Customer Journey Analytics

What is customer journey analytics?

Customer journey analytics is the practice of connecting and analyzing data from every interaction a customer has with a brand, across platforms, channels, and devices, to understand how customers move through their journey and what shapes their behavior along the way. It covers the full journey, from first touch through purchase, retention, and loyalty.

Why mobile marketers need customer journey analytics

A single customer might click an ad on their phone, respond to a marketing email, download an app, make purchases through the app, then review the app on a third-party site for other prospective customers.

Marketing likely influenced every one of those steps. Customer journey analytics shows how those steps connect, and attribution, which assigns credit for conversions to the touchpoints that drove them, shows which marketing efforts made the difference. Tools that track only one platform, such as web, miss what happens elsewhere.

Attribution that works across platforms, across channels, and across devices throughout the entire customer journey is crucial. It allows you to understand which of your campaigns are performing well, which are underperforming, and where to invest resources.

Unfortunately, most traditional approaches can’t give you that complete view. Plenty of analytics platforms track web activity well, but they lose the trail when a user moves from web to app, and that handoff is where many mobile journeys fall apart.

As a marketer, losing visibility into customer activities reduces your ability to influence customers’ experience of your brand, build loyalty, and ultimately drive conversions. It undermines your ability to troubleshoot challenges with user retention, and it prevents you from taking advantage of some opportunities that may otherwise be available to your organization.

Mapping the customer journey

Fragmented tools leave gaps in the journey, so the first step is to see the whole thing and understand which touchpoints matter. Most teams start with a customer journey map, a visual of the interactions people have with your brand.

Journey maps vary in how many stages they include, and some teams break out onboarding as its own step. A common model organized around the buying journey uses five stages:

• Awareness: Customers become aware of your solution through your marketing campaigns, existing-customer referrals, or other means.
• Consideration: They evaluate their options and weigh the pros and cons of each.
• Purchase: They buy the product and get onboarded.
• Retention: They keep using the product, which can include repeat or in-app purchases.
• Advocacy: They leave reviews, refer friends, and talk about your brand on social media.

A journey map shows how you expect customers to move through those stages and which touchpoints you expect them to engage with at each one. Teams usually build one from interviews, surveys, and their own knowledge of the business, which makes it a useful starting point but still a set of assumptions.

Attribution turns those assumptions into something you can measure. First, you define the touchpoints where customers engage with your brand, such as specific channels and campaigns. Then you track the events customers take along the way, such as ad impressions, app installs, registrations, and first purchases, and attribute each one back to the interaction that drove it. That shows which channels and campaigns bring in users who go on to convert.

A journey map shows the path you expect customers to take, usually a tidy line from awareness to loyalty. Multitouch attribution built on connected, cross-platform data shows the paths they actually take and which channels and campaigns contributed to each conversion.

Using customer journey maps to smooth friction

When you have a holistic visualization of the ways in which customers engage with your brand, you’re ready to pinpoint which marketing strategies are most effective. This enables you to find opportunities to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction, while also identifying friction points within the customer journey.

For example, the Harvard Business School recounts a mobile phone provider’s experience with journey mapping for its customer service call center. The first step in the customer journey was pre-call, when the customer considered canceling their mobile phone service. The second step, a phone call to the provider, entailed a conversation with a customer service representative.  The third step, the post-call, covered interactions the customer had after talking with customer service.

The phone provider, which was struggling with customer attrition, used its journey map to design interventions targeted at reducing customer frustration over fees and penalties. Call center staff began offering discounts to customers who wanted to cancel service. For customers who changed their mind after speaking to a representative, the company sent personalized follow-up texts and a request to complete a satisfaction survey.

You can apply the same approach to your marketing campaigns. Swap the service call for the path from an ad or email to your app, and the questions stay the same. Where do customers get frustrated, where do they give up, and what would keep them moving? For mobile marketers, the answers usually sit at the handoffs, such as a link that sends an existing app user to the mobile website, where they have to log in again, or an install that never leads to a registration.

Marketing journeys are harder to study than a single call flow, though. They span dozens of channels, devices, and campaigns, and you can’t find every friction point through interviews and intuition alone. To see where users actually drop off, you need to measure each step of the journey with connected data.

Using analytics for data-based insights throughout the journey

The hard part about customer journey analytics is finding a system that makes these connections across channels, platforms, and devices. Generic analytics platforms track customer interactions, but they are disconnected from attribution data, so you can’t assign credit or value to each interaction. Legacy mobile measurement partners (MMPs) credit marketing activities for specific conversions along the customer journey, but most lack cross-channel and cross-platform visibility.

For customer journey analytics to work, you need one story connected across every user touchpoint. That comes from a system that can track and attribute conversions across every touchpoint where customers can interact with your brand.

Branch’s linking and measurement solutions run on Persona Graph, its identity foundation that processes more than three billion daily device signals across channels and platforms. That means Branch can connect the touchpoints a link captures and the conversion’s attribution credits to the same journey, even when that journey crosses from web to app or from one device to another.

What does customer journey analytics mean for mobile marketers?

Incorporating customer journey analytics into your mobile marketing decision-making lets you base investment choices on hard data about patterns and trends in user behavior. Branch attributes conversions from paid, owned, and organic channels into a single, deduplicated view.

Cross-platform, cross-channel, and cross-device attribution also shows you which parts of your marketing actually move users forward. You can see which campaigns drive installs that turn into registrations and purchases, which channels earn credit only for top-of-journey activity, and where paid, owned, and earned touchpoints overlap. That gives you a clearer view of what’s working and where your strategy needs to change.

Marketing teams across an array of industry sectors are using customer journey analytics to improve their customer onboarding, reengagement, and budget allocation. For example, consider a company whose signups have declined even as its app installs hold steady. Each ad network’s reporting shows healthy install numbers, so the problem isn’t obvious. When the team looks at attribution across the full journey, it finds that a large share of recent installs came from a new paid social campaign, and few of those users went on to sign up. Installs from search and email campaigns, by contrast, led to signups at a much higher rate. The team shifts part of the paid social budget to those channels, and signups start to recover.

That kind of improvement is why so many marketing teams are prioritizing customer journey analytics. According to Gartner, 50% of organizations already use customer journey analytics, and another 45% will start investing in it over the next 12 to 18 months. By doing so, they open the door to deliver better customer experiences and increase their overall return on advertising spend (ROAS).