What is a customer journey in marketing?
What does a customer journey include?
Anything a person does or sees that involves your brand. An ad. A friend's mention. A search. A visit. A cart. A delivery. A return. A reorder.
Sources split it into stages, and the names differ. The same vendor uses five: awareness, consideration, decision, post-purchase and advocacy1. We do not offer one list as the standard.
In our view, the journey is rarely a straight line. People loop back, skip steps and vanish for weeks. A tidy diagram is a simplification, not a measurement.
What can you actually measure?
Part of it. Clicks, visits and purchases leave a trail in your analytics. Conversations, word of mouth and a video that was watched but not clicked mostly do not.
So any journey map mixes measured steps with assumed ones. The honest version marks which is which. This is where attribution, assigning credit for a purchase to the ads and clicks before it, comes in. Multi-touch attribution splits that credit across several touchpoints. It is fast and granular, but it does not show what would have happened without the ads.
Journeys also show the halo effect: one channel affecting results recorded in another, such as video ads lifting branded search.
For ZFD: Our view is that a journey you cannot measure should be labelled as a hypothesis, not drawn as a fact.
Worked example
Easily confused with
Customer journey vs Funnel
A model of the stages a customer moves through, typically awareness, consideration and purchase. A funnel is a simplified model. A journey is what actually happens.
Customer journey vs Attribution path
The touchpoints a tool recorded. A subset of the journey.
Customer journey vs Customer experience
How the journey feels. The journey is what occurred.
More terms from this family are in the marketing glossary (A–Z).
Buzzword alert
"We map the whole customer journey"
Usually means: a diagram of stages, drawn from assumptions rather than data.
Ask: what will we do differently because of this map?
"We optimise every touchpoint"
Usually means: many small activities, with no way to say which mattered.
Ask: how do we know a touchpoint changed what people bought?
FAQ
Is a customer journey the same as a funnel?
No. A funnel is a model of stages. A journey is the real, messier path a person takes.
Is a buyer journey or path to purchase the same thing?
Yes. Customer path is another name. Whatever the label, ask which steps were measured.
Can you measure the whole customer journey?
Not fully. Some of it leaves a trail and some does not. Be wary of anyone who claims otherwise.
Why do agencies talk about customer journeys?
It is a handy frame for a presentation. It is only useful if each step is tied to something you can measure.
Sources
Let’s find what’s actually working.
Next step. Start with the part you can measure. Use the Is your ROAS real? calculator.