Customer journey tracking: which ad touchpoints lead to a sale

Customer journey tracking matters because a purchase rarely takes one click. A person sees your ad on social media, a couple of days later searches for you on Yandex, and leaves a request after an email newsletter. A standard report gives the sale to one channel, and the marketer switches off social media: it brings almost no direct requests. A month later, search requests drop too, because it was social media that introduced people to the company.

The customer journey is all of a client's touchpoints with your ads and website before the request and payment. The system code on your website records every visit: source, campaign and keyword. When the visitor becomes a lead, the whole chain is saved in their card on the “Statistics” tab. So you see not only the last channel but also the ones that prepared the purchase. These are assisted conversions: channels that took part in the sale but didn't close it themselves.

All of this is included in the “CRM + Telephony + Automation” plan and higher, at no extra cost: the touchpoint history sits in the same CRM where you manage deals and payments.

Watch the video of just over a minute, and below you'll find how to read the customer journey and check your channels.

Why businesses need it

• A marketer doesn't switch off a channel for selling little directly. First they check how many buyers came through it earlier.
• Online schools and info products. A person watches an ad, a webinar and a newsletter, and only then buys. The view history shows which combination leads to payment.
• Real estate, cars, B2B. Decisions take weeks, and the client returns to the site many times. You can see which ad first brought them in and what brought them back before the request.
• The business owner sees in the “Client path” how long it takes from the first visit to the request and payment. This tells you how long to wait before judging a new ad campaign.

Why clients don't buy on the first touchpoint

Marketers have long known the rule of several touchpoints: a person needs to see a company several times before trusting it. The first visits introduce and warm up, the last one closes. If you only look at the last channel, the warming-up ones seem useless, even though without them there would be no last click.

So check any decision to switch off a channel against your clients' journeys, not just direct requests.

Where to see the customer journey in the CRM

Open the lead card and the “Statistics” tab. At the top are “Lead statistics” and the “Change source” button, and below are the blocks:

• “Client path” — “Site visit”, “Lead” and “Payment” with dates and the time between them, for example “in 3 d”;
• “Where the client came from” — “Capture type”, “Source”, “Campaign”, “Keyword”, search engine and query, “Came from the site”;
• “Request page” and “Form on the site” — where and through which form the client left the request;
• “Client” — address, client time, operating system and browser;
• “View history” — all visits in order: date, source → campaign and keyword. The block appears when there are two or more visits.

More about the card in the article customer profile in CRM.

How to find the channels that warm up buyers

1. 1
   Open the report

   “Website analytics”; in “Filters”, choose a longer period, for example “Quarter”.
2. 2
   Pick the channel that closes sales

   Most often search or brand queries. Expand it down to campaigns.
3. 3
   Open the buyers

   The ⋮ menu of the row → “Open deals”, or the blue number in the leads column. A list opens, and clicking a row opens the card in the CRM.
4. 4
   Review the history

   On the “Statistics” tab of each card, look at the “View history”. Note which sources the clients came from earlier.
5. 5
   Draw a conclusion

   If one channel often appears at the start of the journey, it warms up buyers. Its direct requests understate its real value.
6. 6
   Check on the chart

   Before switching a channel off, cut its budget for a week or two and watch the “Dynamics” chart for search. If search requests drop, the channel was driving sales.

20–40 cards of paying clients are enough: the pattern is usually obvious right away.

How to capture the full customer journey

• Install the system code on every page of your website, otherwise visits aren't recorded. How to do it is covered in the article website form to CRM.
• Add UTM tags to all ads, newsletters and posts. A visit without tags ends up in “Untitled”. Links are easy to build in the UTM builder.
• Connect call tracking if clients call you: then a call is also linked to their visits. More in the article website call tracking.
• Record payments in deals: then the “Payment” step appears in the “Client path”, and you can see how long it took from the first visit to the money.

If the lead source wasn't detected

Leads created by hand, by import, or by a call to a number without call tracking come in without a source. Then “Where the client came from” says “The source is unknown — it can be set by hand.” Click “Change source”, choose the “Source”, “Campaign” and “Keyword” and click “Save”. The lead goes into the right row of the report.

Read also: Marketing ROI tracking: which ads pay off and which drain your budget, Customer profile in CRM: full history, client replies and tasks, UTM builder: how to tag your ads and track ad spend, Deal cost tracking in CRM: the real profit and ROI of your ads