Beyond the Traditional Customer Journey: Why Most Companies Get It Wrong

Most companies analyze their customer journey and their marketing conversion funnel through similar procedures. The stages of analysis are often described as awareness, consideration, and decision— or more simply — the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.

In reality, path to purchase for a customer is much more complicated than those three stages suggest; however, most companies continue to adhere to this outdated approach, further limiting their insights.

From when they enter the market, to when they purchase the final product, a shopper will make countless decisions. Brands routinely fail to follow the complete customer journey, especially if the process takes weeks. Time and time again, companies prove to be ill-equipped with the tools or the data to process these trends into digestible and actionable insights.

The customer journey often includes multiple touchpoints beyond a website visit. Consumers often read product reviews, browse multiple retailers, and search for comparisons or competitors.

During these early stages of the decision-making process, many companies rely on targeting technologies to reach prospective customers. Although with this model, visibility into this activity is severely limited. Analytics resources, such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics, offer insights into how a customer reaches their website, but those tools are unable to provide any context outside company-owned websites.

For most consumer products, the research and path to purchase go beyond a single website session. In fact, it may take weeks for higher-priced goods or niche products with long decision-making cycles. All of the complexities in the process warrant a path to purchase outline. No matter what attribution model a website uses, relying solely on analytics providers will cause data blind spots.

Traffic source and session insights are great for assessing owned DTC performance. But for companies that sell through marketplaces and retailers,  the customer journey is harder to track. Additionally, it’s a challenge for these companies to accurately assess their competitors’ performance. Evidently, businesses with omnichannel strategies face mounting gaps in path to purchase behavior.

Many brands have yet to harness the power of clickstream data, which acts as a window into user behavior online, including browsing details on multiple websites. You can read more about this in our blog: The Essential Guide to Clickstream Data.

At M Science, we help companies map the full path to purchase with insights from clickstream data. We capture the entire customer journey from initial category browsing activity, to demonstration of intent, to purchase for our clients and their competitors.

M Science’s customer journey module helps companies answer the following questions:

• Where does the customer journey start?
• What is the customer journey duration? What percentage of my customers spend <1 day, 2-7 days, 2-4 weeks, or 4 weeks+ on their journey?
• How many brands are considered throughout the customer journey?
• Which brands are considered most frequently?
• Which retailers capture the most browsing attention for my product category?
• How many retailers are considered throughout the customer journey?
• What non-retail sites do customers visit by magnitude of sessions?
• What irrelevant activity do customers engage in while they are on their journey? What buyer personas come to light?
• What does purchase intent look like on a weekly basis? Do holiday periods have a higher purchase intent for my product?
• Do customers who purchase during the holiday period spend months researching and waiting for holiday sales? Or do they have a shorter journey than non-holiday shoppers?
• How do non-Amazon shoppers differ from Amazon shoppers?

Being able to answer these questions helps companies inform key strategies, including:

• Media placement
• Partnerships (brands and content creators)
• Customer affinity
• Product placement and allocation to retailers
• Marketing activities such as blogs, YouTube videos, social media
• Marketing investment in Amazon PPC or paid search
• Buyer persona identification
• Prospective customer reliance on blogs and reviews
• Non-retail touchpoints along the journey

The journey’s end can be defined as the demonstration of purchase intent.

M Science believes the journey starts as soon as the person engages in any digital activity related to the product category. This marks earliest date and domain with any activity. It can involve browsing a specific product on a retailer or e-tailer (including Amazon) or searching terms related to the product category on a search engine.

Being able to define this date is key to segmenting customers by journey start and duration.

Determining the end of the path is extremely important.

This process is difficult to assess without the right data and tools. A customer can visit a DTC website, only to make an in-person purchase. On the other hand, a customer can view multiple sites then make a purchase on only one.

The customer journey can range from minutes to months.

Identifying the journey start and intent to purchase actions will inform the journey duration.

Browsing brands and products on DTCs and retail websites are collected in clickstream data. The findings can identify which competitors are considered most frequently and how competitive the category is. Understanding which brands command the greatest share of browsing can help answer key questions:

• Do people review multiple brands before making a purchase?
• Are incumbent or disruptor brands browsed the most?
• Which competitors are taking the most mind share? Which competitors are lagging?

You can uncover buyer personas by visualizing consumer activity outside of your product category during browsing sessions. For example, analyzing irrelevant activity can uncover that customers who are browsing kitchen appliances are also browsing home renovation and technology retailers.

M Science is a global data-driven research and analytics firm, with nearly 20 years of experience uncovering new insights for some of the world’s largest corporations and financial institutions. We revolutionize research by discovering new datasets and pioneering methodologies to provide actionable intelligence. Learn more at: mscience.com/corporate intelligence. M Science is a portfolio company of Leucadia Investments, a division of Jefferies Financial Group Inc. (NYSE: JEF).

Interested in talking to a member of our sales team for a demo of our solutions? Reach out to our team!

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