Why my leads and customers insist on bypassing the funnel of conversion? 

The Funnel, which Funnel?

In the past, the funnel of sales of all the life of any product or service was simple to understand and control: Attract -> Convince -> Convert.  

Later, with the advent of the Internet, it was determined that upper, middle & bottom funnelalthough it was really a digital recreation of the same process. No trace of evolution. 

But in the Era of the Customerthe so-called "increased customerThe "more informed, more influential, more empowered, and more demanding of a real-time and personalized experiencehas changed its behavior incorporating more steps into the conversion processResearch, search, question, learn, compare, trust, decide, convert, give your opinion and share. Not necessarily in that order, nor in the same channel.: store, web, mobile app, social networks, comparative sites, email, people around you, employees.  

That is why we talk about the customer journeyas if it were a trip through the stations of a subway with multiple paths and possible connections to the destination station: la conversion. In short, in our marketing strategywe have to think that el customer journey is the new funnel. 

The journey, which Journey? 

The second thing we need to understand is that, no matter how much we draw on the wall our customer journey ideal and common to all, customers will do as they see fit. What's more, there will be as many journeys different as behavioral patterns of our customers. The customer journey is not defined, it is discovered, and there are hundreds of them. 

Nor should we be confused with the user navigation paths on our website, app or e-commerce store, because they are partial and incomplete views of the journey. 

El customer journey does not necessarily last one session, can last for days or weeks. Nor does it occur in a single channel or device, it can cross multiple channels multiple times. Nor does it respond to a single marketing campaign or initiative, it can involve concurrence or complementarity of several actions. 

The key to discovering the customer journey is the traceability of the different events that each customer leaves in each channel or point of contact, in addition to the analytics of behavioral patterns of these customers during the journey. 

It is no coincidence that Google Analytics 4 has drastically changed its paradigm for measuring websites and apps, turning it into a sequence of user events. 

By visualizing the customer's complete journey, it allows us to identify patterns and the most frequent and discovering the paths that lead to conversion. It also allows to identify paths that generate pain points and thereby improve the customer experience.  

In turn, it allows us to understand the most common paths customers take prior to cancel, abandon or change productthus helping to anticipate and prevent the risk of leakage. 

Automatically all customers that follow the same path or pattern become a actionable audience to optimize conversion and/or customer satisfaction in the right channel at the right time. 

The multipath Funnel 

The Customer Journey Analytics allows us to interact and understand the paths that new users take when acquiring a product or service, analyze the difference with existing customersor constructing funnels and cohorts based on an in-depth analysis of how customers move in their journeys. 

The way to rebuild the new funnel from the different journeys customer is to identify the conversion funnel key eventsand to recreate the multiple paths between the steps of the funnel.

This allows us to identify the most frequent paths and channelsIt also allows us to calculate the time elapsed between each step of the process, the alternative and optional steps, and the optimal path. It also allows us to calculate the elapsed time between each step of the funnel and in total up to the conversion. 

Once again, all customers that are encountered follow the same path and become a actionable audience suitable for the realization of a type A/B experiment for accelerate conversion in the right channel at the right time.