Ready to crank up the conversions? This is a beginner’s guide to the Customer Journey Analysis, our method of drawing actionable insights from a site’s user behaviour. Just imagine understanding your customers’ needs, their behaviours, their decision-making processes. With the Customer Journey Analysis, it’s more than possible – it’s guaranteed.
What is the Customer Journey Analysis?
We devised the Customer Journey Analysis as a solution to a challenge: creating a digital strategy informed by customers’ needs, behaviours, and decision-making processes. By the end of the analysis, you’ll have specific personas for your different customer types, informed by their real-world behaviours and thoughts. These help visualise the gap between your existing and optimal journeys to conversion. In B2B business, for example, the Customer Journey Analysis identifies opportunities to retain potential customers during decision-making stages. With appropriate messages at touchpoints during the lengthy process of consideration, this helps prevent losing them to competitors before converting.
How Does It Work?
There are three stages to the Customer Journey Analysis. 
Stage 1: Collecting the Right Data You must begin by collecting data about sequential customer behaviours across multiple visits to your site. Each individual data point should include the following:
- Unique visitor ID (usually referred as “Client ID” in Google Analytics)
- Details of the first touchpoint with the website
- Page paths with the exact time when each page was viewed for each website visit
- Details of the last touchpoint prior to conversion
- Accurate conversion tracking (leads, purchases, etc.)
Stage 2: Defining Customer Personas and Funnel Once you’ve defined your customer segments and your marketing funnel, you can devise a qualitative framework for precisely identifying your target audience. We create our personas based on real customer behaviour data and validate them with a persona survey:
- Initial analysis of existing customer data
Understand customer segmentation insights using 1) data from your CRM and 2) qualitative information from your sales staff.
- Workshop to determine buyer personas and marketing funnel
Funnel performance for customer segments provides a framework for current and future marketing campaigns.
- Online survey to validate perceived personas (with analysis)
The survey provides insights for more effective audience targeting.
You’ll then have key high-level personas which you can relate to your existing and potential customers. Stage 3: Analyse User Paths & CRO Opportunities You can now provide value to all areas of your digital marketing team with a visual analysis of successful and abandoned paths to conversion.
Apply your learnings to ad messaging, landing pages, calls-to-action, in-page navigation, and your site’s overall UX. This will increase your conversions rates across the site.
Identify dead-end patterns in your users’ digital behaviour that cost you potential customers. Apply those learnings to create a patch list to cover the holes in your conversion funnel.
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Interested in creating a Customer Journey Canvas? Want to know how it’s actually implemented? Watch this space – we’ll soon post an in-depth blog, detailing everything you need to know to get started. The insights from this analysis are mapped onto a Customer Journey Canvas, a single, comprehensive visual which demonstrates the gaps between your existing and optimal journeys to conversion. In the meantime, check out our Analytics and Marketing Science services .
Click here if you want to read the sequel to this post to get a more advanced understanding how the customer journey can help your business.
Contact DAC today to find out more!
