Exploring Use Cases for HubSpot's Customer Journey Analytics

Customer Journey Analytics, a powerful tool offered by HubSpot, empowering product managers and marketers to delve deep into their brand's touch points and unlock valuable insights to improve conversions.

In this blog post, we'll explore customer journey analytics use cases and how this tool can help businesses answer critical questions, analyse customer interactions, and optimise their marketing efforts to drive conversions.

Customer Journey Analytics in HubSpot

Customer Journey Analytics is a robust HubSpot tool that empowers product managers and marketers to delve deep into the touch points of their brand and unlock valuable insights to enhance conversions. This comprehensive report builder amalgamates all the interactions a contact has with your business, providing a clearer picture of what efforts are most effective at driving desired conversions. By scrutinising various attributes of customer interactions, such as URLs visited, emails clicked, webinars attended, and more, businesses can optimise their marketing efforts and gain a competitive edge.

Key Features of Customer Journey Analytics that Enhance Analysis

1. Flexibility in Building Reports

The first noteworthy feature of Customer Journey Analytics is its flexibility in report building. Users can select and reorder multiple touch points to be included in their analysis. Moreover, they can hone in on specific attributes by employing property filters, enabling a more focused examination of customer interactions.

2. Optional Touchpoints

Not all customers follow the same journey to conversion. The ability to designate certain touch points as optional allows for a more accurate representation of customer journeys. This means that a contact doesn't have to complete a specific stage to proceed along the conversion path, acknowledging the diverse paths customers may take.

3. SYN Charts for Visualisation

The second powerful feature is the SYN chart, a visualisation type that displays the flow of customers from one step to another. SYN charts are particularly valuable in understanding and explaining the different paths customers take as they progress with a brand. By using these charts, businesses can identify bottlenecks, spot trends, and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly.

4. Branching Analysis

With Customer Journey Analytics, it's possible to track how multiple subsequent steps branch from a previous stage. This advanced branching analysis allows businesses to explore multiple paths within one report. For instance, from a form submission, they can track how many leads connected with sales through email or phone calls. Similarly, they can investigate the progression of visitors from one landing page to subsequent pages, uncovering valuable insights into user behavior.

Multi Touch Revenue Attribution Reports in HubSpot

These reports allow marketers to answer crucial questions, such as which campaigns contributed the most revenue, which marketing assets led to the most deals, or which channels had the greatest influence on revenue. The reports use mathematical models called attribution models, such as first touch, last touch, or J-shaped, to determine the credit each interaction receives in influencing the bottom line.

How do Multi Touch Revenue Attribution and Customer Journey Analytics work together? 

By combining the capabilities of Multi-Touch Revenue Attribution and Customer Journey Analytics, HubSpot provides marketers with an unparalleled opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of their customers. This integration allows businesses to access crucial data that reveals valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, ultimately enhancing their overall experience.

Multi-Touch Revenue Attribution Reports provide a high-level overview. But, understanding customer behavior requires delving deeper into incremental micro conversions. These micro conversions are small steps that customers take along their journey, building trust and awareness in a brand and eventually leading to macro conversions.

Unlocking these insights is essential for convincing customers that a product or service is the right fit for them.

The real power of Customer Journey Analytics lies in its ability to transform insights into actionable steps for optimisation. By understanding the conversion rates of individual assets, such as CTAs and forms, marketers can optimise these elements to improve the overall customer experience. The result is increased lead engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved marketing ROI.

Example Use Cases for Customer Journey Analytics

1. Evaluating the Impact of Call-to-Action in Generating New Leads

Let's consider an example: a popular blog post with a call-to-action (CTA) that leads to a landing page form, which, in turn, promotes a valuable content offer. With traditional reporting, you would need to gather data from various sources to assess the performance of each element in the conversion path. However, Customer Journey Analytics allows you to view the conversion rates of all assets in context, making it easier to identify drop-offs and areas for optimisation.

2. Compare Customer Journey Steps

Analyse the performance of various touch points and determine which ones are most effective in driving conversions. For example, they can compare the conversion rates of different landing pages or CTAs to see which ones are generating the most leads.

This comparison can also help businesses identify any bottlenecks or drop-offs in the customer journey. By pinpointing the steps where customers are most likely to abandon the conversion process, businesses can take steps to optimise those specific touch points and improve the overall customer experience.

For example, by comparing the conversion rates of customers who attended a webinar versus those who clicked on an email, businesses can determine which touchpoint is more effective in driving conversions. This information can then be used to refine marketing strategies and allocate resources more effectively.

Using HubSpot Report to Answers Questions like:

1. Which campaigns drove the most revenue?
2. Which marketing assets drove the most revenue?
3. Which channels influenced the most revenue?
4. Which emails drove the most revenue
5. Which landing pages drove the most revenue?
6. Which marketing activities drive more opportunities? 
7. What bottlenecks exist in the buyer's journey?
8. Which steps in sign up or onboarding flows have the biggest drop off rates?

Tip: Don't Get Lost in Attribution 

Attribution is important. You need to know what is happening in your funnel and why, so that you can impact it. Thats not in dispute.

But focussing too much on attribution is time consuming, can over simplify your results and can blind you from other foundational factors of your offering.

One of the key problems with Attribution is that it relies on key data insights and some things are not trackable which leads to a foundational issues with the models. Even if you have very accurate data all encompassing data (which is pretty much impossible), it's not worth trying to pin point every single touch point and causation as to why someone has completed a purchase.

Look at a normal buying cycle, a customer might have been influenced by a radio ad, then searched for the product online, and finally made a purchase after receiving an email. A last touch attribution will credit the sale to the email, when in reality, all of these touchpoints played a role.

Even If I have visibility over all the touch points do I really need to know how revenue was impacted by the 7th touch point, for a social post that was put out last month based on a W-shaped attribution model….No!

Do I need to understand the value that our product has, How it can solve the pain of the prospect and how that value is being communicated across every part of our business from marketing to delivery to customer service…Yes!

If you don’t understand the 3 things above then no amount of attribution is going to improve your revenue.

How to Approach Attribution Reporting

1. Don’t get bogged down in the hypothetical or in the minor (the 5%). Only focus on the areas that are going to significantly impact the business (the 95%).
   
   
2. You need to know how your channels are affecting your demand generation. You should build clean lines of conversion to enable this and campaigns to aggregate this.
   
   
3. Your site should have main pages, landing pages and thank you pages all linked to a campaign with the relevant tagging on each page load
   
   
4. Once you have these lines in place sit down with your demand gen teams to agree of a collective understanding of what is useful and what is not.
   
   
5. Agree on the Attribution models you want to use and in what way .i.e. Last Click probably isn’t useful for Social channels but relevant for high value content
   
   
6. Once you have this in place only focus on these core metrics.