17 Metrics to Measure Success Along the Customer Journey

In a couple of earlier posts, we talked about Customer Journey Mapping — creating a map depicting how consumers move through your digital properties toward a purchase. Here’s what a customer journey map might look like (select the image to enlarge it):

Obviously, your particular customer journey map will look different, and you may have multiple maps reflecting various types of customers, usage occasions, or seasons. It’s important to do your research so you can develop accurate customer journey maps of each situation. However, customer journey maps aren’t static but change over time, so you must periodically update your map to reflect the current reality you face.

A customer journey map is an excellent tool for identifying all the touchpoints between you and your customers (and between customers). The map should include both online and offline interactions, although many offline interactions are hard to capture. However, simply mapping the journey isn’t enough; you need metrics that allow you to assess how well you perform at each stage in the customer journey, developing the insights you need to improve market performance by highlighting ineffective or wasteful elements of your marketing campaigns.

Assessing the customer journey

When it comes to assessments, companies tend to focus on the last stage of the customer journey, conversion. We call these terminal metrics and include metrics such as ROI (return on investment), ROAS (return on advertising spend), and conversion rate. You might have other terminal goals, such as gaining subscribers or accepting a free trial, so you’ll include metrics to assess these actions in your analysis. Of course, these metrics are important because they reflect the revenue that supports your company and fuels its growth.

But you don’t generate these terminal metrics out of thin air. Instead, conversion often begins with top-of-funnel metrics, such as awareness, that frequently get less attention from an organization. Not only must prospective buyers become aware of your product and its attributes, but they must also evaluate your product against other options that satisfy a specific need and then make a decision to purchase your product. Before they complete the purchase, however, factors such as shipping costs, slow delivery promises, types of payment accepted, and the effort required to complete the purchase might interfere with completion, resulting in shopping cart abandonment. Currently, rates of shopping cart abandonment reached 70% (WOW), and appear to continue increasing based on recent data. Increasing the rate of completion by easing the process between awareness and conversion by 1% can generate as many as 50% more conversions.

Thus, our first step is to identify the process consumers go through along the journey from awareness to conversion. Recognize that this isn’t a linear process, as portrayed in most marketing textbooks. Instead, it’s a series of concentric circles that (hopefully) lead toward conversion. Think of the customer journey like this, and you’re closer to reality.

All along the journey, consumers may return to an earlier stage along the journey, only to skip down to a later stage using a side street. They encounter inducements and interference along the path that might derail their interest or push them forward. Moreover, consumers aren’t finished when they make a purchase. Over time, they might come back to repeat the purchase and, eventually, become a loyal customers if you do everything right.

In developing insights to assess and optimize this complete customer journey, we need a wide range of metrics. So, let’s move on to discuss what metrics we need.

Metrics to assess the customer journey

A key metric comes from observing the conversion funnel. Where are your most significant drop-offs? What happened in between those stages to cause the drops? For instance, look at the funnel below to see how users drop off during the conversion process.

Many metrics require multiple observations because you’re most interested in trends rather than point measures. Things like # of subscribers, # of visitors, and # of followers gain meaning only by evaluating the change in value over time. Once a trend emerges, you need to investigate the cause. Solutions might involve fixing problems or stepping up marketing campaigns. Otherwise, we call these vanity metrics because they make you feel good about your performance without actually impacting that performance or providing insights that allow you to improve performance.

In contrast, KPIs or key performance indicators offer a direct view of your performance. Making changes to improve KPIs directly translates into improved performance, especially when you perform a thorough analysis to build insights. For instance, you might analyze data from Google Analytics to determine that visitors between the ages of 35-50 convert at higher rates or they represent a higher AOV (average order value) or CLV (customer lifetime value) relative to visitors in other age groups. Armed with these insights, you might develop more content designed to appeal to users in this age group and share this content across communication channels favored by these users.

Moving on to metrics to access the customer journey, we gain insights from Occam’s Razor, which offers a way to look at the metrics across the entire journey to gain a more complete understanding of your performance and develop insights on how to improve performance.

Note that in the image above, we see the various stages of the conversion process, associated metrics, goals, and even ideas for segmenting the metric to improve insights. These metrics are associated with your website and available through Google Analytics. Obviously, a number of other KPIs represent success (or failure) in your website marketing campaigns.

In the following sections, we’ll elaborate on this graphic to help you become an expert at assessing your company’s performance across the entire customer journey. Here are a group of metrics to evaluate your website suggested by Hubspot:

1. Page Views – this metric helps you understand which pages are most popular/ least popular. By applying tracking codes when sharing the URL for the page, you can assess where the traffic came from for each page down to the individual post or campaign.
2. Average Time on Page – pages with a longer view time show your visitors are interested in the content your created. Not every page will cause visitors to linger so don’t assume any page with a short dwell time is bad.
3. Average Session Duration – again, the longer visitors stay on your site, the more interested they are in your content and products.
4. Pages per Session – this metric is a little difficult to interpret. A visitor who is very interested in making a purchase might only view a page, especially if they left a product in the shopping cart on a prior visit. While a visitor who views a bunch of pages might have trouble finding the exact information they wanted. To parse this out, you can view the funnel, which depicts the way visitors move through your website.
5. Bounce Rate – bounce rate refers to a visit that’s a single page. High bounce rates show you provide a poor customer experience and can also hurt your SEO (search engine optimization) to bury your website in search results so you get less traffic.
6. Traffic Sources—This metric helps you identify which communication channels work best when it comes to sending traffic to your website. By using the report function on Google Analytics, you can also determine which sources send traffic that converts at a higher rate. This information helps you spend your budget wisely.
7. Social Referrals
8. New Visitor Sessions
9. Returning Visitor Sessions
10. Device Type
11. Conversion Rate
12. Exit Rate
13. Top Pages
14. Top Exit Pages
15. Revenue Attribution
16. Event Tracking – by setting up events in Google Analytics, you can monitor progress toward your goals.

Here’s an example of the standard dashboard produced by Google Analytics to show some or all of these metrics. This dashboard is customization so you can view metrics that are important for your business in a way that helps with analysis to provide insights.

Using social metrics on the customer journey

Of course, your website isn’t the only channel used to interact with customers and prospects. You also operate a comprehensive social media marketing component, as you likely recognize the impact of social on your marketing performance. Below is a curated list of metrics recommended to use in evaluating the performance of your social media campaigns. This list is interactive, so feel free to add your own preferred metrics to the list or vote for your favorites to make the list more valuable for everyone.

It’s not enough to have these metrics; you need to use insights from analyzing the customer journey to make the journey frictionless if you want to improve market performance.

Satisfaction

Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent. – Three C’s of Customer Satisfaction, McKinsey & Company

That’s a significant increase in market performance. So, measuring satisfaction is a must.

But, based on a survey of 27,000 consumers, McKinsey contends the proper measure is overall satisfaction with the journey rather than satisfaction with individual elements (touchpoints) along the journey. Likely, the halo effect explains much of why overall satisfaction is a better measure, even though measuring satisfaction across the journey is both more intuitive and actionable. These are two qualities I usually love in a metric. Primacy, recency, and saliency effects similarly distort customer evaluations based on the first or last touchpoints or those most salient for solving the customer problem. In other words, unless you’re assessing satisfaction at each touchpoint, you’re getting results contaminated with evaluations at other touchpoints anyway, so you might as well measure overall satisfaction.

Satisfaction metrics make more sense when evaluated over time rather than inspecting satisfaction at a particular point in time. If overall satisfaction declines over time, something needs to change. If it goes up, you’re doing well. Determining what impacts the level of satisfaction is the key to improving it.

Since you’re evaluating overall satisfaction, it only makes sense to look for changes in the process as the source of satisfaction declines. If nothing changes, you’re gonna have to ask for customer feedback to identify the culprit. This might involve doing research or focus groups, but you might find your answer by systematically listening on social networks to sniff out the culprit.

Steps in identifying metrics across the customer journey

Obviously, these metrics only matter for our model company and do not all translate to other business situations. You may be much more interested in the stages leading to conversion and less concerned with what happens after conversion, for instance. Or, you might be interested in stages leading to conversion, stages leading to advocacy, and stages leading to loyalty. You’ll need metrics to reflect measurable actions at each stage of the process. Satisfaction, especially overall satisfaction, is the exception that will cross all business situations.

Hence, the first step is crafting your customer journey map using the one above as a template. Your business situation might not require the level of complexity identified in the Rail Europe situation. Still, you’ll need to consider the stages along the customer journey at a minimum.

Next, examine how consumers interact with your brand at each stage, paying particular attention to behavioral events and attitudinal changes that both positively and negatively impact your market performance. Identify which sources and which metrics accurately represent these behaviors and feelings.

Conclusion

As you likely realized, if you read this entire post, you got more than the promised 17 metrics, as this post was updated over time to include perspectives from more experts and those available in the ever-evolving Google Analytics platform. I hope you found this information valuable, but don’t feel overwhelmed by the many metrics available and the many ways to segment your results to glean insights. You don’t have to analyze everything and break your data down by every segment possible. Any metrics you choose to analyze, if done right, will help you make better decisions that impact your performance. As a matter of fact, Avinash Kaushik (author of Occam’s Razor and Google Analytics guru) recommends you limit yourself to 10 metrics so you can analyze them thoroughly on a daily basis.

For small businesses like the ones that read this blog, here are the critical metrics recommended by Kaushik:

1. Acquisition – clicks, visits, backlinks, impressions
2. Click-through rate
3. Cost per acquisition
4. Behavior – page views, time on site
5. Bounce rate
6. Checkout abandonment rate
7. Outcomes – conversion rate
8. Loyalty
9. ROAS – return on advertising spend
10. Days to conversion

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