When It Comes to User Journeys, There’s No Such Thing as Typical

When a new customer starts using our product, I always ask them the same question: “What is your main pain point? What insights are you hoping to discover? Many of them answer that they would like to know what the typical journey is for all the users that convert.

In the beginning, this made sense to me: Of course, there is the best route to the office, and so people should take it. But as I dug in the data, looking for that one magic pattern, I realized again and again: not all of us take the same route to the office, because we don’t all start in the same place. This seems to also apply to visitor journeys on your owned media, not all of them have the same starting point, not all of them are engaged in the same way when they start their journey, and therefore not all of them take the same route toward their destination.

It would probably be nice to have one typical journey, It would make our lives much easier. Just find the journey and then bring all new traffic to the same first step, and they will all repeat and convert in the same way.

Alas, it just doesn’t work that way.

So, How should you read the map? “My visitors are converting, but I want to understand how, so I can improve my conversions, engagement and other business  KPI’s.”

A journey is a combination of sources and content, and in between those we have the amount of sessions, engagement level of the journey, time to conversion, etc.

The best way to understand it is by extracting those pieces of content, sources and campaigns that aided the conversion, and then map them by their position in most successful journeys regardless of what was read before or after.

In other words – identify your top performing content pieces, and determine the position each individual piece falls in the most effective journeys. You’ll probably find several content pieces for each position, and those may vary by source. But it’s a great place to start when you’re trying to optimize content for converstions.

Eventually, this method should allow you to look at your content and sources as silos, showing you the optimal content pages to start the journey and matching those with the best campaigns that are most impactful as a first touch source.

Read your visitor’s map by the content they engage with and on each step of the way, you’ll see what content is really impacting your conversions. Once you identify that 15-20 %, you will know what content you should invest in and where you should drive your traffic.

To learn how to discover the most effective user journeys for your bottom line, schedule a demo.