Transforming Customer Journeys Using Experience Analytics Tools
Where are your customers leaving you?
If you ask most marketers and business owners, they'd probably shrug and say they "don't know." No joke.
Your website is a black box. You're clueless about what's causing friction, why carts are abandoned and what makes the checkout journey so damn confusing. When you can't see the problem, you can't solve it.
Good news: Experience analytics tools are shining a light on your website and allowing you to optimize the customer journey for maximum revenue.
No more collecting data for the sake of it. Get a full understanding of customer interactions from start to finish to improve digital experiences. Let's break it down…
Topics you'll learn in this guide
The Shift to Experience Analytics Platforms
Why Focus on the Customer Journey?
Journey Mapping: The Best Tool for Uncovering Friction Points
Actionable Customer Journey Analytics Examples
Optimize for the Long-Term: End-to-End Customer Journeys and Full Funnel View
Using Business Metrics as the North Star
Focus on Customer Satisfaction and Measure Engagement
The UX Champion
Wrap Up: Why Improving the Customer Journey Matters.
Why The Shift to Experience Analytics Platforms
Listen up…Digital experience platform (DXP) market size was $10.51 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $31.21 billion by 2034. That's a CAGR of 10.10%.
Businesses are suddenly interested in spending a lot of money on experience analytics software (after ignoring the entire category for years). Companies have finally woken up and realized that you can't optimize if you can't measure. Traditional analytics gives you "what happened" data, but digital experience analytics answers the "why" and "how" questions, which are much more valuable.
Web analytics tells you your bounce rate, while digital experience analytics tells you the exact element on your page that's causing visitors to leave. A digital experience analytics platform like Quantum Metric lets you analyze every click, scroll, and action in real-time. Pair this data with journey mapping and you'll be able to see customer behavior across the entire customer journey.
In short: Companies are taking their blindfolds off. The most successful brands are the ones that are investing in experience analytics.
If you don't understand digital experience platforms and how they work, read my new guide: Digital Experience Platform: The Complete Buyer's Guide.
The Real Problem With Traditional Analytics
Quick question…What happened on your site yesterday?
Okay, you probably ran a Google Analytics report and checked your page views and traffic sources. Great.
But now we need to dig deeper.
How did people experience your site? Did someone abandon a cart because they got lost on your shipping information page? Did someone leave because they couldn't find the coupon field? Could it be that your purchase confirmation email drove another conversion later?
Google Analytics and other traditional analytics solutions are useless at answering these types of questions.
Traditional web analytics capture aggregated data. They'll tell you 500 people visited your checkout page, but they don't care that 300 of them couldn't find the apply coupon button.
Digital experience analytics is what you need. Experience analytics tools like Quantum Metric record every interaction. When a customer has a bad experience, you can playback their exact session and identify the specific point of friction.
Understanding the Complete Customer Journey
The customer journey doesn't flow in a straight line.
In the past, a visitor would land on your homepage, visit a few product pages, then hit the checkout button. Done.
Today, the journey is more complex. Visitors use multiple devices. They research on your site, then purchase from a competitor. They fill out a contact form, then call your sales team.
Each of these touchpoints (points of contact) are a part of the overall customer journey. You need to look at your customer's journey holistically to truly improve the digital experience.
Experience analytics tools capture customer interactions at all of these touchpoints. Digital experience analytics connect the dots from a first visit to eventual conversion (or drop-off).
Imagine you discover that customers who visit your site on mobile then switch to desktop are 40% more likely to convert than single-device customers. Armed with this knowledge, you can optimize your cross-device experience and improve conversion rates.
That's the power of journey analytics.
Traditional analytics only look at individual sessions in isolation. Experience analytics tools like Quantum Metric help you see the forest for the trees.
Real-Time Insights Power Real Results
So here's the thing…
Traditional web analytics dashboards are slow.
Google Analytics updates daily. Adobe Analytics reports take hours. By the time you see the problem, it's already cost you money.
Digital experience analytics tools are different. You get real-time alerts of issues.
Receive a notification that your checkout page is spitting errors for mobile users. You immediately fix the problem instead of losing sales for hours or days. A new feature you launched is tripping people up? Get a heads up so you can iterate before the damage is done.
Real-time data = real-time results.
You also need tools to help you A/B test different aspects of the customer journey and iterate faster. According to industry research, 72% of organizations adopted AI in 2024, a significant increase from the 50% adoption in previous years. Most AI adoption was directed towards enhancing CX through better analytics and personalization.
Want some more tips for improving CX? Check out my Ultimate Guide to Customer Experience.
Turning Data into Action
But here's the tricky part. Collecting data is easy, but using that data to make informed decisions and improving customer experience is difficult.
Companies struggle to understand the raw data their digital experience analytics tools are giving them. It's useless if it's not actionable.
Here's a radical concept.
Hook up your customer journey analytics to your CRM and CDP.
Combine first-party data with behavior insights to get the most accurate picture of your customers. When you do this, companies that integrate customer journey analytics with their CRM and customer data platforms report 2.5 times higher marketing ROI and resolve customer friction points faster. Customer journey analytics is useless until you can act on that information.
To take action, start with the highest-value customer journeys. Identify the critical paths that lead to the biggest revenue and focus on those. You can slowly add more journeys and datapoints until you're analyzing the entire customer experience funnel.
Adopting a Customer-Centric Mindset
The shift to digital experience analytics isn't just about technology.
It's also about changing your approach and putting the customer experience at the center of everything you do. Obsess over every detail of the customer experience. Become the customer's champion.
That means watching customer sessions to get an understanding of where the experience is painful. It also means running experiments on your website and iterating based on data, not assumptions.
Customer-centric organizations approach digital experience analytics with buy-in from every team. Developers want to fix issues. Designers want to improve UI. Marketers want to optimize the journey.
With everyone rowing in the same direction, digital experience analytics becomes a common language for your entire company.
Wrapping Up: Why Optimizing the Customer Journey Matters
Digital experience analytics went from "nice to have" to table stakes in recent years.
Expectations are higher than ever, and competition is just one click away. If you want to get ahead, you need to optimize the customer journey. You need to understand your customer in real-time. You need to be able to identify and resolve issues in minutes, not days.
The tools to make this happen are more accessible than ever. The ROI is proven. The competitive advantage is tangible.
Pick a digital experience analytics tool. Start by understanding the most important customer journeys. Build teams that can turn that data into action. And make the customer experience your competitive advantage.