At a glance
Top User Path (Flows) is a Mixpanel-distinctive view of the single most-travelled event sequence your shoppers take. Rather than forcing journeys into a fixed funnel, Flows reconstructs the real order of events and surfaces the route the largest number of sessions actually follow. When this dominant path shifts, it means users are finding a new route, or that the old one has broken. As a Key Metrics card it sits front and centre because the most common journey is the one your store lives or dies on. The card presents the leading paths as a table you can read step by step.
Calculation
Vortex IQ reads the Mixpanel Flows report anchored on your primary starting event and reconstructs, for each session, the ordered sequence of events the user fired. It groups sessions by their event sequence and counts how many followed each one over the rolling 30-day window, then ranks the sequences so the most-travelled path is at the top. Because Flows works from the real order of events rather than a fixed template, the dominant path emerges from actual behaviour, including routes you may not have anticipated. The card shows the ranked sequences as a table rather than a single number.Worked example
A representative reading of Top User Path (Flows) for a typical merchant on Mixpanel. Say that for the 30 days to 14 Jun 26 the leading path is Product Viewed, Add to Cart, Begin Checkout, Purchase, followed by 6,900 sessions. The week before, the leader had been Product Viewed, Add to Cart, Purchase, with checkout skipped via an express button. The express route has now slipped to second place, and the longer path leads. You investigate and find a recent change quietly hid the express checkout button on mobile, forcing users through the full checkout. The Conversion-Path Share card shows a small dip as the longer route loses a few percent of sessions. You restore the express button on mobile, and the shorter path returns to the top within days. For deeper investigation, use Vortex Mind to trace upstream causes; for natural-language exploration, ask Ask Viq.Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against Mixpanel
Where to look in Mixpanel’s own dashboard: Open the Flows report, set the starting event to your primary entry point and the window to the last 30 days, and read the widest continuous band of flow from left to right. That widest band is the most-travelled path and should match the top row of the card. Hovering over each step shows the session count, which you can compare directly with the card’s figures. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: if the dominant Mixpanel path skips a step your ecommerce platform records, such as an upsell page, the event for that step may not be firing even though the page is served. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.