Countly lets you track any important metric or milestone in your application via a flexible mechanism called events or by accounting the views in your application. Flows uses them to let you see common event paths of your users in a birds-eye view.

Benefits of Flows

A flow report is basically a graphical representation of the paths users take through your site, defined by events or views data types. It also lets you compare this traffic flow based on several segmentation options such as device, country, platform, or campaign.

Getting Started

In the Sidebar, go to Management > Feature Management, and enable the Flows feature toggle.

Flows Overview

Flows Settings

There are several aspects to Flows functionalities that are customizable, including:

• How often are flows regenerated, ranging in intervals from 5 minutes to 24 hours.
• If flows are allowed to be recalculated automatically in the background, which keeps flows always updated but increases data usage.
• Maximum number of steps and of nodes when you constructing flows.

You can set these values from Management > Settings > Flows.

Automatic Flows

Previous versions of Countly allowed you to create simple flows based on Views or Events that followed a session start. With Countly 22.03 and newer versions, these flows can be further customized to override the session start and commence the flow at a customized View or Event.

That said, Countly will generate these basic flows automatically (i.e., those commencing with the session start) so as to provide you with basic examples.

Using Flows

Upon accessing Flows, you will see the following elements: 

1. List of existing flow queries. Note that the status can be New, Edited, Calculated, Calculating, or Error. You can disable a flow as well. Flows get automatically disabled when they fail to be computed due to memory or file size limitations.
2. Individual menu for each flow. From here, you can edit or delete the Flow. You can also use Recalculate Flow to run the calculation manually instead of waiting for the server to do it or having to access the Flow itself. You can validate the last time the flow was (re)calculated in the Updated column.
3. + New Flow button to open the creation drawer.

Clicking on the name of the Flow or on View in a flow's menu will lead you to its detailed view.

Creating a New Flow

When you click on the + New Flow button, a drawer will open containing the following:

1. Name of the flow.
2. Select the data type that the flow will track.
3. Add settings to the flow by enabling the toggle button, including events/views that can be ignored or skipped by the flow path, and from where to where should the path flow.
4. Add user properties to filter the data used in the flow.
5. Determine the date range.

Flow Detailed View

Upon selecting an individual Flow, you will be able to see its detailed view, containing:

1. A dropdown for the number of steps, which are shown horizontally.
2. A dropdown for the number of nodes, which are shown vertically. The more nodes, the more detailed the possible steps in the flow's path. A Flow will always show an "Other" category plus the number of nodes you choose, hence showing your two most popular steps and grouping the rest as "Other". In the example above, there are 4 nodes chosen, which means that there will be 5 different variations in total: Other and 4 others.
3. When hovering over an individual path in the flow, the line flowing between two nodes will get highlighted and the percentage of users belonging to that path will be shown in a pop up dialog. In the example above, the path between Other and Credit Card Application Begin was taken by 3% of the total users.
4. Editing the Flow will open the drawer used during the creation and, upon making the changes, the query will be rerun.
5. As noted above, you can edit the settings of the flows, particularly regarding sampling and the maximum number of steps.

FAQ

What is the difference between Flows and Funnels?

Both a flow and a funnel track the progression of a user's actions through your application. The difference between both though, is that using Flows, you will automatically be able to see what common event paths users take without defining each individual path as you would have to with a funnel.

Once a flow is created, how long does the first update take?

There is no generic time for the update, as the flow is calculated from dynamic data. It also depends on the complexity of the data which is defined by the filtering options chosen for every particular flow.

Is Flows data retroactive?

Yes, the data is retroactive because the flow keeps track of all the data that is being updated, including any historical period. This allows you to create flows later and not necessarily before an event/campaign.