Google introduces new customer journey mapping tool
Have you seen Google’s new customer journey benchmarking tool for reviewing The Customer Journey to Online Purchase? I thought I would feature it at the start of our round-up of our advice from May 2013 since I haven’t seen it discussed much, perhaps because it’s built into Google's Think Insights rather than Google Analytics itself. It’s a tool to help understand media campaign attribution, i.e. which marketing channels influence lead or sale. It's based on data collected from Google Analytics, but gives a slightly different visualisation from Multichannel Funnels or Social Reports.
It covers data for these countries: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, U.K., US
U.S. and these industries: Auto, B2B, Classified/Local, CPG, Edu/Gov, Finance, Health, Media, Retail, Tech and Travel. Here's an example from the travel sector in the UK:

It can help you compare your customer path-to-purchase with others in your sector based on:
- Mean days to purchase, e.g. % of total revenue from purchases made in more than one day.
- Typical channels that act more as an assist interaction (typically display, social media and paid search) compared to a last-click interaction (typically referral, organic search and direct)
- Average order value (AOV) by days - this doesn’t vary much.
Have you looked at this tool? How useful do you think it is?
Here is our round-up of posts summarising what we think are the most useful posts to help plan and keep up-to-date with developments in marketing.
Strategy and planning
Social media marketing
Search marketing
User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation
- Case study: Managing CRO at ao.com. An interview with Matt Lawson of ao.com on their ecommerce strategy. Matt Lawson is Head of Conversion at ao.com. In this interview he describes how they have grown their business through keeping the web experience focused on the customer
- User Experience is key to conversion - a reminder of the importance of focus on user experience.
Email marketing and CRM