Google Analytics: Analysis & Visualization of the Customer Journey

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Who visits your website, what content do visitors consume and how long do they really linger? These and many other data collect Google Analytics in reports and diagrams. From the loading time to the search terms used by customers to find content, all data can be viewed. How can this wealth of information on the customer journey be graphically prepared and analyzed? We inform.

PowerPoint Template: Effective Marketing Thanks to Customer Journey Map - Download

This is why you should analyze the customer journey

As an entrepreneur and website operator, you pursue a specific goal in providing Content, the creation of subpages or creating an online store. The website should generate orders and sales and educate about its own services and products.

How your customers get to the page, what they see, and what elements they click on is what marketing experts call the Customer Journeycustomer journey. Although this also includes external stimuli like interaction on social media, with Google Ads, flyer advertising with domain imprint or phone calls. In the end, however, many decisions are made about the website itself.

Analyze, evaluate and optimize the customer journey.
Constantly analyze the customer journey to evaluate and optimize them. (Image: welldonemarketing.com)

Google Analytics captures every click, every dwell, and every referral on your website and maps the customer journey in data records. Users thereby become an anonymized network of accesses, from which important information can be extracted through analysis and visualization.

Track goal setting & optimization with Google Analytics

Google offers numerous options for visualizing and analyzing the customer journey. For this purpose, the ready-made diagrams in Analytics itself can be used, but also the Google Data Studio.

What is the Google Data Studio?

The Data Studio is a professional tool that is a bit confusing for beginners at first. Here you create reports according to your own specifications, which are then kept up to date automatically, depending on the selection of the time period.

To do this, select parameters to be visualized, for example:

  • User behavior (e.g. calling up search results, dwell time, crashes, loading times, screen time)
  • E-commerce (e.g. call-up of product pages, order value, turnover per purchase, quantity in shopping basket)
  • User data (e.g. new or returning visitors, one-time search queries, session duration, bounce rate)
  • Social media (e.g. actions per session, unique interactions, social interactions).
  • Advertising (e.g. cost per conversion, clicks, impressions, margin)
Google Data Studios lets you visualize and analyze a customer journey. (Source: youtube.com)

This is how goal setting works in Google Data Studio

Trends can be tracked and anticipated via the creation of these reports. This is especially important if you have set your own goals, which are within a set time frame are to be achieved. The reports can be viewed on a daily basis, Google Analytics even has real-time tracking of the customer journey.

In Google Data Studio, you can set goals, i.e. targets. The desired values are stored when the reports are created and then compared with the real data. For example, you can find weak points in the design of the website. High loading times discourage users and result in a high bounce rate. If users access the website with keywords that do not match your content, they leave again more quickly.

For example, if your goal is to increase average visit duration, structure content so that prospects can click through to other topics, or interrupt the reading flow with illustrations and infographics. Then track the trend via visualization. The trend should be towards longer sessions per user.

Various visualization tools in Google Analytics

Google uses various diagrams to depict the customer journey from different angles. These include for example World mapsthat localize your prospects. Do you offer your service or products exclusively in Germany? Then a broad audience may indicate unclear geographic positioning and too many English-language terms.

Simple Bar charts are one of the simplest visualization techniques. For example, they are suitable for displaying views, activity per day/month, comparisons of views by device, or a simple mapping of Google's estimated gender and age groups.

Google Analytics can visualize the customer journey in different diagrams.
Google Analytics can visualize the customer journey into different diagrams. (Image: datadrivencompany.com)

With tools like the Timetable Google Analytics shows how the calls change according to time of day. Many stores only become really attractive to the target group in the evenings or at weekends, while informative websites are often visited around the clock.

The List display of keywordsThe lists of visited URLs, redirects and clicks by link are visually less appealing than the colorful charts, but they hold a large part of the Google Analytics data ready for analysis. Most lists can be adjusted arbitrarily in the display and reduced to those columns that are really needed.

Understanding and optimizing the customer journey

Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Data Studio are essential for analyzing the customer journey. However, the sheer volume of data overwhelms SMEs and founders in particular without extensive prior knowledge of working with statistics and data. Where experts routinely create and read out reports, beginners often need a lot of experimentation to clearly map the data they are looking for.

Our Thorit experts specialize in the active work and optimization of the customer journey. We advise companies on reporting with Google Analytics and prepare visualizations and reports so that the insights gained can be implemented in marketing and website optimization. Arrange a personal consultation appointment now!

PowerPoint Template: Effective Marketing Thanks to Customer Journey Map - Download

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