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Path Explorer Guide

The Path Explorer is your mission control for understanding how customers navigate your store, identifying where high-intent buyers encounter friction, and taking immediate commercial action on those insights.

Unlike generic web analytics that present disconnected pageview counts, Path Explorer reconstructs complete, chronological customer journeys from initial landing to final checkout.

1. Segments That Matter (Customer CRM Sync)​

Path Explorer automatically groups customer journeys into four high-impact commercial segments. Instead of passively viewing metrics, you can directly activate these cohorts in your marketing stack.

How Customers Are Identified​

ShopGuide merges browsing journeys with real customer identities using two authoritative sources:

  1. Shopify Order Attribution: When a customer completes an order, their Shopify Customer ID, email, and order history link back to their full browsing journey.
  2. Interactive & Account Touchpoints: When a customer logs into their store account, provides an email to the AI assistant, or signs up for a newsletter, their session is unified with their customer record.

When a segment displays "Reachable" customers, these are verified shoppers with email addresses or Shopify Customer IDs ready for targeted outreach.

The Four High-Impact Segments​

  • Product browsers who didn't add to cart
    • Who they are: Shoppers who actively explored products but never pressed "Add to Cart."
    • Action: These visitors represent untapped intent. Use targeted on-site offers or proactive AI launch messages on high-traffic product pages to address common pre-purchase hesitations before they bounce.
  • Cart abandoners
    • Who they are: High-intent shoppers who added items to their shopping cart but dropped off before completing checkout.
    • Action: Click Sync reachable to Klaviyo to enroll them in an automated, highly personalized win-back email sequence addressing specific cart items.
  • Searchers who left
    • Who they are: Visitors who utilized your on-site search bar but exited without viewing a product page.
    • Action: Inspect the top search queries surfaced in Path Explorer to identify catalog terminology gaps, missing inventory, or search synonym requirements.
  • Chat-assisted buyers
    • Who they are: Customers who interacted with the AI Shopping Guide during their journey and successfully placed an order.
    • Action: Click Tag & sync these customers to push them into Shopify or Klaviyo for VIP loyalty programs and post-purchase replenishment flows.

2. Tagging in Shopify & Building a CRM​

When you click Tag in Shopify for any cohort, ShopGuide writes structured customer tags directly to customer profiles in your Shopify Admin.

How It Works​

  1. ShopGuide extracts the identified Shopify Customer IDs from the selected segment.
  2. It writes a distinct, timestamped tag (e.g., path-explorer:2026-09-13:cart-abandoners or path-explorer:chat-assisted-buyers).

Why This is Powerful​

Inside your Shopify Admin under Customers, you can instantly filter and create saved customer segments:

customer_tags CONTAINS 'path-explorer'

This allows you to:

  • Track long-term Lifetime Value (LTV) and repurchase rates of chat-assisted customers.
  • Build native Shopify Email campaigns targeted to specific browsing behaviors.
  • Segment your customer base by verified shopping patterns.

3. Syncing to Klaviyo​

Clicking Sync to Klaviyo pushes reachable customers and rich behavioral attributes directly into your Klaviyo marketing funnels.

How It Works​

  1. Identifies verified emails within the cohort.
  2. Updates their Klaviyo profile with specialized properties (including path_explorer_cohort, sg_journey_archetype, and sg_top_category).
  3. Automatically subscribes or adds them to your selected Klaviyo List or Segment.
  • Cart Abandoner Win-Back: Send dynamic emails reminding customers of their abandoned cart items, enriched with personalized AI recommendations.
  • Custom Ad Audiences: Sync your Klaviyo segment to Meta (Facebook/Instagram) or Google Ads to create lookalike audiences based on your highest-converting shoppers.

4. Journey Heat Map​

The Journey Heat Map provides an interactive topological view of traffic flows between pages on your store.

  • Zoom and Pan: Scroll to zoom in on complex page clusters; drag to pan across the journey canvas.
  • Connection Drop-Offs: Hover over any connecting line between pages to view exact traffic volume, transition rates, and drop-off percentages.
  • Identify Friction: Spot navigation loops or dead-end pages that fail to guide visitors into collections or product detail pages.

5. Exclude Bots Toggle​

Web crawlers, price scrapers, and automated bots (such as Amazonbot, Bingbot, Bytespider, and GPTBot) frequently crawl eCommerce catalogs. If unmonitored, bot traffic severely distorts store analytics, causing conversion rates to look artificially depressed.

Audience Insights & Bot Transparency​

ShopGuide doesn't just hide bot rows behind the scenes—it gives you full transparency. Under Audience Insights, ShopGuide detects and explicitly names the crawlers hitting your store alongside their exact session counts.

Verified Human Session Denominators​

When the Exclude bots toggle is switched on:

  • All KPI cards, journey funnel rates, and chat-impact conversion metrics are calculated against Shopify's verified human session count (powered by live ShopifyQL data).
  • This guarantees that your conversion rates reflect genuine human shopper behavior rather than crawler spikes.

6. Customer Journey Funnel​

The Customer Journey Funnel maps the critical milestones of eCommerce conversion:

graph LR
    A["Store Landing<br/>(100%)"] --> B["Product View<br/>(Discovery)"]
    B --> C["Add to Cart<br/>(Purchase Intent)"]
    C --> D["Checkout / Order<br/>(Conversion)"]
  • Stage Inspection: Click on any stage in the funnel (e.g., Add to Cart) to dynamically filter the session table below to that exact cohort.
  • Chat-Assisted vs. Non-Chat: Toggle comparison views to measure the exact conversion lift delivered when visitors engage with the AI shopping guide.

7. All Sessions Table​

The All Sessions Table lists individual customer journeys in chronological sequence.

  • Detailed Timeline: Click any row to open a comprehensive step-by-step timeline of that visitor's visit—showing the exact landing URL, products viewed, time spent per page, and any conversational turns with the AI assistant.
  • Journey Archetypes: Identify whether the shopper behaved as a direct Spear-Fisher, an In-Depth Researcher, or a casual Window Shopper.
  • Exporting: Export filtered session lists as CSV for deep analysis or custom attribution modeling.

8. Checkout Sessions​

The Checkout Sessions view filters exclusively for high-intent visitors: shoppers who progressed into checkout or completed an order.

  • Purchase Conversion Rate: Track the percentage of checkout sessions that successfully cross the finish line.
  • Drop-Off Diagnostics: Identify checkout steps where customers abandon (e.g., unexpected shipping costs, payment gateway friction, or missing discount codes).
  • High-Intent Journey Paths: Compare paths that completed an order against those that dropped off to discover common success patterns.

9. Path Flow Analysis​

The Path Flow & Checkout Journeys section provides a multi-tiered visualization of customer progression:

1. Top 10 Most-Travelled Paths​

Visualizes the 10 most common sequential routes taken by customers who reached checkout or completed an order. Nodes are clearly labeled with intuitive product and page titles (rather than cryptic URL parameters or database IDs) so your marketing and merchandising teams can quickly understand the flow.

2. AI Overwatch Summary​

An intelligent analytical summary that synthesizes thousands of journey steps into plain-English observations. AI Overwatch highlights:

  • The primary entry points that yield the highest conversion velocity.
  • Key transition pages where customers drop off before reaching the cart.
  • Recommendations for optimizing internal links and collection navigation.

3. High-Intent Session Drill-Down​

A dedicated session list tracking every single customer who entered the checkout funnel, allowing you to review real-world purchasing behavior down to the individual session.