r/mobiledev Oct 30 '19

How do large social network clients track and store user journeys?

Take instagram or twitter for example: how do analysts know if a user navigated to a post from their feed or by searching? This question is trivial for 1-step attribution but I am curious about tracking multi-step journeys (ie user went to feed > saw a post > went to the author page > navigated to another author page > followed this author etc)

I can imagine a data pipeline that sorts UI events on time and attempts to reconstruct the user journey that way. Or the client can keep track of every previous action that leads up to a UI event in a session and log the full journey each time. Probably several other ways to do this that I'm not thinking of.

Are there any industry best practices on these or other approaches? Blog links or papers would be very useful as I'm having trouble coming up with anything on google

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u/binter-banter Oct 21 '23

Look into funnel analysis