Table of Contents
Customer experience (CX) is critical to a business’s success. In a recent study, customer-centric brands reported an 80% increase in their revenue. Proactively measuring CX will make sure you identify and optimize any weak points in your strategy.
However, most businesses miss the boat in their analysis and instead focus on simply understanding how to better convert leads and increase sales. They miss seeing things from the customer’s point of view: their holistic journey interacting with the brand, as well as the points that either increase their engagement or lead them to drop off. This is where customer journey measurement and analysis comes into play.
Instead of focusing solely on conversion, you’ll track metrics that best reflect your customers’ experience with your brand. Using these figures, you can monitor the steps each customer takes to reach their goal and gain the insights you need to improve your CX.
What metrics should you measure throughout the customer journey?
Among the multiple data points available for customer behavior, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start and which metrics to track. When you’re looking for customer journey analytics ideas, where do you even start?
Too much irrelevant or misleading data can mean you ignore the actionable insights from your analysis, so it’s important to focus on the metrics that matter at every stage of the journey.
“Numerous customer journey points are monitored by us, such as website visits, social media activity, customer service conversations, and purchasing trends. Key metrics like how long customers spend on our website, conversion rates, and the feedback we gather from surveys are incredibly telling. They draw attention to the areas of our business where we are succeeding as well as those where we might be falling short of what our customers want.” —Jake Munday, Co-Founder & CEO at Custom Neon
Awareness stage
When customers aren’t even aware of the problems your product can solve, how can you be sure you’re on the right track? By measuring these metrics:
Reach, impressions, and rankings
Your reach quantifies the potential audience exposed to your content—a broader reach expands your brand’s visibility. To enhance your reach:
- Create relatable content
- Leverage referral marketing for word-of-mouth recommendations
- Consider partnerships with other brands to tap into their audiences
Impressions indicate how often your content is displayed to your audience. This offers insights into findability, search ranking, and content shareability.
Similarly, SEO ranking determines how well your content ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs.) Higher rankings contribute to increased organic traffic, which is often highly targeted and valuable for conversions.
Optimize your impressions and SEO ranking by focusing on factors like:
- Using varied keyword match types for relevance
- Creating engaging headlines to increase impressions
- URL and content optimization
- Content quality improvement
- Optimizing page loading times
- Ensuring mobile-friendliness
Bounce rates and time on page
Bounce Rate and Time on page are crucial metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of a website in engaging visitors and guiding them through the customer journey.
A high bounce rate shows that users are leaving without interacting, which can mean your pages aren’t attracting or retaining the right audience.
On the other hand, time on page helps gauge user engagement by revealing how much time visitors spend consuming content. It indicates which pages are captivating and which can be optimized.
To improve these metrics, follow these best practices:
- Enhance website usability, navigation, and responsiveness to make the user experience enjoyable.
- Ensure compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) that encourage users to explore further and take meaningful actions.
- Create consistent high-value content to captivate users’ attention and encourage longer stays.
- Use tools like Google Analytics to measure time on page and identify top-performing pages.
- Include interactive elements like videos, quizzes, or infographics to enhance engagement.
- Make navigation intuitive to guide users seamlessly through the site, encouraging exploration.
Consideration stage
When customers have finished their research and start actively considering solutions, clicks become a leading sign of a healthy customer journey.
Clicks and click-through rates
While clicks indicate the overall user engagement with website elements, media content, links, and CTAs, CTR measure the success of specific links by comparing the number of clicks to the number of impressions.
Here’s how to improve both these metrics:
- Analyze user sessions and identify issues such as confusing navigation or broken links that may impact clicks.
- Use heatmaps to gain insights into the areas users engage with the most, helping make effective changes to drive conversions.
- Optimize your headlines and copy and make sure they appeal to users by addressing and solving their problems.
- Include clear and compelling CTAs positioned prominently above the fold to guide users on where to click.
“Recognizing a high drop-off rate at the inquiry stage, we simplified our inquiry process, making it more intuitive. The change led to a significant uptick in inquiries, and demonstrated the value of listening to—and acting on—customer journey insights. Adjustments will improve current customer interactions and also lay the groundwork for future client engagements.” —Alex Ugarte, Marketing & Operations Manager at London Office Space
Start your free trial of Funnelytics Performance
Unleash the full potential of Funnelytics with a free 14-day trial and get access to the platform that will help you plan, measure and optimize your customer journeys.
Decision stage
The decision (or purchase) stage means the customer has chosen your product– or not. These metrics can indicate success or a need for improvement:
Conversion rate
Conversion Rate represents the percentage of users who complete a desired action (conversion) out of the total number of website visitors. It tells you how well a website or campaign guides users through the customer journey to take a specific action.
Here’s how you can improve your conversion rate:
- Use exit-intent surveys to understand why users aren’t converting.
- Conduct A/B tests on CTAs, landing pages, buttons, and key elements to identify variations that drive the most conversions.
- Use optimized headlines and high-quality product images to encourage users to explore further.
Sales and Cost Per Conversion (CPC)
Sales represent the ultimate conversion, indicating that users have progressed through the customer journey to become paying customers. Meanwhile, CPC measures the cost of a website element or advertisement relative to the conversions it drives.
Both metrics provide insights into revenue generation, conversion efficiency, and the overall success of your marketing efforts.
“The main information that we look at is:
- How happy our customers are.
- How much our customers might be worth over a long period of time.
- How many customers have stopped doing business with us?
- How much does it cost us to get a new customer?
What we learn from these details really helps us build a stronger business:
- We can make sure each customer gets what they want from us.
- We’re always learning and getting better because of it.
- We take smarter steps to make our products meet our customer’s needs.”—Natalie Suppes, Founder at S & S Creative
Here’s how to optimize these metrics:
- Identify pages that convert the most. Allocate more budget to promote those pages to maximize conversions and minimize costs.
- Determine when users are most active. Display key promotional content during these specific times to increase the chances of conversions.
- Leverage social proof to build credibility and gather user feedback to tailor solutions and marketing strategies.
- Optimize the timing of ads and content based on user activity patterns to enhance the efficiency of marketing spending.
Retention stage
How do you retain customers after the initial purchase? Measuring these metrics can help to spotlight opportunities:
Customer loyalty
Loyalty measures the likelihood of customers engaging in repeat business with a company or recommending them to others. It also indicates the customer satisfaction levels with your products.
Satisfied and loyal customers are likely to become advocates for the brand, contributing to positive word-of-mouth marketing and a great brand reputation.
Here’s how you can improve this metric:
- Offer excellent customer service to support customers, addressing their queries and concerns promptly.
- Implement a loyalty rewards program to acknowledge and appreciate customer loyalty. Exclusive gifts, discounts, and offers can incentivize repeat business.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS gauges customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your brand to others.
Here’s how to improve your NPS score:
- Leverage the feedback collected through NPS surveys to make informed decisions and implement changes that positively impact customer satisfaction.
- Track and measure NPS scores over time to understand the trends and effectiveness of your implemented improvements.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV measures the revenue generated over the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with a company. It provides insights into the long-term profitability of the business based on customer interactions.
Here’s how to improve it:
- Focus on enhancing the onboarding experience and testing the onboarding process to streamline product adoption and improve user satisfaction.
- Ensure a seamless navigation of your websites and product pages to exchange user experience.
Start your free trial of Funnelytics Performance
Unleash the full potential of Funnelytics with a free 14-day trial and get access to the platform that will help you plan, measure and optimize your customer journeys.
How to measure the customer journey in 4 steps
Every customer journey is different, but the general method to measure and improve them can be summarized in four steps:
1. Determine your priority
Not all customer journeys are the same—one customer may have found you through Google ads, while the other may have found you through word-of-mouth. You may be looking at hundreds of customer journeys, which can be overwhelming to analyze without a structured process.
Here, you need to determine the top priority for your business and focus on analyzing customer journeys in that area. Here’s how to go about it:
- Revisit your marketing goals and understand what you need to focus on at a point—is it optimizing customer support, improving your onboarding process, or addressing your cart abandonment issues?
- Organize customer journeys into different groups. For example, create a group segment for customer journeys where the users sign up for the trial or subscribe to your newsletter.
In the end, the selection of customer journeys depends on what conversion means to you and what aligns with your business and marketing goals the best.
2. Identify the customer data points you need
Customer journeys are a lot more than channels—your customers may be reaching a common goal through different touchpoints.
Customer touchpoints are specific interaction points between a customer and a business throughout the entire customer journey. For example, in a scenario where a customer interacts with a company’s mobile app to browse products, track orders, or participate in loyalty programs, mobile apps serve as a touchpoint.
Once you’ve decided on the customer journey you’re going to measure, start collecting data points stage by stage—from awareness to loyalty.
Here’s how to go about it:
- Awareness stage: Understand how customers are discovering your brand, the channels they’re using and how appealing are your websites and social media channels in order to attract your leads.
- Consideration stage: Outline the specific metrics you need to track, such as lead generation, content engagement, and email sign-ups resulting from your lead magnet. Implement conversion tracking for certain actions you want your customers to take and track engagement metrics.
- Decision stage: Examine the sales funnel to identify where potential customers either drop off or convert and pinpoint any bottlenecks in the decision-making process. Don’t forget to gather feedback from your sales team based on customer inquiries, objections, and interactions.
- Retention stage: Pay the most attention to your churn rate, as this tells you how many customers stopped using your product within a time period. Also, track how often customers make repeat purchases, and see if this pattern changes over time.
- Loyalty stage: Analyze the purchase history of loyal customers to discern trends, including the consistent products or services they buy and any seasonal variations. Continuously keep tabs on your NPS.
Start your free trial of Funnelytics Performance
Unleash the full potential of Funnelytics with a free 14-day trial and get access to the platform that will help you plan, measure and optimize your customer journeys.
3. Map your customer journey
By now, you may have collected tons of data in isolated databases—you need to integrate it all to interpret it well and make data-informed decisions.
That’s when funnel mapping comes into play.
“Monitoring these indicators provides a lot of advantages. They give us guidance on how to improve every customer experience, assess the effectiveness of our advertising, and streamline our operations. Each time a customer interacts with our brand, it is now more distinct and rewarding, because of CX optimization. And that’s only been possible because of the insights gained from analyzing their journey measurements.” —Jake Munday, Co-Founder & CEO at Custom Neon
Using funnel analytics tools like Funnelytics, you can visualize this data into a canvas and gain actionable insights to streamline your customer journey. It acts as a central repository of all your data—just integrate all your analytics tools into it, and it’ll help you create stunning—and understandable—journey maps.
Here are different ways to use Funnelytics for reporting and analysis:
- You can create beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert-level canvases, depending on how complex your strategy or customer journey is.
- You can use it to measure the performance of a page while measuring every element of the page and see how each action on that page contributes to conversions.
- You can create notes and to-do lists on the side panel of your canvas to log your progress or updates. There’s also an option of creating notes for individual steps in your journey, which makes it easy to annotate while working on the map.
- You can map your customer journey in any format you like—value ladder, flow charts, step-by-step process, and so on.
- You can add custom icons to any of the steps—for example, a screenshot of an email or a product image.
- You can use it for trend analysis in different stages of your customer journey.
4. Score your customer journeys
Scores determine how a customer journey is performing. You can define journey scores using a combination of metrics that capture the unique customer experience and the value generated when customers complete a specific journey.
Here are the factors to consider when scoring your customer journeys:
- Analyze the differences between a streamlined journey and a challenging or painful journey to achieve the same goal. A positive outcome alone doesn’t guarantee a high score—the ease and satisfaction of the journey are also important.
- Monitor metrics that cover both the in-journey and end-of-journey processes.
- Calculate the scores on a micro-journey level by only considering a particular stage of the customer journey or a particular step in that stage.
Unlock your marketing potential with customer journey measurement
Analyzing customer journeys doesn’t have to be complicated—all you need is the right approach and tools. You can conduct a customer journey analysis across multiple touchpoints and find out what makes them take an action or drop off from your funnel.
“Customer journey measurement is crucial for understanding our clients’ experiences from initial interest to final transaction. It has taught us the importance of each touchpoint when shaping customer perceptions and decisions. The end transaction isn’t even the half of it. Ensuring a positive experience at every step builds long-term, loyal customer relationships.” —Alex Ugarte, Marketing & Operations Manager at London Office Space
While there are many customer journey analytics platforms to help you measure your customer journeys effectively, Funnelytics makes this process fun and engaging. Easily visualize your data and interpret it with ease without spending hours analyzing journeys manually—simply drag-and-drop elements into the canvas to create steps, fetch data, and build a stunning journey map.
Sign up for a free trial today!
1. When should you measure the customer journey?
2. What customer journey metrics should I measure?
3. Where does traditional customer journey mapping fail?
Share
Mikael Dia
Related resources
Start your free trial
Unleash the full potential of Funnelytics with a 14-day trial, no strings attached. Gain full access to the features that will propel your growth to new heights.
