The customer journey is the path from never having heard of you to buying, and then buying again. Six stages, roughly, and almost nobody walks all of them in order.
Naming the stages is the easy part. Finding the one where you are losing people is what makes it worth doing.
- Awareness. They learn you exist. A search, a recommendation, an ad, a van with your name on it.
- Interest. They look you up. This is where your website and your reviews do their work, mostly without you knowing it happened.
- Consideration. They compare you against two or three others. Price, proof, and how easy you are to contact.
- Purchase. They buy. Anything that adds friction here costs you people who had already decided.
- After the purchase. They find out whether you were as good as you said. This is where reviews come from.
- Loyalty. They come back, or they recommend you. Cheaper than any of the stages above it.
Finding the leak
Every business loses people at one stage more than the others, and it is rarely the one they assume.
Google Analytics tells you some of it: which pages people land on, where they leave, how many get as far as the contact form. Search Console tells you whether you appear at the awareness stage at all.
But the honest answer usually comes from asking. Five recent customers, one question: what nearly stopped you? You will hear the same thing twice and that is your answer.
What we see most often
Not awareness. Most small and medium-sized businesses get found. The drop is between interest and consideration, and the cause is nearly always the same: the site does not answer the question the customer actually has, so they go and ask a competitor instead.
Fixing that is cheaper than buying more traffic, and it makes the traffic you already have worth more.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where yours leaks, we will look at it with you.
Builds websites and the systems behind them for small businesses in Spain and the Netherlands. Writes down the things clients ask twice.
