Why are user journeys important?

Seems like a simple question right? But we still see many online marketers asking us this question ….

The customer journey is a key piece of any website, online selling, or lead generation process. It’s not easy to fully understand a user’s behavior considering there are many touchpoints and channels they could come from, routes they can take when they get onto your website, and many interactions they can have along the way.

Analyzing and understanding the user journey end-to-end can be challenging. Here at Making Science focusing on optimizing the customer journey, ensuring your business remains customer-centric is at the heart of what we do.

But when does the journey really begin? Customer profiles help provide us with the characteristics and behavior of a group of users. When starting a business one of the first steps taken is understanding who your end-user is. Analyzing data related to the user profile and understanding the target customers through for example demographic, motivation, psychographic, geographic segmentation, etc. are just some of the characteristics used. Understanding where their journey starts and what drives them to the end requires more than the average day to day, basic analysis.

User journeys are extremely important to understand – where a user is when browsing your website, what triggers them to react and take a certain path and how can we better fulfill their needs? A first time visitor to your website would have a totally different behavior than a user that has come three or more times and searched for a handful of products. The first time user may be investigating what is sold, whereas the returning user may be ready to buy or passed through that discovery stage.

By knowing our website journeys, we can also identify the existing pain points and try to improve them. One of our mottos at Making Science is: We believe in putting ourselves in the user’s shoes. It’s about feeling their pain points and fixing them to help them convert sooner. And the first step is to understand their journey and what they really want or need.