Customer journey

What the customer journey describes

The customer journey describes a customer's path from first contact to purchase and beyond, across all channels and devices. It does not start with the first session in the shop but often earlier: with an ad, a post, a conversation or a recommendation. It does not end with the order but with review, service, repurchase or abandonment.

The practical value lies in comparing your own picture with the actual route. Assuming that customers arrive through the ad and buy immediately overlooks the search in between, the second device and two weeks of deliberation.

Typical stages

• Trigger: A need arises, often outside the shop. Here the shop is not visible.
• Orientation: The customer searches terms and compares sellers. Content and reviews outweigh prices.
• Selection: Two or three sellers remain. Filters, availability and return rules decide.
• Purchase: The completion, with payment method and shipping route as the final hurdles.
• Afterwards: Delivery, use, service, review and the second purchase. This stage decides the value of the customer.

Why last click attribution falls short

If every purchase is credited to the last contact before the order, ads and brand appearances systematically get too much weight and preparatory channels too little. A post that created attention three weeks earlier does not count. Shifting budget accordingly strengthens exactly the channels that are only visible just before completion.

Robust attribution is demanding, because there is no shared identifier across devices. Three routes are realistic: a question in the checkout about how the customer found the shop. Analysis of internal search queries, because they reveal what was searched before. And observing paths within a session, showing which pages are actually visited before completion.

What follows for the work

The most important conclusion is to fill every stage instead of putting all energy into advertising. Orientation needs explanatory content, selection needs clean product data and filters, purchase needs a frictionless flow, and the period afterwards needs a reason for the second purchase.

The second conclusion concerns measurement. One fixed metric per stage makes sense, not just a revenue figure at the end. For orientation, visits to explanatory pages matter, for selection visits to product pages and the cart, for purchase the completion rate, for the period afterwards the repeat purchase rate. Comparing those four values usually shows which stage is weak, and the weakest stage is the lever. Revenue growth rarely comes from more advertising but from closing the stage where customers drop out.