As a marketer, you would have realized that customers do not always make a purchase by looking only at one advertisement, image, or banner. Visitors may have been referred by friends or may have searched several websites, or may have returned several times to your website before making a purchase.
It is thus important that you track the complete journey of a customer, look at multi channel marketing strategies and their roles in that purchase, and allocate future budgets based on the results of your exercise. You need to use various Google Analytics tools such as Attribution Modeling and Multi-Channel Funnels that help provide crucial statistics. Now, Google has used those statistics to create a new benchmarking tool called The Customer Journey to Online Purchase.
This tool allows you to monitor online behavior of customers and also view just how various marketing strategies can have an effect on business success. This interactive tool actually extracts data from more than 36,000 Google Analytics users that have authorized such sharing. This data contains millions of purchases made in 7 countries and spread across 11 industries.
You will find data related to how various marketing channels including search, email, display, as well as your website influence users to make purchases. While some channels may “assist” in the first stages of a marketing funnel, others might result in “last interaction”. This tool will also display the actual journey of the customer in terms of time taken from interacting with your site to actually making a purchase as well as how this factor is affecting your average order values.
You should also realize that while one strategy may work in a particular country or industry, it may not yield the same results in another. Google’s study indicates that in a few countries such as the USA, travel and auto display clicks usually occur much closer to the buying decision while in other industries or countries they occur at a far more early stage of the purchase journey.
In addition, paid search has quite a centered position in assist-to-last interaction ratio. However, Google advises you to scrutinize your own benchmarks by using the Multi-Channel Funnel Reports to split up categories that cater to your precise business needs.
While looking at the total time taken by a customer to make a purchase, Google noted several interesting facts that may be true for your business too. Google noted that while most purchases were completed in a single step or within a single day, longer journeys often resulted in higher values of the orders.
One helpful tip is to adjust your Lookback Window in the Attribution Modeling or Multi-Channel Funnels tool to reflect the average purchase length in your specific industry. For instance, you can check on paths that have taken 5 days or even less in case your own business usually has shorter paths to purchases.
Google hopes that you will use the Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool to gain important insight into the journey taken by your customers from interest, interaction, and finally to conversion. You can use the Benchmarks Dashboard to get a summary of your industry and understand your standing in a better way when you view your data in the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels Reports.
By comprehending this journey, you will be able to make adjustments to your budget as well as marketing campaigns in the future.
