Forum Discussion
Sankey diagram - data structure question
Hi,
I'm attempting to see if I can use the Sankey visual to illustrate the main user journeys through a website. However I'm not sure what format I need the data in to make this work.
The current format of the data is:
| USER ID | DATETIME | WEBSITE SECTION | POSITION IN JOUNREY |
| 111 | 20/10/2017 09:18:21 | Home | 1 |
| 111 | 20/10/2017 09:18:30 | Search Results | 2 |
| 111 | 20/10/2017 09:19:00 | Article Page | 3 |
| 111 | 20/10/2017 09:19:58 | Article Page | 4 |
| 111 | 01/11/2017 17:19:58 | Article Page | 1 |
| 111 | 01/11/2017 17:22:58 | Home Page | 2 |
| 111 | 01/11/2017 17:23:25 | Article Page | 3 |
| 222 | 07/10/2017 12:14:25 | Home Page | 1 |
| 222 | 07/10/2017 12:15:10 | Search Results | 2 |
| 333 | 24/10/2017 15:15:10 | Home Page | 1 |
| 333 | 24/10/2017 15:15:25 | Article Page | 2 |
| 333 | 24/10/2017 15:16:01 | Home Page | 3 |
The "Position in Journey" column identifies that it was the first, second, etc page to be visited during a visit.
A given user may make multiple visits to the website.
A successful outcome for me would be to show the pages in 'Position 1', with the flows on to the pages in 'Position 2', etc.
If there are better ways than a Sankey visualisation to achieve this, I'm happy to learn! :)
To use Sankey chart, you dataset should have columns like Source, Target, Weight column. It can be like:
It means on row level, you need to have current Position and next Postion info, with some weight. So in your scenario, you need to put Positions into Source and Target. It can be like:
Source Target Home Search Results Search Results Article Page Article Page Article Page
However, this visual currently can't analyze on some other data field level.
As I notice that you also have UserID and DateTime columns in your table, you may create one slicer for User, one slicer for DateTime.
Currently I haven't seen any other published custom visual better on showing flow diagram.
Regards,
1 Reply
To use Sankey chart, you dataset should have columns like Source, Target, Weight column. It can be like:
It means on row level, you need to have current Position and next Postion info, with some weight. So in your scenario, you need to put Positions into Source and Target. It can be like:
Source Target Home Search Results Search Results Article Page Article Page Article Page
However, this visual currently can't analyze on some other data field level.
As I notice that you also have UserID and DateTime columns in your table, you may create one slicer for User, one slicer for DateTime.
Currently I haven't seen any other published custom visual better on showing flow diagram.
Regards,