Monitoring how your customers move through the buyer’s journey is critical. It helps you understand their behaviors and guides your marketing strategies by identifying the best channels and collateral to focus on.
But you need the right data and insights to learn your customers’ (and prospective customers’) path to purchase, so you know what’s working and what’s not. Luth Research tracks the macro and micro journeys so you are not missing opportunities to piece together a strategy that optimizes all touchpoints throughout your buyers’ journey.
Let’s review what Macro and Micro Journeys are and how they can enhance your digital marketing efforts.
What is a Macro Journey?
Macro Journey Analysis examines the behavioral patterns captured during relevant shopping journeys. It illustrates the scale and sequence of sites visited during the overall shopping journey, along with the channel used during the shopping journey (store vs. computer vs mobile). This is the “big picture” view of the journey.
Examples of macro touchpoints include:
- Retailer and brand websites
- Search engines
- Brand websites
- Social media visits (not content)
- Consumer review sites
- Coupon publishers
- Offline stores and touchpoints
You can gather data from computers, mobile, and in-store channels. With this data, you’re given an overall picture of how customers maneuver to find your product. For example, a customer may:
- start on a search engine
- visit your retail website
- check out the brand website of a product
- lookup customer reviews
- and then visit your retail site to make the purchase
Based on the macro journey, you can adapt your strategies to zone in on what works and remove what doesn’t.
What is a Micro Journey?
The Micro Journey allows insights to the multi-step sequence of shopper interaction with features on a specific site and enables comparison of micro journeys across other sites of interest, such as:
- Conducting searches that particular site
- Clicking on promotions
- Visiting product detail pages
- Adding items to shopping carts
- Making a purchase
This is tracked across channels, including desktop, mobile, and in-store channels. With this information, you have a clearer picture of what your customers are doing within specific websites.
How to Use Macro and Micro Journeys to Grow Revenue
So how do you turn macro and micro data into actionable insights? Here’s a look at two scenarios using both types of intel.
Using Insights from Macro Data
The data you gather from macro tracking enables you to make solid decisions about your marketing methods, retailer partnerships, and competitive moves (based on benchmarks against competition). This is possible because you have access to empirical data.
Let’s say you’re a retailer. You begin using macro tracking and see your customers frequently visit review sites right before visiting your website to make a purchase. You can optimize your marketing by directing customers to review sites or creating your own social proof by asking customers for reviews. Then you can add them to your website, emails, and other marketing content to entice customers to convert.
Using Insights from Micro Data
With micro tracking, you can dive deeper into enhancing the customer journey. You’ll know what consumer activities matter the most so you can allocate more spend on the right resources. And you can identify blind spots in working with retailers (if you’re a brand), or see how well you’re performing compared to competitors.
Let’s say your micro data shows customers convert more when videos are shown on your product detail pages. So you focus on product videos for your landing pages on Amazon and see a jump in conversions.
The key is piecing together insights gathered from micro tracking to determine what your customers are doing and why on specific sites like Amazon, Walmart, and Target. This way, you can design a strategy to better direct their behaviors.
Build a Complete Image of Your Customers’ Journey
The better you understand your customers’ micro and macro journeys, the easier it’ll be to make the right marketing decisions. You’ll know what partnerships are working, how to better compete against competitors, and what to focus your marketing efforts on. In the end, you’ll have a better customer experience optimized for conversions.