Last week I shipped one of the biggest upgrades to my analytics engine since launch.
I was chasing a simple question. How do people actually move through a document
Not just page views, but start points, re-reads, and drop-off points.
Most tools stop at views or reading time. Useful, but they miss attention flow.
So I added a Sankey chart in DocBeacon to map session-level page transitions.
What I can see now
users starting on page 3 instead of page 1
loops where a section gets re-read
exits right after pricing
Under the hood, this required bigger changes than the UI suggests
session stitching
transition graph building
path weighting
sanity checks for noisy sessions
The result feels closer to intent analytics than file tracking.
Next step is turning these paths into actionable signals
content ordering suggestions, confusion hotspots, and lightweight benchmarks for proposals and pitch decks.
Top comments (1)
Small technical add-on for anyone curious.
I ended up modeling each session as a directed page-transition graph, then aggregating into weighted paths for the Sankey.
I also added guardrails for noisy data. bot-like bursts, ultra-short bounces, and weird refresh loops get down-weighted or dropped.
Early pattern I did not expect. some readers treat pricing as a starting node, not an ending node. that changes how I think about page ordering.