Path analysis or funnel analysis?

They answer different questions. Build a funnel when the intended route is known and the question is where people abandon it. Start from path analysis when the behaviour is unknown, then turn what it reveals into a fixed funnel for ongoing monitoring.

Why is the top path's share so small?

The number of possible routes grows exponentially with each step, so traffic spreads across hundreds of them. To make the report readable, reduce the step count and group similar pages together so the branches carry meaning.

Path Analysis

Intermediate

Updated Jul 11, 2026 Shahin editorial 3 min read

PronunciationEN/pæθ əˈnæləsɪs/

Path analysis is a technique that aggregates the sequences of pages or events users actually produce, to surface the most common routes, the branch points and the exits.

The report either walks forward from a starting event or walks backward from an ending event, showing the share of each branch at every step. The core difference from funnel analysis is direction: a funnel encodes a hypothesis and only measures how many people followed it, while path analysis needs no hypothesis and exists to find unplanned behaviour. The main trap is combinatorial explosion: every extra step multiplies the number of possible routes, so the single most common path usually holds a small share of traffic and the other bucket outgrows every named branch. The top path is not the dominant path. Note also that in statistics the phrase path analysis means something else entirely, namely a structural equation modelling method for estimating causal relations between variables.

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