#39 – Mastering Customer Journey Mapping in the Ever-Evolving E-commerce Landscape

So it's fascinating that sometimes when people want to create a customer journey map, they think they want to get to 100% accuracy and they go above and beyond to get to 100% accuracy. In their nature, customer journey maps are not going to be accurate. We are looking for general trends where 80, 85, maybe if we're lucky, 90% of our visitors go through all on their journey to make a purchase. My name is Karl Slade and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like it's no big deal.

While pretty much every episode we'll take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we'll talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man, I bring tough questions like do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high, testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another week, CRO Live Hour. And you know what happened just before we started Simba first. Hey, Simba, how are you doing?

I'm good. How about you?

I was good until Google Analytics decided to send an email to every company that we worked with and to us saying, hey, you did not upgrade to GA4. There's 14 days. The Countdown is down. And then also I think they got Shopify to send the email, which is really, really annoying. You know why? Because every single company we work with, every one of our properties, has GA4 installed on it. So we've already upgraded. We're already using GA4, but we still have the universal tags running on our site, and we want to keep the universal tags running for the next two weeks. So that's just purely lazy marketing. You know, I was like, oh, let's just see if they still have universal. If you've already written the code to check if they have universal or not, why don't you check if they also have GA4 installed or not instead of freaking people out. So, literally, before I jump on this recording, I get all these emails and everybody's saying, oh my God, what's going on? I thought GA4 is installed. And I copied and pasted the response to all the emails. Yes, it is installed. Don't worry. This migration to GA4 is going to be interesting for many people and I think that's what happens when you use a free product. They will force you to do whatever they want because it's a free product. You don't get to say, you know though, what's interesting is for the first time I hear many people saying, hey, what are some of the other alternatives to Google Analytics? The problem is if you are looking for a free solution, they're not going to be necessarily as good as universal. I think GA4 has really good potential, but it's going to be interesting. And the paid options are just expensive, paid, good options. Mainly the two main ones that I think about, Amplitude and Heap. Amazing, but expensive. Doesn't make sense to use them. Not for every company, not for 90% of the companies. So you are left with Universal. Now, Matamo is an open source free option, so maybe people will start considering it and maybe then Google doesn't have access to all of your data. I don't know. Anyways, that was my rant as we start this.

What could be like, the reason why most people want to move away from GA4? Is it because it's kind of like different from Universal or it's very complicated.

It has nothing to do with being complicated or not complicated. People, you've trained people to use Universal for the last 14, 15 years. They got used to it. Humans are creatures of habits. We got used to it. We love it, we hate it. It just became a fact of life. 80% of the features that are available on Universal are not used regularly by typical Google Analytics users. Storage is expensive and Google collected all the information that they need to collect. There are different ways to collect data nowadays. Very focused on events, very focused on users. This is not how Universal did things. It was coming all along. Even if you have a much better product, people are just not used to this other product. They don't like the fact that they are getting pushed to migrate. Now if you pay for a certain product, you expect that, hey, if you do upgrade, I might choose to stay on an older version and eventually you'll say, you know what, support is out for the older version. You can stay on it, but we're not going to support it with Universal. With Google Analytics, Universal is a lot different. It's going away. The product is Going away. It's on the cloud and it's not going to be there. People don't like that. And I can understand why people feel frustrated with that. I actually like Google GA4. I like it. I think it's a step in the right direction. I don't like how Google went about pushing people into GA4. I think the product is still somewhat buggy. I think what Google's doing is having the users do the quality control, quality assurance for the products. Like, hey, what's going on here? Why is the data like that? Why? Oh, gosh. So we end up with a hot mess on our hand. And I think it's going to be interesting over the next four to six months to see how that plays out. Now, if I'm a competitor of Google, if I'm a Microsoft, if I'm an Apple, oh, man. That migration to GA4 would have been an amazing opportunity for me to release a product that competes with Google Analytics. That's a huge project. Correct. It's not a small undertaking to say, you know what, we're going to release an analytics product. So Google continues to dominate that space. Let's see how things play out.

Yeah, it should be interesting to see how it folds. But almost like everyone in the next two weeks will be like using GA4. Hopefully, like many people, they implemented it correctly because there might be like a problem or like an issue where you think you have implemented it right. But it's not that great. I've seen like some YouTube videos, sort of like tutorials talking about how to migrate from Universal to GA4, but the video is about 15 minutes long. So you'd wonder, oh, does it take 15 minutes or less or something?

Yeah, it's funny because I'm on a Facebook group with lots of e commerce companies, larger E commerce companies, and somebody posted, how much does it cost to migrate to GA4? And I laughed at the answers that I saw because some people said, well, you know, it's cost me $100. I hire somebody on Fiverr, and somebody says, oh, it takes like no, 10 minutes. And somebody says it take. And all of these answers are actually correct because it all depends on how much you use Google Analytics in the first place. If it's just merely taking the GA4 scripts and dropping them on your site, that takes probably two to three minutes and you're done. It is not complicated. Now, is that really what you want to do? I don't know. It depends. How much time are you spending in Google Analytics if you're merely logging into Google Analytics, once a week, once a month, dropping the scripts on the site, you're done, you know, move on from there. So that's one case where, yes, you know, doing it for free or doing it yourself makes perfect sense. Let's take the other extreme case, which some people don't think about. Well, I actually have an analytics team. I not only look at the custom reports that are available in Google Analytics, I actually have custom dashboards. I slice and dice the data. There's a lot of decisions that I make in my business based on the data that's coming from Google Analytics. Well, guess what? Dropping Google Analytics scripts on your site is not going to fix your problem. You need a ton of events that need to be tagged on the website. That's number one. That means you have to go through every single element on your site, tag that element, make sure that there is consistent nomenclature for how events are tracked on the website. That's a very lengthy process. Correct. To identify all the events and then somebody needs to go in and tag all those events. That's just the very first step. The second step is you need to do some quality control. Did we tag the events correctly? Are the events coming correctly? That's number two. Number three, I need to push to production. Great, now I have all these events coming to GA. 4, do I stop there? No. I probably have to create all these custom dashboards and custom reports. Again, this is not for everybody, but there are companies that must do this. If you are a 10 million, 20 million, if you are 100 million brand, you're probably going through this very sophisticated setup. If you are a company that does, I don't know, $10,000 or $100,000 a month, you probably want to do just a quick setup. So one answer is not right. You need to start with your requirements and then figure out how important on how critical and how essential GA Google Analytics in your business and how much time are you spending on it. And based on that, you can say, you know what? Yeah, it's not a 10 minute project. It's actually a six weeks or sometimes an eight week project. We work with one brand, they own about seven or eight different properties. Each one of those properties is probably at least $150 million. Now we don't, we did not do the GA for migration for them. They hired a company that specializes in that. And I've seen the amount of work that went into it. And now the custom dashboards and the reporting, it is a huge project. Now at the same time, that company has an analytics team of about 20 different resources. So they understand the importance of Google Analytics, the importance of data. Everything drives their online strategy.

So I think that will be like an interesting topic to talk about, especially next week, just a week before, like, Universal shuts down. It would be interesting to just talk about it.

No, I agree. By the way, the other big thing which people are not paying close attention to right now is what is going to happen to all of your data from Universal? We've had Google Analytics Universal running on Invesp since 2006. So we have about 16 years of data, and we've gone from zero visitors to a month, to 10,000 visitors a month, to at some point to 100,000 visitors a month. And now we dropped. Where are we at, like 50 to 70,000? It depends on the month. I want that data and I want detailed data. So where are you going to keep it? I think we have until beginning of January before all that data goes away. So it's important that you keep track of all that data. And then it's not enough to download reports. That's a painful process from Universal because maybe two years later I'll be like, hey, so can we go back and look at July or let's look back at maybe of 2023 and how the different sources and mediums of traffic were they doing? What was the bounce rate and what was the exit rate? You need to be able to store this data somewhere where you can slice it and dice it and pull the insights that you want at any point in time in the future.

Okay, cool. So we'll talk about it, like, in detail next week. Today we are talking about Customer Journey Maps.

Customer Journey Maps. Can I, before we talk about Customer Journey Maps, I was going to mention we actually, and this is a first for us at Invess, we've lost two clients, two companies that we worked with in the last couple of months. Now, this is very unusual. Most agencies, they bring on clients, they lose clients kind of in the typical cycle. For us, it's very unusual. And people sometimes might find it strange that I'm even mentioning that. But the average company, when they sign up with us, they stay with us for 39 months. And we have some companies that we've been working with since 2010, 2011. So when we have two companies, one we worked with for about four months and one we worked with for two months, and they both came and they said, hey, can we pause the service? They were both a little nice. They didn't say, let's cancel. Can we Pause the service and we'll decide when we pick up the work again. To me, I'm like, really? Two companies? So I had to sit back with the team and say, hey, guys, what happened there? How can we lose two companies? Especially, by the way, for us, it is very painful to lose somebody in the first three to four months because we invest a lot of time during those first two to four months that if a company walks away, we actually end up losing money. So I sat back, and I think I can attribute that to three reasons why we lost both companies. The first one, maybe we were not the right fit for those companies. On paper, it looks like we are the right fit. They have the right number of conversions. They have the right number of visitors a month. They tell us that they are committed to conversion optimization. They are committed to AB testing. So theoretically, we were a good fit. But I think in both cases, I saw a trend that I didn't pay close attention to. And now I'm thinking back and I'm like, oh, man, I should have probably paid a little bit more. More attention to this. In both instances, those companies have hired and fired, hired and fired many agencies. Not only CRO agencies, but PPPC agencies and SEO agencies. One of them, as a matter of fact, I think, have changed their website design three times in the last 12 months. And I'm like, that should have been a red flag just there. I'm like, three different designs in 12 months. That's very unusual, the amount of effort that that goes into putting up a design. And then you put it up and then you say, yeah, I don't like it. Let's just start again. I think what that's telling me is they probably don't understand marketing, or at least we don't share the same understanding of marketing. It's not, oh, let's do this, try this for a couple months. And then, like, it didn't work. Let's try this for another couple months. And at the end, when you look at their trajectory, they've been flat for the last two to three years because they're just trying to do a little bit here, a little bit there, and they're not giving anything the level of consistency it needs to succeed. I should have picked up on that. Number two, I think, is on us, which is the evolution of the relationship. I talk to every company that wants to sign up with us, and I want to make sure that they are actually nice to work with. If they're not nice to work with, we're walking away. Conversion optimization, experimentation is hard just by itself. You add on top of that difficult personality and sometimes we're just not a good fit. And there's plenty of companies that will do CRO and they will love to pick up the work. In both instances, I thought the relationship was good, but there is a handoff between me talking to those companies and then handing them off to our teams. And I always tell the teams during the first two to three months, what you need to do is do two things. One, you need to show them the amount of research and good work that we do, because they're like, hey, Khaled knows how to talk about experimentation and conversion optimization. Do we have a good team who we're working with? So you need to show them that. You show them that through deep research. You show them that through the type of experiments you're coming up with the designs that you are doing. But that's not enough. You also need to build a personal relationship with the people who are sitting across from you on the other side. It's not enough to do the work. You have to establish a relationship. And I think we need to work more on establishing that relationship because really, you need to become a trusted advisor for them. I'm not sure if we succeeded in doing that or not. And I think, by the way, that's one of the big secrets for running an agency. If you're just purely doing the work and you're not establishing the relationship, people will walk away. The third element, which also we didn't pay attention to, is focusing on items that are important for stakeholders in those companies. Now, this applies whether you are working for a company as a conversion rate optimization specialist or if you're running an agency. You need to understand there are people who say, you know what, yeah, let's go ahead and do experimentation, let's go ahead and do conversion rate optimization. What is important to them? Because just like design conversion optimization, everybody has an opinion and they think right or wrong, they think that's, you know, if we fix this one thing, our conversion rates are going to increase the reality. And after doing so many different projects, there is not one thing that you do that's going to take you from 2% conversion rate to 8% conversion rate. It's a flow of things that you have to fix around the customer journey. And that's the reason we're going to be talking about customer journey maps. However, the stakeholders typically have one or two things that they think is important to them. So you need to understand those things and you need to focus on them. In the first two to six months, in the case of one of the companies that we're working with, the stakeholder thought, oh, it's the copy on the website that is what's killing us. I don't think it expresses how our customers feel about our product. Now, I agree with him. Their copy was not that great. However, when our team did the analysis, they said, you know what? Yeah, copy is a problem, but we have many more critical problems to fix. Well, guess what? He was just very focused on the copy and he thought the copy was the secret to unlock higher conversion rates. If I would do this again, I'll probably go back and say, you know what? Okay, so maybe 50% of the experiments that we launch in the first four to six months are going to be focused on copy. And guess what? We have copywriters. But why don't you get involved with us in doing the copy? I think that is very important. Understand the stakeholders, what do they focus on? And some of your experimentation need to actually show them that, hey, because this is important to you, I am going to focus on it as well. Now, what I hate about losing those two clients is our average of 39 months now is going to drop. I'm like, oh man, we worked so hard to get the average time a client stays with us for that long. We invested a lot. And now I'm like, it's going to probably drop now. I don't know what the number is. We calculate it usually twice a year. So we shall see. So that's my kind of lesson that I've learned about EPIG companies. Now we want to talk customer Journey Maps.

Yeah, I think like you said, a lot of important things there. And just because we want to talk about customer Journey maps and those just going to hold questions that I wanted to ask you based on what you were saying. Just like, let's focus on the topic of the day. Customer Journey maps. So we have about three to four questions here. Are you ready?

I am ready, man. You just fire away and we'll see.

Okay, sure. Cool. So the first one is how do you approach customer Journey mapping for businesses with multiple touch points and channels such as social media, email marketing and mobile apps?

Before I even approach or touch Customer Journey Maps, I really want to ask the question, how are we going to be using the customer Journey Map? You cannot imagine the number of companies who hire us and at some point they'll tell us, oh, we have a customer journey map. We've hired XYZ Agency that specializes in customer Journey maps and here's what they produce. As a matter of fact, we've worked with one of the top 10 sites on the web, and they had just finished an engagement, was $250,000 for about three months. They hired an amazing company that does Customer Journey Maps. And they had hired them, I think about a year or a couple of years before. And they said, hey, we've hired them. They produced the Customer Journey maps. And I'm like, perfect, can you just forward to us the Customer Journey maps? And then we'll have meetings to discuss what they've produced. Two weeks later, we still didn't get the files. And I'm like, where are the files? You guys have invested a lot in this. And they're like, we can't find them. I'm like, what do you mean you can't find them? They're like, well, the guy who hired is no longer with us. And unfortunately, no one ever saved the Customer Journey Maps. So we actually had to contact that company that did the Customer Journey maps and say, hey, remember that project that you did two years ago? Can you just send us kind of the final deliverables? Now, what this tells me is that they've hired. They paid a ton of me. They've hired the right company to do the Customer Journey Maps, but they never actually use them, which translates into just an absolute waste. So ask the question, what are we going to use the Customer Journey maps for? I think Customer Journey maps are very powerful if you know how to use them. If it's just an exercise because you have the budget, just don't. You can probably use the money in different ways. To me, I can conduct Customer Journey maps. I start conducting or creating Customer Journey maps by doing a lot of research. Now, in a typical conversion rate optimization project and experimentation project, we do anywhere between five to seven interviews trying to pick different people who have hired the company or the product to accomplish, to fulfill a need in their lives. When we're doing a Customer Journey Map, we expand that pool. So we might be interviewing anywhere between 15 to 30 people because it's a very focused project to understand the decision process, all the different touch points that they've gone through to see how they actually came to the final decision. That's number one. Number two, we look at analytics, try and really decipher through analytics how people navigate around the website. You need to build some sort of a data model to look at new users, where they're coming from, returning visitors, how they're coming from, what are the different channels that they're Using now analytics is very powerful. And the theory there is, because it's online, we can really track that visitor journey. We cannot. Attribution models are still. We're in 2023 to elementary. And everybody tried to take credit for that final conversion. Oh, well, we brought them through this channel. Well, you know, yeah, you did. Like, the actual conversion happened when they came through this last channel. But guess what? They've had seven or eight different visits before they actually made that decision to convert. One of the things that we do in figpy, since we do session recording, is we'll say, you know what, Pull up session recording and pull up session recording for a site for returning visitors, and let's see how many times they've converted. So I was looking at one of the companies that we work with. They have about half a million visitors that are coming to the site every month. We said, okay, let's just look at the returning visitors. That was about 30, 40%, about 30% of their visitors. So we're from 500,000, we dropped to 150,000. And then we said, you know what? Of those returning visitors, how many actually placed an order? The number drops drastically because now we're looking at probably like 15,000. I'm like, okay, 15,000. So we started 500,000, 150, 15,000. The conversion rate for returning visitors is great. We're looking at sessions and we say, you know what? Those are returning visitors. Let's see how many times they actually came before they converted. And it was fascinating because some of them have visited the website six times before they made that purchase decision. Now I can just see their interaction with the website and it's fascinating. First time they came to the collection page and they like, you know, viewed a couple products, they came back to the collection page. They went through. They came through email, they came through Google Search. It's a lot of data points, but you need somebody to sit there and look for trends within those data points. So I have done the customer interviews. I'm looking now at my data, and then I need to merge them both to understand what is the first trigger when somebody recognizes that I have a problem and where do they do the search? What are the different sites that they visit? What influences that purchase decision? Who are they talking to? And we get that from doing the customer interviews. You build that funnel that gives you a good idea of like, it takes them six weeks to make the decision after they recognize pain point that they have. Sometimes it's a lot longer. Correct. The longer that journey, the harder it Is where I work with a company, they do curtains and blind installation. It's an expensive purchase. It's anywhere between 5 to 10,000. It's a lead generation type website. The sales cycle is about four to six months. The customer journey before they actually pull the trigger to do the initial contact. And even after the initial contact, there is lots of offline activity that has to happen. It's a lot different than somebody recognizing, oh, I am out of batteries, I need to go somewhere and place an order of batteries. Oh, I need to buy a new battery for my laptop because my laptop is weak. They recognize the pain. They are doing a little bit of research. Then you might find out that, oh well, they want to figure out whether they do it themselves or they need to find somebody who's going to install the battery for them. Those are all valid questions. You need to bring them all together. Think about how people break down between those different segments. The final thing that I would say is you have people who converted. Having conversations with them is very powerful and segmenting their data and trying to understand, okay, so what were the motivators to make the decision, the influencers and how is that process that helps you build a full customer journey?

That makes a lot of sense. Just to kind of like recap what you're saying, you say that like there are two approaches that you use when it comes to mapping customer journey. The first one, you do like interviews. And then you also do look at like the analytics just to see the different touch points that customers might have. I want to ask you something like about the interviews since like the scenario that we have here is of like maybe a business that has multiple touch points and channels. So in selecting the people or the customers to interview, do you pick them based on the channels or there's kind of like a criteria that you use to pick the customers to interview.

So what we do usually is first we're doing those interviews for people who converted. That's number one. Number two, we have them. We say, okay, give us everybody who converted. Okay, so we have 10,000 conversions the last month, or maybe we have 100 conversions last month. Great, it doesn't matter to me. Then we, we say, what are the different demographics that we can pull for those who converted? What is some of the information that we have before we even reach out to them? Because I might have converted on a website, but I don't really remember how I found the website in the first place. And it's fascinating, especially if you're dealing with E commerce where people come in and out. And I'm like, oh, maybe it was a Google search. Maybe I clicked on link on Facebook. People do not necessarily remember. So trying to use the data that you have before even reaching out to people and creating the segments. You know what? Based on the data that we have, we think here's a segment of people that came through paid social. Here's a segment of people who came organically, at least in their last touch. Correct. And where the conversion happened here are people who just directly typed in our website and they came through. So we try and create some sort of criteria. We look at also demographics. You know, younger, older, kind of like, okay, we're aiming for people who are 22 to 20, 30 maybe, and 31 to 40. And then we're looking for males and females. We're looking at people living in different cities. Really. Initially, with our research, we try and go with a blanket approach. Correct. At least in the first 10 interviews. Let's just see what data points we have. Now, after I do my initial eight to 10 interviews, I might come back to the drawing board and say, okay, you know what, there are some trends there. We might of segments that we see. We can drill a bit deeper, we can expand the reach or, you know, like, you know, based on the data that you have, you'll have to make the next decision about the next 10 interviews. And then after you finish the next 10 interviews, you might expand again for the next 10 interviews. So that's kind of how the process is. It is not set solid, but you keep your eye on the different criteria that you have. And the interviews that you are conducting really help guide you to say, you know what, we need to expand here. We need to pull back. You might conduct 10 interviews and you say, you know what? Everybody is like of those 10 people are sharing kind of the same journey. That's not good. How do we expand? Let's go back to our initial selection criteria. And how do we fix that? Because something happened there that really is giving us kind of the same person. We work with a company, sells coffee, and we did the initial interviews for them. And it's fascinating because nine out of the 10 interviews, they all came from the same channel. Then we said, you know what? Okay, everybody's coming from the same channel. Can we expand? We looked at it, we tried to expand the channels. We're like, hey, how can we find people who don't come through that channel? It turns out that in that case in particular, everybody came because they following a particular influencer, and they either follow that influencer, or they know somebody who follows that influencer. And that's the way it worked. Very unique situation. Worked with another company that does skincare for men. Again, it was an influencer. Everybody was watching his videos. He's recommending the product. Everybody's coming and buying them. And it's fascinating, by the way, I remember talking to that influencer. He says, yeah, I record a YouTube video. I know the day I release it, that is about $100,000 in sales for me. So he does, you know, anywhere from four to 10 different YouTube drops videos that are very specific to his product. And, you know, he generates just by doing those videos that are anywhere between five to 15 minutes, he will generate probably a million or one and a half in sales. But because, of course, people look at that and say, oh, I can do that. Well, no, he spent years building the audience and the people who follow him.

Yep. As you're explaining it, like, I totally get it, I understand it, but how do you then? Maybe because it's easy to understand as you explain, but to apply it or implement what you're saying, it's so complicated. Right. So how do you kind of like, ensure the accuracy and completeness of customer journey mapping in the complex and ever evolving landscape of E commerce?

You know, I wish that there is a checklist. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Yeah, there are general guidelines. Correct? That's the thing. Sometimes people ask me about a B testing, conversion optimization. I tell them we share our process. I mean, I get every week with some LinkedIn Live and we'll answer whatever questions and then we share on the blog. We give away every little detail to. Sometimes I feel it's painful. I'm like, oh, are we sharing too much? I'm like, no, it's fine. Even we've looked at sometimes like we've looked at our trello boards. Correct. And here's how we run a project. It's almost like me, since Ayat is traveling, I have to do some cooking for the kids, and I look at these recipes online and I look at those YouTube videos and they make them look so easy until I get in the kitchen and I try and do it and I'm like, God dang it. The rice does not look like the rice that they showed in the video. And the meat looks a little bit different. We cannot put a dollar value on the actual experience. There are specific situations that by experience, you know how to handle. You just put general guidelines and then you have to do it. And you had to do it once or Twice and three times. And it's like, oh, I've learned from this mistake. I've learned from that mistake. I do a weekly internal CRO training for our team and I tell them, like, every week, bring me your questions. So we have somebody, one of our senior CROs, and he's like, khaled, can we talk about sample size calculation now? It's funny, sample size calculation. Most people think it's like, oh, there's calculators out there. You calculate the sample size for an a B test and you're done. Oh, my God, I wish it's that easy. There's a lot of thought that goes into it, especially if you're gonna be doing some data segmentation. Sometimes we call tests early. Sometimes we drop variations in the middle of a test. Now, I'm probably gonna give him about 80% of the rules that are in my head and Iyad's head and, like, other CRO members are gonna jump in and they say, oh, here's what we do, here's what. But it really is different from one experiment to the next. You have general rules, but you need to have an eye on the experiment, what you are trying to accomplish. You apply the general rule, and then sometimes you make a call. People say, no, you should run an experiment until you hit the sample size. Sometimes you don't have to. And then. Perfect example of that, when elections are happening. Correct. Sometimes you can call a winner early before you finish. Everybody who votes, just look at the data and you can call a winner early. Not everybody knows how to do it. There's statistics around it. Correct. For that decision room to make that decision. So you can't just say, well, yeah, I'm going to call it early at like 60% of the sample size. Maybe yes, maybe no. There's some statistics that you need to apply. Again, the same with customer journey maps. We talk about the steps. Correct. But unless you do hands on, okay, I'm going to run through the process and I'm going to learn from it. And sometimes we don't do customer journey maps. So I can talk about this freely because sometimes we do it ourselves. I bring in somebody external to say, you know what? You have experience in doing this. Guide our team. I don't need you to implement it. Sometimes I'll tell them, hey, our team members are going to watch you doing it. But sometimes I will tell them, hey, can you guide our team through the process? Give them advice? I want weekly calls where you kind of direct the team and guide them. Because ultimately, if I do an exercise 20 times, I'll figure out the ins and the outs. And I'm not making mistakes, but sometimes I'd rather spend money and get things done correctly right away. Different approaches, different philosophies on how people like to do things. One of the other questions that we have, what are some of the pitfalls when creating customer journey maps? So it's fascinating that sometimes when people want to create a customer journey map, they think they want to get to 100% accuracy, and they go above and beyond to get to 100% accuracy. In their nature, Customer journey maps are not going to be accurate. We are looking for general trends where 80, 85, maybe if we're lucky, 90% of our visitors go through on their journey to make a purchase. That's it. Trying to get us like, oh, I need it to be 100% accurate. No, because every customer is different. They have their unique circumstances. Now you can generalize, correct? And the more you generalize, the more you say, you know what? Yeah, they fall in this bucket and that bucket. And that's really what to me, customer journey mapping is all about, about creating different buckets of first event things that trigger somebody to say, you know what, I'm going to start the research. What are the different criteria that they are selecting second events where they say, you know what, I need to make a decision today. And then going through the process of actually placing, placing an order, that really is perhaps one of the most important things as you are creating a customer journey map. It's not a perfect process. However, the process of trying to figure out the customer journey map doesn't have to be accurate. It will never be accurate. Inaccuracy is built into it. But 80% accuracy of a customer journey map is perfect enough. So, Simba, I just talked about kind of some of the pitfalls and the challenges of customer journey maps. First one. So one of the first pitfalls is trying to aim for 100 accuracy. That's one problem. Number two is kind of the two extremes. Trying to do customer journey maps with a very small sample size, that's a little scary. Correct. I'm not going to build a customer journey map based on interviews with three, four people. I need to expand that. And then the other extreme is trying to build the customer journey map by trying to make it into a large project. And I'm going to interview 200, 300 people. There is a right balance. To me, it's 20 to 30 people. If I have a specific project to figure out my customer journey maps, I'M not going to do four or five people. I'm not going to do 300, 400 people. Then the final thing is actually making sure that you'll use the customer journey map in your marketing. If it's just merely here, it's another document we produced, it's a check mark that I've done because somebody had asked for it and no one's going to look at it again. Don't do that. It's just like Personas. Correct. Most companies have Personas. Most companies don't use Personas. It's just an exercise. And like, oh, it looks nice. Now. Every company you talk to, like every e commerce company has a Gene who is 42, who is kind of like the stay at home mom. And I'm like, okay, can we just move beyond the gene that everybody has? Make sure that you have a real use for your customer journey. Make sure that you come back to it regularly, that it influences the marketing that you do. Now marketing is ever evolving. Channels are ever changing. So if I create customer journey maps and I'm using them regularly, it might be an exercise that I do every couple of years. Maybe it's an exercise that I do regularly because things have changed, the positioning have changed, the economy has changed. So as consumers change, we have to update our customer journey maps and then think about, okay, what are the decisions that we are making based on those updated customer journey maps. Yep.

So I think that maybe it also touches on the follow up question that I was going to ask you that how often should you do like customer Journey? So you just answered it in saying like, as things change, you also have to kind of like make your customer general. So that, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. I mean every time somebody tells me, especially if they've done a customer journey map before and they say, hey, we want to go back to it. My first question to them, show me how often you've the existing customer journey maps in the last six to 12 months. Past performance is a good indicator of future behavior. Correct performance. If you haven't used it in the past, save your money. I'm not saying it's not important, it's very important. But if it's just again, something that you do and you just move on, just don't do it. Save your money. Like the amount of money and effort and time and thinking that requires a company to come up with a customer journey map is not simple. It's a major activity and if it's used correctly, it will have an amazing impact on your bottom line, but if it's just a checkpoint, you probably can use that budget towards something else.

So, yeah, I think those are the questions that I had for you about customer Journey Maps and Liz, maybe you want to shed some light on.

No, I think, you know, we've talked about all this stuff. I'll go deal with GA4, see what more emails they've sent. But next week maybe we'll talk about Google Analytics or Universal.

Yeah, that'll be interesting. That'll be interesting.

Awesome. Well, until next time, thank you everybody for watching, commenting and happy A B testing. Sure.