To get an overview of your Customer Journey is a widely accepted approach. It orchestrates all efforts of an organization out of a customer centric perspective. Which is very good. But far less people know, how to measure this effectively and holistically. Welcome to Customer Journey Analytics. And no, this article’s not about a software tool, like so many others, but about the systematic approach how to improve quality of all your customers communication in a measurable way.
To start tracking and analyzing your Customer Journey is like: Not only building a new and comfortable street, but also to directly implement all those technologies helping to maintain and improve this new street, according to new changes and requirements that may come up. May it be potholes, traffic incidents and jams, wrong-way-drivers or the further rise of commuters. The only difference for us? We’re not talking about street development, but your online presences:
Contents of this article
1. What is Customer Journey Analysis?
2. How to measure the Customer Journey
3. How to implement the tracking
4. Most important: How to do the quality assurance
5. How to set up reports and dashboards
1. What is Customer Journey Analysis?
First, what is the “Customer Journey”?
It is the complete experience a customer has with your brand from first recognition via deeper understanding over converting to successfully using your solution and further engagement. Thus, it includes every relevant users touchpoint with your organisation. May it be social media, ads, website visits, emails, customer support, personal contact with your organization, using your products, your customer support, your rewarding referral programs etc.pp. Many others have written more than enough about this topic. Thus, you can get a good overview here, or here, or here.
Customer journey MAPPING is – according to Atlassian “a visual representation of the customer’s experience with a brand, product, or service throughout their buying journey. This process allows for a deeper understanding of customers’ emotions and actions highlighting pain points, unmet needs, and opportunities for improvement.”
Now, what is Customer Journey ANALYSIS?
Customer Journey ANALYSIS is about tracking and understanding all relevant touchpoints of a Customer Journey. Analysis leads via relevant insights finally to laser-focused optimization of those most important touchpoints, that are having biggest deficits.
The problem is, many organizations spend lots of time, resources and money into defining their Customer Journey. They even differentiate it into different target groups, personas or “ICPs” (ideal customer profile). BUT what many organizations so often don’t do, is to properly measure and monitor their different touchpoints successes and efficiencies.
The solution is to define a web analytics strategy and measuring impact of touchpoints. This way, organisations can create and optimize a structured path that guides customers smoothly towards desired actions.
The RACE framework is one of those frameworks, that have proven to help structuring the customer journey effectively:
- REACH: Attracting potential customers
- ACT: Encouraging interaction
- CONVERT: Driving goal achievements and conversions
- ENGAGE: Fostering long-term relationships
By aligning your key touchpoints with such a model, and making sure you have uniformly distributed your touchpoints across all stages, you ensure high quality of all the Customer Journey. This finally leads to an overall excellent user experience for your users and customers.
2. How to Measure the Customer Journey
Let’s get into the material now: How can you measure all your relevant Customer Journey touchpoints in your Websites, Shops and App, and also beyond these?
Let’s start with Website and App tracking. And then go beyond these. Overall, you typically can differentiate 3 main types of touchpoint trackings:
1. Tracking Website Pages or App Views – The Basics
For many websites, measuring customer journey touchpoints can be straightforward. A classic example is a website with a contact form in center as goal to generate new contacts. The main goal would be the contact forms confirmation page, after a form submission. If a visitor lands on this page, it’s a clear indication of a completed action and boom – it’s a relevant goal, and you easily tracked it!
2. Tracking Events – The Deeper Details
Beyond simple page views, event tracking allows deeper analysis. This way, you can catch all those other customer journey touchpoints that are often more complex than simple page/screen views.
- Did a user engage with specific content?
- Did they really consume that content?
- Watch that image gallery?
- Scroll down the page until end?
- Use that product filters on the product list? Which ones most often?
- Click on that crucial button?
- How far did they watch a video – perhaps up to the first 25%?
- Did they open that modal contact form above the page?
- Did they add that product to the cart?
Such engagements and micro-conversions provide valuable data about user behavior and intent. They show, which smaller steps lead to your big goals. And if users move into this direction, or not.
3. Tracking All Other Touchpoints – Beyond Websites and Apps
Of course, customer interactions don’t just take place on your website or in your app. Social media platforms, advertising platforms and other acquisition channels like i.e. SEO offer their own data insights access and export functionalities. Also customer interfaces like apps or Software-as-a-Service software, portals or interfaces can offer additional data.
Offline touchpoints, like a phone hotline or trade fair visits are often equally important. For measuring success here, often also smart integrations exist – such as connecting your hotline provider or your store in the city with internal systems to track touchpoint interactions and outcomes.
But even if there are no automations and data connections available, there are always pragmatical ways you can measure touchpoint success. A very simple example is, to make a simple tally list when somebody phones you and your colleagues. In example, you could add those phone calls to a Google sheet. This sheet then could be connected to your Google Data Studio dashboards. Tadaaa, the touchpoints data is integrated.
In such a way, you can – and should – analyze all relevant touchpoints and your customers satisfaction across these steps.
3. Implement Touchpoint Tracking
3.1 Collecting Customer Journey touchpoints in Web Analytics
1. Get the basics done: Integrate website or app page views
Let’s start with your website or app. If all your goals are simple standard website pages, or app views, then you can get forward quite easily. A quite simple web analytics tool integration in your website and app will do it. All those major web analytics tools then offer quite simple interface options to define and measure your goals. To identify those pages that are more interesting than others. In example, contact form or purchase confirmation pages.
2. Add event trackings
But if you realize, you also have more complex events inside pages, then event tracking will be your solution. For this, I often recommend a Tag Management system (TMS) as the way to go. It simplifies the process of adding and managing tracking codes across your website or app. Instead of manually embedding tracking scripts into your websites, shops or apps code, a TMS allows you to manage tags centrally without modifying the site’s code every time. This is particularly useful, if you want to track more and more special events, like mentioned above.
With such a TMS in place, you can easily track multiple touchpoints, gain insights, and make data-driven decisions – without the hassle of diving into the technical details every time you want to make a change.
Server-Side Tag Management
Server-Side Tag Management (SST) processes tracking data on the server instead of the user’s browser. This improves data control, security, and page load speeds while reducing the impact of ad blockers. SST also ensures compliance with privacy laws like GDPR by only sharing necessary data with third-party tools. Tools like Google Tag Manager offer server-side options for better, more reliable data collection.
3. Add all other touchpoints
To add the tracking of other touchpoints beyond website/shop/app page views and individual events, soon gets even more individual. Thus, here I won’t go any deeper. But repeat only one thing. Indeed it is possible, to track performance of each and every touchpoint. Maybe, I’ll go deeper and give some examples on this topic in later blogposts.
3.2 Sending Customer Journey data to other systems
Touchpoint tracking data could and should also be sent to various platforms like i.e. Session Recording (with i.e. Mouseflow), Google Ads, or LinkedIn for effective retargeting, especially based on detailed micro-conversion data. Ensuring data accuracy and consistency is key – make sure the entire tracking mechanism functions as expected to maintain data quality and reliable insights. This helps in optimizing campaigns and providing a better user experience.
Bonus tip: I do have a complete checklist on ALL those relevant aspects how to set up your Digital/Web Analytics tool. You can download it here.
4. Quality Assurance
4.1 The Initial Quality assurance of Customer Journey Tracking
Best practice is to take your above customer journey definition, and check if all touchpoint trackings work like expected. Additionally after a few days or weeks of collecting data you can also question, if the tracked customer journey makes sense. In example, if you have more people finishing a checkout than starting it, this should and will make you suspicious. Such things happen more often than one might think.
4.2 Ongoing assurance – while analyzing the Customer Journey
5. Setting up Reports and Dashboards
Once the data is tracked properly and correct, it’s important to ensure you can easily access and view it in a clear and organized way. Set up reports and dashboards in your analytics tools to visualize the data effectively. This will make it much easier to track performance and insights in real-time.
My tip: Always run quality assurance in parallel to ensure the reports and dashboards are accurate and reliable for better decision-making.
6. TL;DR
In order to reach excellence in your Customer Journey and your Users Experience, you need to understand your customers behaviour. By defining and tracking your complete Customer Journeys touchpoints evenly distributed across all stages, you make sure to not miss anything important. Keep an eye on assuring data quality, as wrong and minor quality data are pitfalls for wrong conclusions. Finally, by regularly monitoring and analyzing the most important touchpoints, you make sure that quality across all the journey is evenly distributed excellent.
Now, it’s your turn. Is also your next step, to get a more holistic overview over your complete Customer Journey? Let’s go, define – if you haven’t done already so – your Customer Journey. Then measure its touchpoints. Start with the most important ones. But make always sure they’re evenly distributed across all stages.
If you need help with this process, feel free to reach out.
Book your free 20 minutes sparring call today.
About Thomas Gerstmann
Thomas Gerstmann is a Datadriven Marketing Expert with over 25 years experience in medium-sized B2Bs.
He has his expertise in establishing datadriven improvement cultures.
His strengths are data strategies and their execution, customer centricity, digital analytics, experimentation and personalisation.
He enables organizations to reach their goals online, by building up datadriven teams, internal skills and innovative processes.
He establishes cultures of continuous datadriven improvement. Through regular data talks, equipping teams with all skills and knowhow, and working aside until they reach their goals online better.
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