Chances are you know where most of your conversions happen, but knowing all the touchpoints that took place to actually make those conversions a reality is a different story.
That sequence of touchpoints is called your conversion path. Now looking at that lot of data and getting insights is what you would call conversion path analysis.
Most customers rarely convert instantaneously or within two touch points. Depending on your industry and the type of product or service you’re selling, your customer journeys can include anywhere between 3 to 20+ touchpoints.
On top of that, while ad platforms can tell you the touchpoints and interactions that took place on their systems, they can’t see or show the ones that happened on other platforms.
And to make things even more complex, most ad platforms favor last-touch attribution models, which completely overlooks the channels and campaigns which initiated the journey, and the ones that assisted to finally drive that customer to conversion.
In this article we explain why conversion path analysis is the modern performance marketer’s go-to tactic for campaign optimization. It helps you unravel how your customers interact with your marketing channels and materials so you can make the right decisions when it comes to budget allocation across the funnel.
What is Conversion Path Analysis & Why Every Performance Marketer Should Use It
A conversion path shows you exactly the steps a user or customer takes in their journey to purchase.
One conversion path sequence might look like this:
Meta Ad (mobile) → Organic search (desktop) → Blog visit (desktop) → Google Ad (desktop) → Email Click (mobile) → Purchase (mobile)
If this is a how a good number of your users interact, then you know users engage with multiple channels, and have multiple touchpoints with your brand and content, using several different devices before they buy, across many days.
What conversion path analysis does, is it examines the types of paths users take (like the one above), so you can grasp behaviors and then make marketing decisions that align for better campaign performance.
The analysis involves looking at the various sequences and asking questions like:
- Which channels introduce the customer? (for the above example, it’s Meta)
- Which touchpoints influence purchasing decisions? (Organic search, blog, Google ad & email)
- How many interactions occur before conversion? (5 + the conversion)
- How long does it take users to convert?
- Which channel combinations generate the best revenue?
When you have the answers to these questions, you begin to understand how your customers move through and respond to various marketing campaigns you have running across your traffic channels.
So you move way beyond, last-click reporting, and on to conversion analysis where you can apply different attribution models to get deeper insights on which campaigns and channels work best at which stage of the funnel.
Why Privacy Conrols Have Made Conversion Path Analysis More Difficult
With all the privacy updates that have taken place in recent years, conversion path analysis and tracking has become more difficult because of:
- Browser and cookie restrictions (reducing visibility across sessions)
- Ad blockers (preventing pixels from firing)
- iOS privacy updates (limiting user-level tracking)
- VPN usage (obstructing attribution data)
- Cross-device journeys (causing reporting gaps if you only use platform native reporting)
As a result, most businesses have been forced to make costly ad decisions based on incomplete data and attribution models that don’t reflect the real customer journey.
And this is why many performance marketers are turning to third-party tools like RedTrack, which:
- Operate on first-party, server-side tracking
- Come with Conversion APIs (CAPI) integrations and postbacks
- Offer multiple attribution model analysis
- Track clicks and conversion across multiiple platforms
- Deduplicate and enrich click and conversion data and then send it back to ad platotforms for better algorithm learning
- Centralize all your tracking data it into one dashboard
When you have clean and accurate data to work with, you can finally see which campaigns are genuinely:
- Creating demand
- Assisting conversions
- Capturing purchases
5 Components of Conversion Path Analysis
Before jumping into conversion path analysis, you need to grasp the five key components it’s made up of.
1. Touchpoints
When we say touchpoint, we mean any and every direct interaction the user has with your brand or product.
This can include:
- Paid social clicks & search visits
- Organic search sessions
- Email interactions
- Affiliate referrals
- Direct website visits
- Blog, guide, use case, case study visits
2. Conversion Events
Your conversion events are the actions you want users to take after viewing a particular ad or marketing content.
These are:
- Purchases
- Lead submissions
- Demo requests
- Sign ups (trial or otherwise)
- Subscription purchases
3. Path Length
The path length is the number of touchpoints that happen before a conversion takes place.
- Short paths usually indicate strong demand or high purchase intent
- Long paths normally suggest users need more education, trust or consideration (nurturing) before they make the purchase
4. Time Lag
Your conversion path’s time lag measures the time span between the user’s first interaction and the final conversion.
The time lag you see in your conversion path analysis depends greatly on the industry and product type you’re selling.
- B2C & e-commerce can take anywhere between a few minutes (for fast moving goods like food) to several days or weeks (for fashion and electronics).
- B2B & software generally take longer (anywhere between 2 weeks and 6 months) because they’re not impulse buys and usually require deeper research and budget approvals.
- High consideration B2C products such as cars and real estate can take anywhere between a month to 3 months.
5. Channel Roles
The final thing you need to look at when doing conversion path analysis is which channels play key roles at which stage of the funnel.
Some might only be generating awareness, some might be your nurtures (conversion assisters), and others will be demand capturers.
So you can break them down into three core groups:
- Initiators: These are your first-touch channels and they usually tend to be TikTok, Meta, or LinkedIn.
- Nurturers: These are the channels that help educate and influence users and eventually assist conversions. These will usually be YouTube, blog articles, case studies and white papers.
- Closers: These channels are the ones that normally deliver your actual sales and they tend to be email, direct traffic, branded search and retargeting campaigns across any of the channels you use.
Understanding Conversion Path Reports
A standard conversion path report will normally includes five key metrics:
- Path sequence (all the touchpoints to a conversion)
- Conversions (how often a path converts)
- Revenue (the value generated from each path)
- Touchpoints (the number of interactions before conversion)
- Days to conversion or path length (length of the buying cycle)
When you view these reports, what you should be focusing on are the patterns which seem to be prevalent, rather than individual customer journeys.
That’s the only way you’ll be able to understand how different touchpoints across multiple channels work together to influence and create conversions.
And this is why conversion path analysis is only possible through a tool that can capture entire customer journeys across all your ad traffic channels.
Because native ad platforms only see the touchpoints that occured within their ecosystem, they can’t actually give you the full report on your conversion paths.
RedTrack on the other hand, has a much broader view of user paths. It collects data across multiple channels, and then provides click, cost, conversion and revenue numbers for all your campaigns in one centralized dashboard.
And when you have this as a performance marketer, you can then anlalyze user behavior without being limited to individual platform data.
The Conversion Path Metrics You Should Focus On
Depending on the tool you’re using, you might have dozens of different metrics and charts. What you want to do is focus on are the key ones that provide the most valuable insights.
Start with focusing on these four.
Conversion Path Length
- Group paths into categories (1-2, 3-5 and 6+).
- Look at which category most customers fall into.
Time Lag
- Look at the average number of days it takes for a customer to go from first touchpoint to the conversion.
- Use this amount of time as a guide before you pause a campaign.
- Sometimes strong campaigns and channels appear less effective if you look at them through short attribution windows. It’s important to give your campaigns enough time to make them do their work.
Assisted Conversions
- Look at the channels that play an assisting role in conversions (all the ones that take place between first and last interaction).
- They play a critical role in pushing the user through to the final purchase and they need to keep going if you want to guide that user to the ‘Buy’ stage.
Audience segments
- View conversion paths for specific audience types to reveal how different customers interact with your marketing campaigns across channels.
- You can look at comparisons between:
- New and returning visitors
- Mobile and desktop users
- Different campaign types
How to Analyze Conversion Paths
When the time comes to finally analyze conversion path analysis, start by identifying:
- The paths that generate the most revenue
- The most common channel combinations
- Key drop off points where users abandon the journey
- Main differences between converting and non-converting users
Then, take these insights and combine them with funnel analysis.
While conversion paths reveal how users arrive, funnel analysis shows you what happens once they reach your site.
This is where you’ll discover your points of friction (areas for improvement).
You might find:
- A large number of users leaving after arriving to a specific landing page (meaning the landing page needs fixing).
- Many users starting a form but dropping out after filling out the first few fields (meaning your form is too long).
- Certain blogs seem to be key conversion assisters (meaning it’s the kind of content users find useful so you might mirror the structure, and tone of voice for future blogs).
How to Improve Revenue Using Conversion Path Insights
The key to improving your revenue by using conversion path optimization insights is acting on the learnings you’ve discovered.
In most cases you’ll find three key actions you can take.
Improve High-Converting Journeys
When you see something is delivering stellar results, you’ll want to maximize and reinforce it as much as possible.
So if you see a particular sequence is driving consistent revenue, you’ll want to:
- Do additional retargeting campaigns
- Take it up a notch with personalized messaging
- Apply better audience segmentation
Fix Friction Points
On the other hand, when you see a particular sequence is continuously underperforming, and users are dropping off, you’ll want to:
- Review your landing page and make sure its on-message with the ad that drove the user there
- Look at your form length and make it shorter
- Remove any unnecessary steps
- Change your CTAs to make them clearer and more direct
If you’re using RedTrack, the tool’s near real-time reporting helps you monitor campaigns and conversion paths almost instantaneously (while campaigns are still running), so you can spot performance peaks and drop offs quickly and make changes if needed.
Align Your Messaging to Buying Stages
Finally, you may have good content but you’re pushing it out to users at the wrong stage of the buying journey. So make sure you align your content and messaging to the right buying stages.
- Early-stage users – Focus on messaging that acknowledges the problem and educates.
- Mid-stage users – Fill your messaging with comparison info, testimonials and social proof.
- Late-stage – Include offers, purchase support and a sense of urgency across your marketing assets.
The idea is that you match your messaging to user intent at each stage. This will increase your changes of guiding the user through the entire customer journey.
Why RedTrack Needs To Be Your Foundation Step for Conversion Path Analysis
For conversion path analysis to be worth your time, you need analysis-worthy reporting. There’s no point doing conversion path analysis when you only have part of the customer journey and questionable click and conversion accuracy.
So the absolute first, and foundational step you need to take care of before you incorporate conversion path analysis within your ad campaign reporting workflows is to get your hands on a tool that gathers, cleans and centralizes all your click and conversion data.
RedTrack does exactly that, and more. With server-side tracking, 82% CAPI match rate and first-party click captures for every major ad platform and affiliate network, it guarantees reliable conversion path data.
When you have that, you’re team can get knee-deep in customer sequences and touchpoint analysis to draw conclusions that will drive better campaign performance and guide smarter budget allocations.
Book a demo with one of our people so you can see (not just hear) what makes RedTrack’s reporting system king in the performance and affiliate marketing space.
And if you’re keen to give the platform a go right now, sign up for our 14-day free trial.
