The Journey of Online Purchase

If you’re not currently subscribed to Google’s Think Insights I highly recommend that you sign up for their ThinkLetter. This E-mail delivers some nice insights and neat tools right into your inbox. There’s also enough data in these E-mails to make your head spin. That said, if you can wade through it all you’ll most likely find some useful nuggets that can come in handy for presentations and general fodder.

The latest piece that I’m immersed in is the tool that Google’s developed to walk you through the different roles that online marketing channels play in a customer’s awareness/decision process. This tool allows one to look at 11 industries across 7 countries and see just what digital channels are more effective for awareness and also the decision phase of a customer’s journey. For instance, in the travel industry in the U.S., you’ll see that channels such as social, E-mail and paid search are part of the awareness phase and channels such as referral and direct marketing play more into the decision portion of a consumer’s journey.

In general we know that the customer journey has grown more and more complex with all the noise that surrounds us on a daily basis. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with a brand through many different media channels over several days. These tools from Google can really help in the exploration and understanding of your customer’s journey to improve upon marketing programs.