3.3 How do I track the customer journey? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->One of the things we promised at the top of this course</v> is we're gonna help you to track customer journeys. What are your customers doing as they're making a buying decision, or even as they're using your product and they come back to your website with questions? And so, a lot of what you wanna track is the path to a conversion. So a purchase, a registration, email signup, contact form, there's all sorts of different ones, but there might be other tasks as well that they're trying to do. Maybe you wanna measure their progress toward a purchase. Especially if you have a customer journey, that's a very long sales cycle, you might have customers coming back to your site multiple times, even over a period of months. And you wanna know, "Hey, are they actually making progress? "Did they get from step to step?" Or maybe your product is based on usage, and they wanna check usage, or they're trying to pay a bill, or you've got some other customer service activities there. And you wanna see how well customers are doing at being able to complete those tasks so that you keep them happy. Any of these things are journeys. And so, how do we track them? Well, tasks completion, did they complete these other tasks? Is one really critical way to measure improvement of a customer journey. And so, you can use your analytics to identify how many people are completing the tasks versus how many start out doing the task, and, you can check to see how easily it's done. And as we highlight here, you can even see what the normal path is to follow. What are the things that most people do in order to complete that task? And now once you've done that, now maybe you can start to make some improvements. So maybe you wanna figure out how to improve the journey so that more people completed, or that they complete it more easily. And so your natural ideas to make it shorter. But, is shorter always better? The answer's no. So in this case, with a client that we worked with, we went from 22 pages to four, and it actually did improve things tremendously. And that was very good. But, if shorter was always better, then we'd have gone from 22 pages to one, wouldn't we? That doesn't make any sense. Right. Would it make sense for you to have one page on your website that was 14 miles long? I don't think so. And so, it does make sense to split the journey into pages, but you wanna split them into as few as possible, but not all was the fewest possible. You can test and see whether longer or shorter journeys actually make things simpler for the customer, because understand, it's not always about how many clicks there are, it's also about something called cognitive load. Now, what does that mean? It's a really fancy user experience way of talking about how hard the click is? How difficult it is? How much effort the person has to make in order to make a decision of what to do next? If it's easy, and you can just keep clicking forward and going through a journey, then the cognitive load is really low, and it doesn't matter that there are more clicks. But on the other hand, if you have very high cognitive load, maybe it's a very busy page and maybe there's 15 different places they could go, even if there's only a couple of clicks, that high cognitive load might make that feel very difficult and it might cause more people to abandon. But those are the physical journeys through the site. What about the mental journey? What about what we usually typically call the buyer journey, that mental transition that people make from step to step as they're making a buying decision? So where are they in that journey? Are they just at the beginning? Or, are they comparing solutions to others? Or, are they trying your product out or using one of your solutions already? So any of these things could be steps in your buyer journey. Now, this is a typical buyer journey for some types of products, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the buyer journey for yours. So you should take a look at what you think the buyer journey is, and you should focus on using the names for those steps. Try to only have a few number of steps, don't have too many, but really make the mental processes, really think about what your customer is going through. Because those journeys are steps to task completion. Now, one of the things that they can do is identify content. You're gonna create content for different steps in the buyer journey, but they can be used for more than just creating content. Because this is an analytics course, we want you to think about how you can measure how close people are getting to completing a task or a conversion by seeing which steps they follow in the buyer journey. And guess what? The content can be one way that you do that. You can pick events that reveal the transitions between steps. So for example, it's pretty easy to know when they sign up for a free trial and they go from that compare step to the try step. That's a form they fill out. That's an event that you can track. But how about when they give you your credit card and they actually buy? That's another thing. That's a very tangible step that you can measure. But what about ones that are a little harder? How do you know when they go from learn to compare? Well, that's a little trickier. And the way you could figure it out is if you really did create content step by step, where you can see when they start moving from the learn content to the compare content. Now, one of the reasons that we draw this as a circle, rather than as a funnel, you usually see sales processes drawn as a funnel. The reason we do that is because we really believe in the idea that it's easier to sell something to an existing customer than to a new customer. So why aren't you drawing it as a circle? Why aren't you drawing it so that when people are using your products, they might use that as an opportunity to start learning about a new one? So you can look at each of these events as micro-conversions between the steps, and once you can start counting those, now you can use your analytics system to tell you that people are moving step to step. Those micro-conversion rates identify the targets for improvement. So, instead of just knowing your conversion rate is 1% of all the visitors that come to your site, what if you knew that half of the people drop off between learn and compare, 90% drop off before they try, and then of the people who try, 80% of them leave before they buy. Now, if you multiply 50% by 10% by 20%, do you know what you get? You get 1%. You get that 1% conversion rate. But let me ask you, isn't it a lot more actionable to understand the differences between learn and compare and try, than just to know you have a 1% conversion rate? 'Cause look at these numbers. That learn content is killing it. You're doing great with the learn content, but how come only 10% of the people who compare your product wanna try it? And, how come 80% of the people who try it don't buy it? I'm starting to wonder if your product is really bad. And so maybe the product needs to be improved, not the content, but maybe it is the content. Maybe the content about the product that describes the product is really not very good. And so this tells you what to focus on. You'd never wanna focus on that learn content because it's already doing really well. Instead, the compare, the try content, these are the places where you're really falling down. Each step in the process can have KPIs and Metrics. So if you think about this as the customer cycle of awareness, engagement, purchase intent, loyalty, and advocacy, well, you can ask whether the tactic drove a particular metric, and what is the KPI for that metric? And what are the metrics underlying that KPI that you can use to diagnose when things are going wrong? Now, you might have a different customer cycle. You might have different KPIs or different metrics you're looking at. This is an example from one of my clients. So it's a real example, but your example might be different. So think about your business and the problems that you're trying to solve, and pick the right KPIs and metrics for each step in your journey. Now, if you're doing omni-channel campaigns, then you even have more data to deal with and more complexity. And the reason is, that you are trying to tell, whether your campaign is working across multiple different channels. And so, you might see activity like this, where there's some kind of link building work that caused content to bring someone to the site, where they looked at press coverage to come to the site. Maybe that improved your search rankings. Maybe you did some retargeting ads. And all of these things kind of work together. And so you have to then look at an overall metric, an overall KPI for your omni-channel campaign, but you're also gonna wanna break it down by channel to figure out where things are working and where they're not. Now, the problem you chose might not have this level of complexity, but I wanna tell you that if it does, there are solutions. So even if the problem you chose is difficult, don't give up, you can use all of the techniques we're giving you in order to solve your problem, and you have the capability of doing that, because the data exists and you just have to learn what to do with it.