The Pathfinder Users chart: see the paths your users take through your product

Amplitude's Pathfinder Users chart shows the paths your users take through your product. Specify an event you're interested in, and Amplitude shows the steps users took to get there, or the events they fired afterwards. It's a handy way to identify natural pathways in your product, and to generate strategies for guiding the user experience in a new or more effective direction.

Before you begin

• Events don't appear in Amplitude charts until instrumentation is complete.
• Read the article about building charts in Amplitude.
• Learn the difference between active and inactive events, since Pathfinder Users charts hide inactive events by default.

Pathfinder Users tracks all paths in individual sessions. If you're sending Amplitude events through the HTTP API or another pipeline, you must send a session_id with the event. Otherwise, your product's path views aren't accurate.

Set up a Pathfinder Users chart

To build your own Pathfinder Users analysis, follow these steps:

1. In the Events Module, decide whether you want your path to start with a specific event or end with one:
   • To view the actions or events users take after a given event, select starting with from the Event paths taken dropdown menu.
   • To view the events users take before a given event, select ending with from the Event paths taken dropdown menu.
2. Select the starting (or ending) event. Unlike many other Amplitude charts, Pathfinder Users requires a specific event instrumented in Amplitude. Pathfinder Users doesn't support Any Event.
3. To add properties to your starting event, click + where, select the property name, and specify the property value you're interested in.
4. Add up to four more events to your path. Adding more steps narrows the focus of the analysis to users whose path matches the order of events you select.
5. In the Segmentation Module, identify the user segment to include in this analysis. To import a previously saved segment, click Saved Segments and select the one you want from the list. Otherwise, Amplitude targets all users by default.
6. To build your own user segment instead, add properties. Click + where, choose the property to include, and specify the property value you're interested in.
7. To narrow the focus further to users who already performed certain actions, click + perform, then choose the event you're interested in.
8. In the Metrics Module, decide whether to measure your results in users or sessions.

9. Use the date picker to specify the timezone and set the timeframe for your analysis. Your analysis can span a maximum of 30 days.
10. To name and save Pathfinder Users reports, click Save. You can't pin Pathfinder Users reports to dashboards, but you can find them in the Search tab.

Interpret your Pathfinder Users chart

The chart displays paths in descending order of use—the most common path appears at the top, followed by the second-most common, and so on. To alter the path length, select more events in the left module of the chart control panel.

In the chart below, the starting event is '[Amplitude] Start Session'. The top row shows that 11.0% (33,943) of all active users in the last seven days fired the '[Amplitude] Start Session' event and followed immediately with four 'PlaySong' events.

If you use Amplitude's default session_id to group events into sessions, Amplitude orders events in a given session by event_time.

Expand events by property

You can group your results by the properties of a specific event. Add an event and property pairing to Expand events by property to apply a "group by" condition based on the property values you selected.

In this example, the Pathfinder Users chart displays results broken out by values for the country property of the Edit Profile event—but not for the Main Landing Screen event.

You can expand multiple events by property in this way.