ids with a placeholder (/projects/:id) or you'll get a thousand pages seen once.
• Collapse reloads, keep returns. Opening the same page twice in a row is one step. Going to another page and coming back is two: it's often the most telling part of the path.

Pick where it starts

Most questions about paths are one of three:

1. Where do people go at all? Start every visit on the page it began on. Returning users who open a project straight from a bookmark are part of the picture, not only new sign-ups.
2. What do new users do first? Start on the sign-up and follow their first visit.
3. What happens around one page? Start on it to see where people go next, or end on it to see how they got there. "How do people reach billing?" is a question about the way in, not the way out.

Keep it readable

• Three or four steps. Past that, the chart is mostly noise.
• Five or six pages per step, the rest grouped as "Other pages".
• Name the endings. "End of visit" is normal: people close the tab. "Didn't come back" (no visit since, for over a week) is what you're looking for. Mixing them makes everything look like churn.

Colour by outcome, not by page

A path chart shows where people go. What you need to know is which way works. So instead of a colour per page, give each page the share of the people who passed through it who are activated (or paying), against everyone in the chart:

• clearly above average: the good way,
• clearly below: a detour or a dead end,
• with fewer than about five people: say nothing yet.

That's how "21 people go to Settings right after signing up, and few of them ever activate" jumps out, instead of hiding in a tangle of grey bands.

One person at a time

With a few dozen users a week, read individual paths. Each visit as a line of pages, with how long they stayed on each, what happened between visits (an email from you, a payment) and where they left. Ten of those teach you more about a confusing screen than any aggregate.

Doing it with UserJourney

There's nothing to set up beyond the snippet and uj.identify(): every page a signed-in person opens is recorded with its route grouped (/projects/:id), split into visits.

Funnel > Paths starts on each visit, on the sign-up, or on any page you search for, in both directions, for everyone, new users or paying customers. Pages are coloured by how many of their people are activated, and a sentence on top names the page that does worst and the one that does best. Click a page to start from it. In Users, each person's panel shows their path visit by visit, above the full timeline.

Start for free or read the quickstart.

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