Knowing your customers inside and out is a HUGE part of being successful in your business. And having an ideal customer avatar is just the beginning—you’ll also need to use KPIs to track your typical consumer journey for the best results.
In an online world, things are always changing. You have to be highly aware of your average consumer journey in order to stay relevant and alleviate any conversion issues.
Have you ever wondered where your customers or visitors get stuck during the process leading to conversions? No matter the root cause, understanding your consumer journey is the key to finding a solution.
Your consumer journey is how someone interacts with your business to eventually take a specific action, like making a purchase or signing up for your services. Sometimes, your consumer journey can feel overwhelming—but luckily, there are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you navigate the process with ease!
How Do We Usually Understand The Consumer Journey?
One way that we typically understand the consumer journey is by creating a customer journey map. Basically, this is a visual representation of the path your prospective customer takes in order to convert in some way. Whether that conversion is joining your email list, purchasing a product, or investing in your service or course, there’s some goal action you’re hoping your customers will take.
When you take the time to map out your typical consumer journey, you’re able to understand your customers’ motivations and better encourage them to achieve that conversion goal.
To create a consumer journey map, you’ll need to map out what steps they take in order to reach that conversion goal, including:
- Key events along the way
- Data points to support this information
- Issues preventing conversion during the process
- Customer motivations and needs
When you put together this information in an easy-to-understand visual format, you’ll be more likely to regularly focus on tracking KPIs that matter for your consumer journey. Even more importantly, you’ll create a more effective and efficient process backed by your metrics.
That’s why the first key step to tracking your consumer journey is to start collecting and analyzing metrics.
5 KPIs To Track Your Consumer Journey
If you’re ready to get started tracking your typical consumer journey, it’s time to focus on the data. Here are five reliable KPIs that you should measure in order to understand and adjust your consumer journey effectively.
1. Customer Lifetime Value
Most business owners already know that acquiring a new customer is much harder (and more costly) than retaining a current one.
But one of the best metrics to understand and maximize opportunities for driving repeat business is lifetime customer value. This is a metric that lets you know the potential value of a customer over their entire lifetime interacting with your business.
Basically, lifetime customer value lets you know how much any customer is worth for your business. Once you know this, you can strategically focus on customer retention campaigns to generate more revenue from your best customers (and nurture those with potential).
And when it comes to your consumer journey, this metric is essential so that you can refine the areas that matter for retaining those valuable customers.
2. Customer Satisfaction
To understand and improve your consumer journey, measuring customer satisfaction is important. Conducting surveys and seeing where your customers are satisfied (or where you could improve) is a great idea here.
You can also analyze engagement with specific social media posts or other marketing efforts through UTM links.
3. Engagement For Your CTAs
Your calls-to-action (CTAs) are essential parts of your business and marketing copy. They drive your visitors to take action and steer them in the right direction to convert.
That’s why checking in with your metrics is essential! Things like email clickthrough rates or even clicks for specific CTAs on your website are a great place to start.
With these metrics, you’ll know which CTAs are effective and which you need to delete, update, or replace altogether.
4. Abandon Cart and Bounce Rate
Another set of KPIs to measure your consumer journey includes your abandoned cart rate and your website bounce rate.
If your cart abandonment rate is high, it lets you know that there’s a problem somewhere in the checkout process, whether that’s high shipping prices, long load times, or even a confusing process to navigate.
And if someone bounces off your website, you need to figure out why that’s happening and where any problem spots are. You can also track bounce rates for specific pages on your website, such as your return policy, to strategically make adjustments.
With these metrics, you’ll be able to tailor your consumer journey to alleviate any issues and improve conversion rates.
5. Organic Traffic To Your Website
Inside Google Analytics, you’ll definitely want to track organic traffic for a NUMBER of reasons, including your consumer journey. When traffic is organic, it means that people found your website through search engines naturally (without any paid ads).
With the right organic traffic analytics metrics, you’ll gain clarity into your customers’ needs and figure out what’s driving people to your website the most. That way, you can adjust your strategy to reflect those things.
If you’re ready to grow your business, it’s time to select and track KPIs to analyze your consumer journey.