Phase 1: Understand what WalkMe Insights can measure

WalkMe Insights Overview

WalkMe Insights helps you understand how users interact with your application and how your WalkMe content is performing. It's your analytics layer for digital adoption that helps you:

• See how users behave in your application — for example, what they click, type, or don't engage with.
• Spot friction — where users get stuck, drop off, or take longer than expected.
• Measure WalkMe's impact — see which WalkMe guidance drives impact across applications, segments and time periods.
• Visualize cross-system journeys — see how users move across applications and how WalkMe guidance contributes to process success.
• Report on what matters most — customize dashboards with the metrics and data that reflect your business priorities.

Common Questions WalkMe Insights Can Answer

Additional resources to learn more about Insights:
About WalkMe Insights
Insights Terminology

Phase 2: Configure UUID & DXA level

Set up your system so Insights can track accurate, user-level data from day one. This foundation determines the quality of every report, funnel, or dashboard you'll build later. UUID is set up by users with Admin permissions when they configure their system before WalkMe content is published.

Step 1: Select how you will identify users (UUID)

The UUID (Unique User Identifier) tells WalkMe who is doing what—it's the foundation of all user-level analytics in WalkMe Insights, ensuring every click, play, and goal completion is tied back to a real user. Without a UUID, WalkMe assigns a new ID each time a user enters the system, creating duplicates in Insights and breaking Onboarding and Goal continuity.

For example:

• Without a UUID: A Smart Walk-Thru shows 100 plays, but Insights can't tell whether this represents 100 unique users or repeated plays by the same few users. There's no visibility into who completed the Smart Walk-Thru or who dropped off. Each time a user enters the system—even if they're returning—they're assigned a new ID since there's no method to track unique users. This leads to inflated metrics and inaccurate Insights data.
• With a UUID: Insights shows 75 unique users started the Walk-Thru; 45 completed it and 30 dropped off. You can see which users did not finish and exactly where they dropped off in the Smart Walk-Thru.

It's a recommended best practice to choose one consistent UUID method across all your environments. While several options are available, we recommend using an IDP integration for internal applications and a variable for customer-facing applications for the most accurate, persistent user tracking. If your organization requires an additional layer of security, you can request to have your UUID hashed.

NOTE: UUID is configured in Data Settings within the Admin Center of the WalkMe Console by someone who has Admin permissions for your account. UUID settings are configured per system, not per account. Some organizations require IT approval to set up an IDP Integration. Reach out to your IT department to identify the person responsible for Identity Access Management (IAM) to request assistance with configuration if needed.

Best Practices

• Choose a stable, consistent UUID method from day one (IDP for internal applications, Variable for customer-facing sites).
• Validate UUIDs appear consistently in Insights user page (no duplicates).
• Publish after changing data settings.

DO NOT

• Leave UUID blank or rely on WalkMe ID — this will reset with every cleared cookie or new browser.
• Change your UUID configuration after deploying content unless you are upgrading to a more reliable method (IDP or Variable). Changing UUIDs breaks historical continuity and resets user-level analytics.

Here are a few additional resources to help you set up your UUID: Unique user settings, IDP, Variables, UUID hashing, Roles & permissions.

Step 2: Choose how much data to collect (DXA Level)

WalkMe collects data at three different levels, each offering a deeper view into how users interact with your application and your WalkMe guidance. Together, these levels help you move from simply counting interactions to truly understanding user behavior, identifying friction, and measuring impact. DXA (Digital Experience Analytics) determines how much user-behavior data WalkMe collects beyond WalkMe engagement analytics.

Different DXA levels offer different levels of visibility into how users interact with your website or application. As a best practice, we recommend enabling Targeted DXA so you can define and analyze Tracked Events. Full DXA is only required if you need access to retroactive interaction data, and it's important to note that historical data is only available from the moment DXA is activated.

Session Playback is not required for most Insights use cases and should be enabled only when visual session replays are needed. Session Playback is an opt-in capability only available to customers who have purchased the WalkMe for Customers package.

Governance and censorship controls

DXA includes governance controls that allow administrators to define what interaction data may be collected. If needed, use Censorship and Privacy settings to restrict the collection of specific elements on your site to align with your organization's security and compliance requirements.

You'll know you're ready to move on when:

• UUID and DXA are configured and validated in the Admin Center.
• You can confirm that data is flowing into Insights (via a simple Tracked Event test).
• Your team understands how much user behavior you're collecting and why.

Here are a few additional resources to help you set up your data collection level: Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), WalkMe Events Settings, Session Playback.

Phase 3: Decide what to track and set up baseline data

To understand how users interact with your application, use Engaged Elements or Tracked Events to collect baseline data before publishing WalkMe content. Without a baseline, it becomes difficult to demonstrate how your WalkMe solutions improve user behavior.

We recommend collecting baseline data for at least 30 days before publishing WalkMe content. This ensures you can confidently measure before-and-after impact. We highly recommended making this a standard practice before deploying new WalkMe content.

Events: When to use Engaged Elements and Tracked Events

Events are the building blocks of Insights analytics. They help you understand how users interact with your application - which buttons they click, which pages they visit, etc. There are two ways to set up events: Engaged Elements and Tracked Events. It's important to know what each method captures since they form the foundation of all Insights analytics.

• Use Engaged Elements when you want to see how users engage with specific on-page elements like clicking a button, typing in a field, hovering, or viewing a UI element. Engaged Elements are captured visually and powered by the WalkMe Editor rule engine, making them more accurate and less prone to selector changes. They also support a broader range of interaction types—including visibility, hover, text change, and input events—helping you measure user behavior with precision. Engaged Elements must be published from the WalkMe Editor, require DeepUI to be enabled, and are limited to 20 per page for performance reasons.
• Use Tracked Events when you need to track page visits or need retroactive data. Please note, DXA (Targeted DXA or Full DXA) must be enabled to set up a Tracked Event. Use Tracked Events + Full DXA when you need retroactive data.

You'll know you're ready to move on when you:

• Understand when to use Engaged Elements and Tracked Events.
• Publish Engaged Elements or set up Tracked Events to collect baseline data for 30 days.
• In the Events section of Insights Console, confirm your Engaged Elements or Tracked Events are sending data into Insights.
• Always validate after creating new events or changing rules.

Additional resources to help you set up Events: Collect Baseline Data with Engaged Elements or Tracked Events, How to create Events, About Insights Engaged Elements.

Phase 4: Deploy WalkMe & measure impact

Address the friction points you've discovered by deploying WalkMe content, then prove it made an impact. Deploy WalkMe guidance where friction exists.

Add Goals in each Smart Walk-Thru, ShoutOut, Resource, or Shuttle — and a completion goal for each Onboarding Task. Goals connect usage to outcomes so you can see if users who engaged with the guidance actually achieved the outcome it was designed to achieve (e.g., “Clicked Save” or “Form Submitted”).

• Add a Main Goal to track the desired outcome from the guidance.
• Add Milestone Goals to track key progress points.

Publish to production and let users interact for at least a week.

To measure whether your WalkMe guidance is gaining traction, you need to look at how users are viewing, playing, clicking, and interacting with each content type across your system. WalkMe Engagement Analytics provides metrics that tell you how often WalkMe content is being surfaced and used. These metrics appear across most app dashboards in Insights, particularly in Smart Walk-Thrus, SmartTips, Launchers, ShoutOuts, Resources, Shuttles, and Surveys.

• Content usage metrics like number of views or displays tells you how many times the item was shown or viewed, even if users did not interact with it.
• Engagement metrics tell you whether users interact with your content.

Use Compare Mode to visualize side-by-side how performance changes before vs. after WalkMe, or compare the same flow with different date ranges and filters. Measuring before vs. after WalkMe helps you clearly demonstrate WalkMe's impact on process success.

NOTE: The combination of using Flow Analytics and Goals help show how WalkMe made a measurable difference. Remember to effectively measure before-and-after impact using Compare Mode, baseline Events need to be set up before WalkMe guidance is deployed.

Phase 5: How to diagnose process bottlenecks using Flow Analytics

Flow Analytics helps you visualize sequential user behavior — showing how users move through multi-step processes, where they drop off, and the alternate paths they take when navigating a workflow. Unlike traditional analytics that track isolated events, Flow Analytics connects the dots, revealing the actual sequence of steps users take across pages, systems, and WalkMe content.

Flow Analytics works best for structured business processes with a clear start, middle, and end, where the order of steps matters. It's ideal for processes like onboarding, sales qualification, form submission, financial approvals, and other multi-page workflows. Flow Analytics is not designed for unstructured exploration or single-click analysis. Use it when you already know the sequential process you want to analyze and optimize.

Flow Analytics answers the critical question: Are users successfully completing the workflows that matter to our business? It's a powerful tool for understanding where processes break down and your proof point for demonstrating the measurable impact of your improvements.

Key capabilities:

• Connects events into flows: reveals the actual sequence of steps users take across pages, systems, or WalkMe content.
• Tracks process effectiveness: measures completion rates, drop-offs, and time between steps.
• Shows alternate paths: identifies the most common or most successful routes to process completion.
• Surfaces behavior differences: compare how user segments behave—by country, browser, device, role, or any property—to uncover patterns that influence completion and friction.
• Proves WalkMe impact: compares performance before vs. after deploying guidance or between users exposed vs. not exposed to WalkMe.

Key actions to set up a Flow:

1. Define a flow around a question for a defined process. Begin with a real process or decision point. For example: Where do users drop off in the workflow? Which steps do my users take in a process? Which button do users choose at a certain step? Do users who saw my ShoutOut go on to complete the process?
2. Set up baseline data. Ensure the key actions in your process have Tracked Events or Engaged Elements defined and published before you deploy WalkMe guidance. These Events become your “before” and “after” anchors in Compare Mode, which helps you demonstrate the impact of your WalkMe solutions. If you don't define your baseline Events before publishing WalkMe content, you lose the ability to measure the performance before vs. after deploying WalkMe in Flow Analytics, making it much harder to prove the impact of your WalkMe solutions.
3. Create a flow for a defined process. Using your pre-defined Events, add each step in the order users must complete for the multi-step process you want to analyze. Your Events can be a combination of WalkMe content, URLs they visited and buttons users clicked as long as it represents the sequence of user behavior in the process. Once set up, your flow should now represent the intended workflow from start to finish.
4. Analyze your flow. Identify the steps where users struggle or slow down, and focus WalkMe guidance and optimization efforts there. Look for friction signals like large drop-off between steps, long average duration between steps, or users skipping fields or pages.

Funnels tell you how many users progress from Step 1 → Step 2 → Step 3, etc. in the exact order you defined. You can see where users drop off and how long each step takes. They're ideal for tracking completion rates, diagnosing drop-off, understanding time-to-completion, and measuring before/after changes when improving a process or adding WalkMe guidance.

Paths reveal how users actually navigate the workflow. They surface unexpected behaviors, alternate routes, loops, and confusion points, often highlighting steps you didn't know needed guidance. Paths reveal how user behavior differs from your intended sequence.

Show Data As / Split By break results down by user attributes (e.g., location, browser, segment) for more detailed user analysis. Show Data As enables you to select a particular property and analyze your data based on that property. This means you can analyze your data not just by events, but also by other factors such as “Number of Users,” "Country" or "Browser". This can be particularly helpful when trying to identify specific issues within an event, rather than analyzing the event as a whole. Split By enables you to segment data based on a property in the Paths view. This allows you to analyze data for each step based on additional factors such as "Country" or "Browser", and view the results under that step.

Comparison Mode in Flow Analytics allows you to compare the same flow side-by-side so you can measure how behavior changes across time, segments, environments, or audiences. This is one of the most powerful features in Flow Analytics because it turns your funnels into a before-and-after story, helping you clearly demonstrate where improvements worked—and where friction still remains. It transforms Flow Analytics from a diagnostic tool into an impact measurement tool, making it easier to justify decisions, communicate value to stakeholders, and guide your next round of optimizations.

NOTE: Use Funnels to track user conversion between steps and the time users take to complete each step. Use Paths when you want to understand which routes users take in the intended workflow. Flows focus on the sequence of user actions rather than isolated events. Each step in a flow must be completed in order for the user to progress to the next step. If a user does not complete a step, they will not be recorded for subsequent steps, and no data will be shown for that user beyond the incomplete step.

Additional resources to help you set up Flow Analytics: Flow Analytics, Tip Tuesday: Utilizing Flow Analytics.

Phase 6: Optimize: Understand what the data means and what to do next

Understanding whether your WalkMe content is effective goes beyond counting plays or clicks. Content effectiveness tells you how well your guidance is helping users complete tasks, make decisions, or correct mistakes.

What to monitor

• Goal completion: Goals—whether tied to Smart Walk-Thrus, Resources, or ShoutOuts—represent the intended outcome of the guidance content was reached. High completion for a Smart Walk-Thru means users not only consumed the guidance but successfully completed the workflow in the application.
• Drop-off indicators: Drop-offs highlight where users begin an experience—such as a Smart Walk-Thru or Resource view—but fail to continue or complete the sequence.
• Initiator quality: Initiation quality reflects how and when users discover your guidance: through a Launcher, proactive ShoutOut, menu search, auto-start rules, or segmentation triggers. A high-quality initiation means users find the content at the right moment and choose to engage.
• Action button click rate: ShoutOuts and Resources often include call-to-action buttons that guide users into a behavior—opening a flow, acknowledging a change, or accessing help. The click-through rate indicates how persuasive and relevant the message is.
• Validation vs. guidance ratio (SmartTips): If validation triggers significantly outpace guidance views, users may be making repeated mistakes or entering incorrect information.
• Survey effectiveness: Survey metrics (views, submissions, per-question responses) help you evaluate whether users are willing to provide input and whether specific questions yield meaningful results.
• Funnel results: Identify where drop-offs improve or persist.
• Flow Compare Mode: Compare Mode looks at a single flow and compares how different users behave for each step of the process using different date ranges or filters. Using these filters, you could say users exposed to WalkMe complete the flow 30% faster than those who were not. Nothing demonstrates value more clearly. Examples of built-in comparison filters: Users Exposed to WalkMe, Users Not Exposed to WalkMe, Users Who Interacted with WalkMe, and Users Not Interacted.

Optimization recommendations

You can also set up a custom dashboard, subscribe to reports, and create data integrations to measure the impact of your WalkMe content alongside your own business data. The Reports Gallery is your central hub for exporting, reviewing, and subscribing to analytics reports in the WalkMe Console. This is where you go when you need raw data, scheduled reporting, or cross-system insights that help you validate performance, share data with stakeholders, or support more advanced analysis outside of WalkMe. There are a lot of out-of-the-box Insights reports, but you can also create custom reports. The most popular report templates that customers use are: End Users and WM Engagement, Tracked Events Analysis, Walk-Thru Analysis, and Survey Analysis.

WalkMe's Custom Dashboards allow you to create personalized visualization views of your data—giving you the flexibility to monitor KPIs, track user behavior, and visualize adoption trends in a format that speaks directly to your program's goals. Custom Dashboards enable you to build tailored collections of widgets that highlight the metrics you care about most, all in one place.

What to do next

• Add Engaged Elements as questions emerge to track user behavior.
• Use Flow Analytics paths view to identify unexpected paths or deviations within known workflows.
• Optimize guidance based on observed user behavior.
• Validate improvements over time using Flow Analytics Compare Mode.

Additional best practices resources for building content and creating reports: Best practices for building WalkMe solutions, Human-centric design tips, About Insights reports, Insights pre-build reports.

Phase 7: Validate impact & share wins with stakeholders

Summarize your Insights findings and confirm WalkMe's impact on downstream business outcomes with stakeholders. For example, after deploying WalkMe content, did you see a decrease in support tickets or increased adoption of a key feature?

• To get a quick pulse on engagement, start with Engagement by Item or Engagement by System to identify which WalkMe content is performing well and which items may need optimization.
• For Smart Walk-Thrus, use the out-of-the-box Walk-Thru Activity and Goal Completion reports to connect usage to meaningful outcomes and validate whether WalkMe is driving the desired behavior.
• If a specific item underperforms, drill into its item-level logs to uncover interaction details that aren't visible in roll-up views.
• When you need to understand how users move through a known process where sequence matters, use Flow Analytics to analyze sequential behavior and identify drop-off points.
• And when standard dashboards don't fully answer your question, use Report Builder to create custom reports that add additional dimensions to standard templates, such as segments or analytics properties.

Document your success stories and schedule a stakeholder readout to share measurable results. Keep in mind that every digital experience has room to grow. WalkMe Insights helps you uncover hidden friction, measure what matters, and demonstrate the value of every improvement—turning Insights into a continuous cycle of optimization and digital adoption growth.

Additional resources for how to share your wins with stakeholders: A practical guide to sharing your DAP wins.