How to create a Sankey Diagram with Excel VS SankeyJourney

As businesses grow and more users interact with their website or app, it becomes crucial to understand how these users navigate through the different pages and features. This is where customer journey mapping comes into play, as it allows businesses to visualize the user's journey and identify areas for improvement. Sankey diagrams and flowcharts are popular tools used for customer journey mapping, and while Excel can generate these diagrams, SankeyJourney offers several advantages over Excel.

Advantages of SankeyJourney over Excel:

• User-Friendly Interface: SankeyJourney has an intuitive and user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to create Sankey diagrams without needing any specialized knowledge. In contrast, Excel can be difficult to use, especially for those who are not familiar with its features.
• Faster Processing: SankeyJourney can generate Sankey diagrams in just a few seconds, even for large data sets. Excel, on the other hand, can be slow and cumbersome, especially for large data sets.
• Customization: SankeyJourney offers several customization options, such as the ability to change the color palette, size of labels, and filter events, making it easier for users to create diagrams that are tailored to their specific needs. Excel, on the other hand, has limited customization options.
• Grouping Events: SankeyJourney offers a feature that allows users to group several events into one, making it easier to clean up redundancies and discover new patterns in users' journeys. Excel does not offer this feature, making it more difficult to group events.
• Event Looping: SankeyJourney offers a feature that allows users to consider successive events as one, making it easier to clean up redundancies and discover new patterns in users' journeys. Excel does not offer this feature, making it more difficult to loop events.
• Session Filtering: SankeyJourney allows users to specify how long a session lasts for a user, making it easier to display the journey of a user only for one specific session. Excel does not offer this feature, making it more difficult to filter sessions.
• Interactivity: SankeyJourney allows users to interact with the graph by clicking on the nodes and segments, which automatically produces a filter on the Sankey for the step of the journey selected. Excel does not offer this level of interactivity, making it more difficult to explore the data.

The Limitations of Excel for Customer Journey Mapping and its Other Use Cases

While Excel is a powerful tool for data analysis, it is not well-suited for creating Sankey diagrams and flowcharts to visualize customer journeys. One of the main reasons for this is that Excel does not offer advanced customization features, such as grouping events, event looping, or session filtering, making it more challenging to clean up redundancies and discover new patterns in users' journeys. Additionally, Excel's interface can be complicated and time-consuming for non-experts, who may struggle to find the right functions and features for creating customer journey maps.

However, Excel is still useful for many other purposes, such as data entry, manipulation, and analysis. For instance, Excel can be used to create budgets, track expenses, and manage inventory. It can also be used to generate charts and graphs for data visualization and analysis, such as bar graphs, pie charts, and scatter plots. Furthermore, Excel offers advanced functions, such as pivot tables and conditional formatting, that make it easier to analyze large data sets and identify patterns and trends.

In summary, while Excel is not the best tool for creating Sankey diagrams and flowcharts for customer journey mapping, it remains a valuable tool for other data analysis and management tasks. Businesses should consider the specific requirements of their projects and choose the right tool for the job.

Conclusion:

While Excel can generate Sankey diagrams and flowcharts, SankeyJourney offers several advantages over Excel when it comes to visualizing and understanding customer journeys. With its user-friendly interface, faster processing, and advanced customization features, SankeyJourney is the best tool for businesses looking to gain insights into their user's journey.