What is the customer journey?

The customer journey is the complete experience customers have with a brand. In other words, the full path from discovery to purchase. It maps how users engage with your brand from initial awareness right to post-purchase.

Catalog Ads can support multiple stages. For example, you can use collection ads during discovery, while dynamic product ads are geared for retargeting, helping move users toward conversion. 

What are the key stages of the customer journey?

The customer journey can be divided into the following five stages:

Awareness

During this first stage, shoppers are introduced to your brand or product. It can happen via personalised Catalog Ads on platforms like Google or Meta which are triggered by their browsing history or interests. 

Consideration 

When users engage with your brand by, for example, clicking on the ad, they enter the consideration stage. If you’re running retargeting campaigns, you’ll target customers in this stage by showing them products they’ve viewed or abandoned in their carts. 

Conversion 

Conversion happens when a shopper completes a desired action. In the case of e-commerce, it’s most often a purchase. 

Retention

This stage of the customer journey focuses on keeping customers engaged after their initial purchase. Brands typically turn their attention to deepening the customer relationship. This can happen via email newsletters, personalised content, product recommendations, and offering fast customer support. You can, for example, promote related products or advertise upselling/cross-selling opportunities. 

Loyalty

Customers have reached the loyalty stage of the customer journey when they continue to purchase from the brand. In addition to buying another product, other actions that take place during this stage include recommending the brand to their network, writing a product review, or joining a loyalty program.  

Benefits of mapping the customer journey

When you’re running paid ads, it’s important that you map the customer journey. A customer journey map is a visual representation of the process that your customers typically complete when they interact with your brand and its products. It can include their actions, thoughts, emotions, and touchpoints. 

It helps you to:

Boost your return on ad spend (ROAS)

You can serve your audience more relevant ads when you know where they are in the customer journey. For example, if they’re in the consideration stage, you can afford to show more sales-driven ads as they’re closer to buying. On the other hand, if they’re only in the awareness stage, you’ll focus on ads aimed at growing brand awareness. 

Improve your ad targeting

By mapping the journey, you can segment your audience. This allows you to personalise your creative, ad copy, and offer based on their user behaviour. 

Better funnel optimisation

A customer journey map helps you to see where audience members drop off. This will help you to identify potential friction areas in your funnel that need to be fixed such as your checkout page or rewards programme, for example.