We are launching soon, leave your email to be the first who gets the full version
Master of Metrics or How you can make a perfect user journey map
12 min read
•
•
by Alena Parfisenko
job-6-2
seq-1-2
A customer journey map is an excellent tool for identifying all customer touchpoints, including online and offline interactions. But it's not enough to simply map the journey; you need metrics to use the customer journey map to improve market performance.
Have you experienced such a scenario?
Not all beginner marketers may know or be aware of customer journey maps. Let alone constructing a visual path for the email sequences or creating a communication map. We’ve asked a few of our collaborators to explain what truly bothers them when creating one, and here is their answer.
Typically, creating a customer journey map is not a challenging task, as many companies highlighted that you should understand how your funnel works and draw the journey that your consumer performs. However, during this process, most marketers told us that some essential data might not be consolidated in one place. Furthermore, there could be insufficient time to create one as there are other important tasks. To sum it up, our collaborators outlined that, in most cases, there is no single platform with collected information from all communication channels.
So how do they usually solve this problem? Building and keeping your journey map in a shared team space is the answer.
How is customer journey analytics different from other analytics tools?
In today's data-driven society, organizations have adopted various analytical tools for virtually every organizational function. From marketing through customer service to client success. Numerous analytics tools and solutions have resulted from the broad usage of business analytics. Most of these might be overwhelming for firms attempting to establish what type of analytics solution they require for a specific use case.
Most of the solutions that businesses are utilizing today give analytics reporting to monitor customer interaction trends for touchpoints managed by the tool.
A marketing automation software primarily used for email drip campaigns, for instance, will provide an in-depth analysis of the performance of each email, including the number of recipients, those who opened it, and those who took action but will not provide insight into the customer experience.
Likewise, an NPS survey program will provide a comprehensive analysis of the survey data. This software can analyze the user's emotions using advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms.
This isolated analytics solution will fail when a business has to examine the impact of critical customer journey touchpoints on the big picture. In response, data-driven organizations have started investing in analytics solutions to overcome this constraint.
In contrast, customer journey analytics delve below the surface to reveal what customers experience, their feelings and sentiment at each touchpoint along the trip, and which interactions had the most impact on customer behavior.
Major metrics you have to focus on in your customer journey map
Awareness
Since, at this stage of the customer journey, the potential customer becomes aware of the problem and start researching more information about the topic, the following Awareness KPIs are important to track.
Impressions
An Impression is a metric that shows an approximate estimation of how many times a specific piece of content was displayed on a website, search engine result page (SERP), or social media, regardless if it was clicked or not. In other words, Impressions represent how often your content was loaded.
Depending on your platform, this metric can have alternative names such as Impression Count (Twitter) and Media Impressions (Instagram). Impression monitoring is crucial in digital marketing, especially for companies that want to build solid brand awareness.
The primary purpose of tracking this metric is to measure the visibility of your content. To increase your brand awareness, you need to focus on increasing the number of impressions. Moreover, by tracking impressions, you can get valuable insights about the potential of a specific keyword, ad, or visual displayed.
When it comes to your website, an impression represents a page view of your website. You can measure these impressions by using the statistics program your Web host provides or through Google Analytics. Otherwise, the general impression formula is:
Budget ÷ CPM × 1,000 = Impressions
Reach
Reach – total number of people who have seen your content. Reach indicates an approximate estimation of how many unique users have seen your content, while Impressions is the metric that shows an approximate estimation of how often in total your content was loaded, potentially to the same person twice. It is important to understand that on different platforms, the definition of Reach can vary. The basic formula for calculating reach is impressions divided by frequency (reach = impressions/frequency).
Cost per impression (CPM)
The cost per mile (CPM), or in other words, the cost per impression, is a way of displaying the amount spent to gain a thousand impressions within your paid digital marketing activities. The word “Mille” comes from Latin and means thousand.
Another term that is used sometimes is the Thousand Ad Impression (TAI) which is a synonym. This metric can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Google Analytics, and many other platforms.
It is calculated by:
It is calculated by:
Cost per Thousand Impressions =
Total Advertising Cost ÷ (Total number of Impressions ÷ 1,000)
Tracking your CPM is important for two reasons, one from a budget standpoint. As the cost per mile gives an insight into how efficiently your advertising budget is being spent. The cost per mile, like other KPIs, is an indicator of the effectiveness of the advertisement and whether or not the set target group is reached as intended.
CPM is mostly tracked within advertising campaigns with brand awareness or exposure goals.
Consideration
Content marketing plays a significant role in this phase. Therefore, blog posts, videos, email marketing, and other content come into play. It is crucial to understand that depending on the product's complexity, the consideration stage may imply multiple engagements.
At this point, KPIs that reflect engagement is the most important.
Clicks
In general, clicks are a metric that counts the user’s action of clicking on a link, an ad, or a call to action (CTA) button. Followingly a short overview of all the platform clicks is found on:
- Google Search Console
- Google Ads
It needs to be noted that the metric tracks only the action itself without a guarantee that the user actually reached the intended destination, for example, the website that was linked.
First of all, clicks in relation to paid activities (i.e., Ads) are important to track in combination with the respective Ad impressions and with the goal completions, as the metric is the linking part for the user. Therefore, by tracking clicks, you can understand whether the messaging is appealing to your target audience and whether they are eager to click on it.
To calculate the click-through rate on a paid ad, divide the total number of clicks on the ad by the total number of impressions. Clicks in the context of social media and email marketing can give you further insights into the attractiveness and relevance of the provided content to the user and possibly a potential customer.
Engagement Rate
The Engagement Rate or Interaction Rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of Engagements, such as likes/comments in relation to Reach, Impressions, or the number of followers. In other words, the metric shows how many users who (potentially) either saw your content actually interacted with it: e.g., give like, commented. Or the number of users who follow you and interact with your content. Basically, the metric shows how engaged your audience is with the content you provide.
What is considered an interaction?
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Clicks on videos or images
In other words, interaction is various kinds of audience reactions to social media content of some sort. It is calculated as total engagement divided by total followers multiplied by 100.
Depending on your social media objective, this Engagement Rate can be calculated differently. The most common calculation methods are Interactions by reach, by post, or by the amount of total impression (each method is defined in the variations section below).
Cost-per-click (CPC)
Cost per Click, or abbreviated CPC, is one of the most common digital marketing KPIs in advertising. The KPI stands for the price paid for a click in a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on a digital marketing platform or publisher platform. The CPC helps to understand how much one click costs.
CPC = Total Advertising Cost ÷ Number of clicks per Advertising
Important to understand is that a Click can mean something different on certain platforms in some cases and can not be blindly compared. For instance, a “Click” on Twitter and Facebook means either a click on a link or a media object (i.e., posted picture). Whereas a click in a search ad is called a “Link Click.” For that reason, there is also the “CPC (Cost per Link Click),” which refers to the actual Clicks on the Link.
Tracking your CPC is important especially when the focus is on paid marketing activities with the goal of interactions. It gives you insights into your campaign performance and is a very tangible metric within the digital realm. Further, it enables you to exercise control over the advertising budget more easily by comparing campaigns on the same level. The use of CPC is recommended by digital marketing experts.
Decision
KPIs at this stage reflect how effectively you convert your customers. It is important to mention that you should track not only the number of leads and conversion rate but also the average Cost per Lead and Cost per Conversion. It will help you to estimate how much money you spend on one lead/conversion.
Conversion Rate
A Conversion in Digital Marketing is the completion of a specific goal, e.g., filling out a subscription form, signing up for a trial, or making an online purchase on your website. This goal can be defined on a case-by-case basis and can vary heavily. Also relevant and related to the Conversion is the Conversion rate, calculated like that:
Conversion Rate =
(Number of conversions ÷ Total visitors) × 100
It is important to track not only the number of conversions but also the conversion rate. Without a doubt, conversions are important to monitor since it allows you to track user journeys. However, without comparing it with the total number of visitors on your website, your landing page, or your app, this metric cannot tell you much. Hence, it is crucial to make your conclusions about the effectiveness of a specific campaign only after checking the Conversion Rate.
Sales
Total sales or gross sales is defined as the value of all invoices for an accounting period, such as a month or a year, before making adjustments. Typically, adjustments include customer discounts, refunds, and returns.
The formula to calculate gross sales is Total Units Sold x Original Sale Price = Gross Sales. A company's gross sales are the total sales of all its products and/or services over a period of time.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
Cost-Per-Lead, or CPL, is a digital marketing pricing model whereby the advertiser pays a pre-established price for each lead generated. In ecommerce, CPL is often utilized by businesses that sell subscription services or high-value products.
Total Marketing Spend / Total New Leads = Cost Per Lead (CPL) For Marketing Spend, it's important to add up the sum of your time, ad spend, and any third-party expenses.
Cost per Conversion
Cost per conversion (CPC or CPCon) is a term used in Web analytics and online advertising to refer to the total cost paid for an advertisement in relation to the success in achieving the goal of that advertisement.
Cost per conversion is calculated by taking how much money is spent on an ad campaign, divided by the number of conversions (customers) over the same period.
Cost per conversion = Total cost of ads ÷ number of conversions
For example, if you spend $1000 on an ad campaign and you gain 100 new customers from this campaign, your conversion will be calculated as:
$1000 / 100 = $10
Your cost per conversion, in this case, will be $10.
Retention
As was mentioned before, one of the most important stages of the Customer Journey. At this phase, companies need to do everything to make their customers happy. Therefore, to measure the effectiveness of your retention strategy, the following number of KPIs need to be monitored.
Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty describes an ongoing emotional relationship between you and your customer, manifesting itself by how willing a customer is to engage with and repeatedly purchase from you versus your competitors. Loyalty is the byproduct of a customer’s positive experience with you and works to create trust
The standard for measuring customer loyalty is the customer retention rate (CRR). The customer retention rate tells you how many customers you’ve kept over a specific time period.
The CRR formula is ((E-N)/S)) × 100.
- E represents the number of customers at the end of a week/month/quarter or another time period.
- N is the number of new customers you sold to or acquired during this time period.
- S equals the number of customers you had at the start of the time period.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is defined as a measurement that determines how happy customers are with a company’s products, services, and capabilities. Customer satisfaction information, including surveys and ratings, can help a company determine how to best improve or change its products and services.
An organization’s main focus must be to satisfy its customers. This applies to industrial firms, retail and wholesale businesses, government bodies, service companies, nonprofit organizations, and every subgroup within an organization.
Calculate your Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score by dividing the positive responses (satisfied customers) by the total number of responses and multiplying by 100, which is then expressed as a percentage. For example, if you have 50 responses total and 45 are positive, your CSAT would be 90%
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score or NPS measures customer experience and predicts business growth. This proven metric transformed the business world and now provides the core measurement for customer experience management programs worldwide.
Calculating your NPS score is as simple as tallying up your responses and subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. For example, if 60% of respondents are promoters, 10% are detractors, and 30% are passives, your NPS would be 60-10=50.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a business metric that measures how much a business can plan to earn from the average customer over the course of the relationship. Differences in products, costs, purchase frequencies, and purchase volumes can make customer lifetime value calculations complex. However, with the right tools, you can find customer lifetime value in just a few clicks.
Customer Lifetime Value is calculated by multiplying your customers' average purchase value, average purchase frequency, and average customer lifespan.
In conclusion
It’s important to remember that metrics can be deceiving. It’s easy to misinterpret a number when there’s no context or customer feedback. For example, dwell time on a website is commonly misunderstood. You might initially believe that dwell time is good. After all, customers are enjoying their experience so much they want to prolong it. But they might be dwelling because they don’t understand what to do next, which would result in a bad overall experience. Be sure to layer qualitative research, including observational studies, onto quantitative data to understand the “why” behind the “what.
Related Content