How to Make a Sankey Diagram in Google Analytics

A Sankey diagram is one of the best ways to understand how users really move through your website. Instead of just looking at isolated page views, it shows you the complete journey - the paths people take, the places they drop off, and the "A to B" funnels you might not even know exist. But if you’ve tried to build one in Google Analytics 4, you've probably hit a wall. This article will walk you through the closest you can get to a Sankey diagram inside GA4 and show you how to build a proper one with your analytics data.

What is a Sankey Diagram and Why Use It for GA Data?

A Sankey diagram is a type of flow diagram where the width of the arrows is proportional to the flow quantity. In the context of website analytics, that "flow quantity" is your users or sessions. Essentially, the thicker the line, the more people went down that path.

Imagine your homepage is the starting point on the left. You might see a thick band flowing from the homepage to your "Products" page, a thinner band flowing to your "About Us" page, and a very small one flowing to your "Contact" page. From the "Products" page, another set of bands would show where users went next - maybe a thick one to a specific product category and a smaller one to a blog post about that product.

For marketing and sales teams, this is incredibly valuable. Sankey diagrams help you answer critical questions like:

What are the most common paths users take from a social media campaign to a conversion?
Where are the biggest drop-offs in my checkout process?
Do users who read the blog before purchasing behave differently than those who don’t?
After users hit our pricing page, do they move to sign up or leave the site?

By visualizing the flow, you stop guessing and start seeing the actual user journey, complete with all its detours and dead ends.

The Straight Answer: Can You Make a Sankey Diagram in Google Analytics?

Let's get this out of the way first: No, you cannot create a true, classic Sankey diagram directly within the Google Analytics 4 interface. GA4 does not have a "Sankey" chart type in its standard reports or explorations.

This is a big change for anyone used to Universal Analytics, which had "Behavior Flow" reports that acted as a similar, albeit clunky, flow visualization. GA4 replaced this with something more powerful but also more complex: the Path Exploration report.

The Closest You Can Get: The GA4 Path Exploration Report

The Path Exploration report is Google’s current answer for visualizing user journeys. It’s a tree-like graph that starts from a single point (like a specific page or event) and fans out to show what users did next, step by step. While it isn't technically a Sankey diagram, it serves a similar purpose and is your best bet for analyzing user flow without leaving GA4.

How to Use the Path Exploration Report Step-by-Step

Here’s how to create and customize a Path Exploration report to find the insights you need.

1. Navigate to the "Explore" Section

In the left-hand menu of GA4, click on the Explore icon. This is where all the advanced reports live. Click on "Blank" or choose the "Path exploration" template from the gallery to get started.

2. Choose Your Starting or Ending Point

Every path has a beginning or an end. The Path Exploration report makes you choose which way you want to look at the data.

Starting point: This is the most common use case. You set an initial event or page to see what users do next. For example, you could start with session_start to see the first thing all users do, or you could select a specific landing page to see where new visitors navigate from there.
Ending point: This lets you work backward. You can set a goal, like the purchase event or a "thank you" page view, to see all the different paths that led users to that point. It’s fantastic for understanding your most effective conversion paths.

To set it, click on either "Starting point" or "Ending point" and choose "Event name" or "Page path and screen name." Then, select the specific page or event you want to analyze.

Example: Let's track what users do after landing on our homepage. We'll click "Starting point," select "Page path and screen name," and choose our homepage (e.g., /).

3. Analyze the Flow

Once you’ve selected your starting point, GA4 will generate the report. It shows your chosen node on the left, followed by a column called "STEP +1" that lists the top pages users visited or events they triggered next. The blue bars next to each node represent the relative volume of users who went down that path.

Now you can start exploring. Click on any node in the "STEP +1" column to expand the path further to "STEP +2." This shows you where users went after that second step. You can continue clicking on nodes to trace the user journey as many steps forward (or backward) as you need.

4. Customize Your View

The default view can be messy. Here are a few ways to clean it up and get better insights:

Breakdown by Dimension: Drag a dimension from the "Variables" column on the left to the "Breakdown" field in the "Settings" column. For example, adding the "Device category" dimension will add colors to the paths to show you the difference in behavior between mobile and desktop users.
Use Filters: If you only want to see data for users from a specific campaign or geographic region, use the "Filters" box. You might filter for "Session source / medium" contains "google / cpc" to analyze only your paid search traffic.
Show Unique Nodes Only: Find your path getting repetitive? The default view shows the same page multiple times if a user navigates between a couple of pages. Click "three dots on each Step" and change "Count unique nodes" to streamline the visual.

The Downside: Limitations of Path Exploration

The Path Exploration is powerful, but it's not a true Sankey diagram, and it comes with frustrations:

It can get visually overwhelming. Expanding more than a few steps can quickly turn your report into an unreadable web of lines and boxes.
Lack of Grouping. You can't easily group similar pages together (e.g., viewing all blog posts as a single "Blog" node). This makes high-level analysis difficult.
Focuses on single paths, not overall flow. It’s great for tracing specific user journeys but less effective at showing you the entire website's traffic system at a glance.

Because of these pain points, serious analysis often requires getting your data out of GA4 and into a tool that's actually built for data visualization.

A Better Approach: Building a True Sankey Diagram with GA Data

To create a clear, customizable Sankey diagram, you need to pull your data out of GA4's interface. Here are the two most common ways to do it, from the completely manual to the more automated (but complex).

Method 1: Exporting to Google Sheets (The Manual Grunt Work)

This method gives you full control but requires the most hands-on work. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it works for one-off analyses.

Get Your Data: In GA4, go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens. You’ll need to figure out what data you need for your flow. Typically, this involves exporting lists of previous pages and next pages for each step.
Clean and Structure Your Data: You have to format the exported CSV data into three columns: a "Source" (like the starting page), a "Target" (the next page), and a "Value" (the number of users). This is the most time-consuming step and is prone to errors.
Build the Chart: Google Sheets doesn’t have a native Sankey chart. You can insert one by going to Insert > Chart, choosing "Sankey diagram" from the chart type suggestion list. It will auto-detect your three columns and generate the diagram.

The obvious downside here is the sheer manual effort. The data in your report will be static, so you’ll have to repeat this entire process every time you want an updated view. It’s great for creating reports for presentations but isn’t practical for day-to-day analytics.

Method 2: Using a BI Tool like Looker Studio, Tableau, or Power BI

BI (Business Intelligence) tools are designed for creating advanced visualizations like Sankey diagrams. They can connect directly to your Google Analytics account to pull in live data.

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a popular free choice. It has a native connector for GA4, and you can add a Sankey diagram using third-party visualizations from the community gallery.
Tableau and Power BI are more powerful, enterprise-grade tools. They both support Sankey charts and offer immense flexibility, but come with a steep learning curve and a significant cost. You have to understand data models, relationships, and chart configuration to get things working.

The challenge with BI tools is the setup and learning curve. While they automate the data-pulling, you still have to dedicate hours to becoming proficient in the software. For a busy marketing team, that’s not always feasible. Often, making one "simple" Sankey diagram can eat up an entire afternoon.

Final Thoughts

Visualizing user flow is essential for understanding your marketing and sales performance, and a Sankey diagram is one of the clearest ways to do it. You can get a solid start with GA4's Path Exploration report, but for a true, insightful, and flexible view, you'll need to use a tool designed for better visualization.

We believe getting these answers shouldn't be so time-consuming. We built Graphed because we were tired of wrestling with manual exports and complex BI tools. Instead of spending hours fighting with settings, you can simply connect your Google Analytics account and ask in plain English: "Show me a Sankey chart of the user journey from our homepage," and get a live, interactive diagram instantly. This turns a multi-hour data project into a 30-second task, letting you get straight to the insights.