Journeys
See the most common ordered paths users take within a session, before or after any step you pick.
A journey report shows the routes people actually take through your site or product, in order, within a single session. Where a funnel asks how many people completed steps you chose in advance, a journey asks what people do around a step you care about.
Use it to find paths you did not anticipate, or to check whether the flow you designed is the flow people take.
Build a Report
Go to Analytics → Journeys and choose Add Journey Report. You pick an anchor and explore the paths around it.
Anchor type is either Event or Pageview, and the anchor value is the specific event name or page.
Direction decides which way the report looks. Forward shows what people did after the anchor, which answers "where do people go once they land here". Backward shows what they did before it, which answers "how do people arrive at this step". Backward is the one to reach for when you want to know what leads to a conversion.
Depth controls how many steps out from the anchor the report follows.
Save a report once it is useful, and it will be there next time.
Reading the Results
Paths are ranked by how many sessions followed each one, so the top rows are the routes most people actually took. The long tail is always large, because a few steps out almost everyone is doing something slightly different. The signal is usually in the first two or three steps.
Journeys are scoped to a session, so a path ends when the session does. Someone returning the next day starts a new journey rather than extending the previous one. See Sessions for how a session is defined.
Page URLs are normalized before paths are grouped. The query string and fragment are removed, trailing
slashes dropped, and identifiers inside the path collapsed to *, so both numeric ids and UUIDs fold
together. /orders/1042 and /orders/1043 both become /orders/* and count as the same step, instead
of splitting one real path into hundreds of near-duplicates.
Journeys or Funnels
Reach for a journey when you do not yet know which steps matter, and for a funnel once you do. A common sequence is to anchor a backward journey on your conversion event to discover how people get there, then build a funnel on those steps to measure and monitor it.