A GUIDE TO USER

JOURNEY ANALYSIS
A user-centric approach
to understanding your
digital property
Introduction

AUTH O R : Few businesses manage to tie one long string throughout their website’s
Dan Saugstad user experience to help answer critical questions about the user journey.
Sr. Director of Analytics Instead, many incredibly talented UX, analyst, marketing, and product teams
short circuit their success by siloing off their disciplines from each other,
CONT R I B U TO R : causing teams to miss the benefit of a uniformed view that would enable
Parker Smith digital teamwork.
Sr. Digital Analyst
This eBook contains the accumulated experiences of analysts who have
worked on thousands of analyses and know that the impact is largely lost
until they come in and set the foundation with a user journey analysis.
The results of their work have helped some of the world’s most respected
companies uncover valuable insights that shine the brightest against the
context of a larger user journey story.

Moving forward, start thinking of your digital product experience as one

big party. This party can walk you through how to implement user journey
analysis for your organization and answer the following questions:
Introduction
1 2
Why do user
journey analysis?
Definitions and models
4 5
Once they are on your
site, what does their
behavior look like?
Get your shoes off the couch!
3
Where is the largest entry
point to your product?
Where’s the front door
to the party?
6
How do you make sure you’re
getting people to convert and
complete the task they came for?
Close friends move to the kitchen
and break out the good stuff
Who are the users and
how can you best define
or segment them?
Who are your party guests?
After they become
customers, how do you
increase retention and bring
people back regularly?
The after-party
 C H APT ER 1

WHY DO USER
JOURNEY ANALYSIS?
Definitions and models
Why Do User Journey Analysis?
Definitions and models

TH E T R A D I T I O N A L A P P R OAC H O F IS O L AT ING ACQU I SI T I ON , BE HAV I OR, AN D OU TCOME FROM E ACH OTHER

Traditionally, analysts do product analysis in isolation.

Then, they look at The last part an analyst

user behavior, digging
Analysts look at into questions such as
acquisition to answer “What are users doing
questions about where on a site?” “How do users
users are coming from. get to the product pages?”
and “What is up with our
cart abandonment rate?”
looks at is outcomes. They
create separate dashboards
for revenue and conversion,
revenue per visit, and
dashboards that get sent
all the way up to the highest
level in their organization.

This is the traditional model for executing product analysis. Due to our business environments, analysts are siloed off from
the departments they are servicing. Instead, analytics should have a seat at the table with all department leads so the data
gets democratized better and raises questions from other leaders.
Why Do User Journey Analysis?
Definitions and models

TH E CO GN E T I K U S ER J O U R N E Y A NA LYS IS M O DE L

We have built a model that focuses on the user pathway to trace a unifying thread
through isolated analyses of acquisition, behavior, and outcomes.

This model adapts to business needs much faster, making user journeys better each
time. Furthermore, as standard practices break sites into little funnels that isolate various
user journeys, our model layers user-segment-specific behavior on top of a broad net of
interconnected site-wide funnels. Bringing all this together as a cohesive strategy has
helped our Fortune 1000 clients uncover incremental revenue that was thwarted by
bad user experience, and we’re excited to be able to standardize this practice with
the publishing of this eBook.

The Cognetik User Journey Analysis Model will set the foundation for any analytics
practice, big or small, to eliminate isolated product analysis. Our model helps develop
a mature analytics practice by promoting informed user journey optimization and will
show you how to give users the best journey to fulfill whatever task they’re trying to
accomplish, making that experience better over time.
Why Do User Journey Analysis?
Definitions and models

Alright, let’s get this party started…

 C H APT ER 2

IDENTIFYING THE USER ENTRY POINT:

WHERE’S THE FRONT DOOR?
Understanding acquisition
and entry points
Identifying the User Entry Point
Where’s the front door?
U N DE RSTAN DI N G ACQU I SI T I ON SOU RC ES
When throwing a party, it’s helpful to know
where your guests are coming from. What
kind of neighborhood do they live in?
Are they coming from some swanky rich
neighborhood? Probably shouldn’t buy a
cheap bottle of wine if you want to impress.
Similarly, the source of your traffic for your
digital property is going to play a key role in
understanding how users will perform. If they
are coming from a search engine, there’s a
good chance they have an intent that will
line up with the landing page experience
they get, and it will be deep within your
site. This is where you need to understand
metrics like bounce rate and exit rate. They
will vote with their feet, or I guess you could
say, mouse. By understanding your traffic
sources and their tendencies, you’ll be able
to isolate issues you might have right out
the gate. Do you have a high bounce rate
for paid search traffic? If this is the case,
the ad copy probably isn’t lining up with
their landing page experience, causing
users to split in a heartbeat. We’ve seen
many sites where paid search wasn’t going
to a finely tuned landing page specific for
the marketing endeavors and ad copy.
Instead, the site is dropped on a poorly
designed search results page with a horrible
search algorithm. The irrelevance of the
landing experience turns visitors around
immediately. In these instances, isolate
whether you are playing to your
weaknesses as a product team.
Identifying the User Entry Point
Where’s the front door?

TIP

You can create segments for each traffic

source as they would be defined by your
marketing team. Then, you can pull those
sources across your user journey funnel to
see if they act entirely different from each
other. If they do, they might be your key
user segments that inform the rest of your
analysis. If they tend to coagulate around
entry pages because you have an immature
marketing program, then the next step is
landing pages.

Image Credit: Macrovector

Identifying the User Entry Point
Where’s the front door?

UNDER STA N D I N G TO P EN T RY P O INT S

To make sure your home is as inviting as possible to the masses coming to your party, you’ve
got to pay attention to the front door. You don’t want your guests sauntering into the backyard
only to get mauled by Fido and his little dog complex.

For your digital property, turn your attention to your entry points. Where do your users tend
to gravitate toward? Find these things out at the get-go:

+ If you are dealing with a native app, this might be simple. Nearly all of your traffic is going
to come into your app at the home screen unless there is a mature marketing program
that has some deep linking efforts for their acquisition. You may also have a strong loyalty
program that is tied to email marketing that brings app users into a specific part of the app.

+ If you are dealing with a website, then you have many entry points. These entry points can
be categorized as search results pages, product pages, and the homepage.
Identifying the User Entry Point
Where’s the front door?

Keep in mind that every vertical is different. Digital properties

with a low percentage of traffic going to the homepage won’t
require much time spent there compared to another that may
have 90% of traffic going to the homepage! If you have a world-
recognized brand name and a simple product, there probably
won’t be much variance on the entry points.

Nine times out of ten, you can use entry points as one of the
key factors in the user segments that will be pulled across your
entire analysis, with acquisition source being a close second
factor in your segment. The other one out of ten would be
acquisition source as the key factor in that segment.
 C H APT ER 3

IDENTIFYING & SEGMENTING USERS:

WHO ARE YOUR PARTY GUESTS?
Developing your user segments
Identifying & Segmenting Users
Who are your party guests?
WHAT T YPE O F S EG M EN T S S H O U L D YO U C R EAT E ?
This is where you will want to be a bit
exclusive with who you invite to the party.
It’s important to see what you can find
out about your guests and their behavior.
You definitely don’t want your friends from
church finding out you have a thousand-
bottle wine cellar and a humidor the size
of an ottoman.
The same concept applies to your
digital property. You can start using your
acquisition channels and entry points as
part of your segments, or they could just
be the beginning point of your analysis. It’s
really up to the data you are seeing at this
point. If you have a user that comes from
a particular referral source, lands on your
career page, and exhibits behavior that is
different from other users when consuming
content, then you have a user segment right
there. However, if you mostly have direct
traffic to your URL, and almost everyone is
starting on your homepage, then the only
other differentiator you have is a product-
finding method.
NOTE
The product-finding method is very manual,
and Cognetik has many years of experience
in it. We are constantly improving the
process to get better statistical significance.
We are also speeding up the process by
using clustering as a method for finding
out segments faster and isolating some
we might not have seen with such a
manual process in the past. We will focus
on the manual product-finding method
for all the analysts out there that may
not have the capability to fire up R and
do some clustering.
Identifying & Segmenting Users
Who are your party guests?
TIP
What really helps you understand
if your segments are any good is to
make them mutually exclusive. If you
have a couponing feature on your
digital property, you could look at
those who use it and those who
never touch it.
This data may reveal how users really Something that seems so small can actually
interact with your digital property. Do you have a large impact on a set of valuable
have a very defined segment of users who users who convert on your digital property.
come solely to browse your coupons to save
money on their purchases and need to be
inspired to purchase? What about users
who come for a very specific purpose, like
wanting the fastest method to find their
product through a search feature? If you
cringe at the possibility of having a horrible
search experience on your digital property,
this is important. You might need to create
mutually exclusive segments of those that
use search only, those that use category
trees to browse only, and those that use
both. What is their overall journey like? What
is their conversion like?
These are great arguments for investing
in technology improvements for search.
Identifying & Segmenting Users
Who are your party guests?

T RY I T YO U R S E L F

An experienced analyst can typically go to any website

without having access to their data, go through the
flow of the site, isolate out flows, and make a pretty
good guess at how these user segments (based off
the product-finding method) will separate out. One
practice Cognetik has for this is printing out the entire
website, taping them in a sequence on a whiteboard,
and then drawing lines between them. This will help
you visualize the whole digital property and figure out
which pain points you need to isolate once you’ve
created your user segments.
Identifying & Segmenting Users
Who are your party guests?
S MA L L S C R E E N , B I G S C R E E N , WE A L L S C R E AM FOR SP EC I FI C SC RE E N S!
Cheesy as it may sound, don’t forget device
category. When presenting an analysis,
the last thing you want asked is: “Is this on
mobile or desktop?” Granted, native app
analytics don’t apply to this, but you’ll find
that this one dimension will double the
amount of work you are likely going to
have to do in this analysis.
You may be asking yourself, “With a
multitude of channels, various entry points,
and likely two devices categories, how many
segments am I supposed to make? And how
in the world am I supposed to visualize this
succinctly on a powerpoint presentation for
people who have little context but still drive
data-driven decisions for this business?” Well,
that’s why we all still have jobs, my friend.
This will literally double your insights,
but it’s a necessary evil since people still
use desktop computers! Gone are the
days of adding that slide showing mobile
devices trending to surpass desktop in
the future, leading you to be scoffed out
of the conference room because no one
needs to be prepared for that utopian
future. These users will have different entry
points, different goals, and vastly different
completion and conversion rates, and
unfortunately, that’s not changing anytime
soon. If this was easy, everyone would
do it, and we wouldn’t write an eBook
about it! But we’re here to help.
 C H APT ER 4

OBSERVING USER BEHAVIOR: GET

YOUR SHOES OFF THE COUCH!
Understanding your users’ behavior
across your digital property
Observing User Behavior
Get your shoes off the couch!

MA P IT O U T

When you’re at the party, it’s important to keep an eye on the crowd, especially for those
under-aged kids sneaking into the party that can get you locked in the slammer. Even party
guests with feet on the couch can be a nuisance! This is where mapping out your digital
property, as mentioned in the previous chapter, comes in handy.

We recommend you print out the entire experience of your digital property so you can see at a
glance what the whole flow looks like. From here, you’ll discover many things you didn’t see before
because now the experience is linear and all parts are visible. This process can shine a light on
some serious pain points and make you ask surprising questions like, “We have nine unique ways
for a user to sign up for our loyalty program?” Yes, it can be that bad. And sometimes, no one really
knew except some product designers that don’t have access to the data that supports the fact
that diluting such a critical flow hurts your overall odds of user satisfaction and conversion. In
short, mapping it out will help you keep a keen eye on the whole environment.

Once the mapping process is complete, you may hear the phrase, “Quantify this/that” a lot.
In essence, you have visually identified your flows and any possible redundancies. Then, you
want to know how many of your users actually experience this flow or that flow. Pull all users
across to get a general trend, and then pull in your new user segments to see if there is one
that over-indexes to one experience.
Observing User Behavior
Get your shoes off the couch!

At this point, your key metrics are exit rates, pageviews

per visit, completion rates, and conversion.

You want to identify the pain points that

show up in high exit rates because it shows
that your users don’t enjoy the experience.

You may also see high pageviews per visit

because users are going back and forth out
of pure confusion on what they’re supposed
to do in the flow.

Analyzing your completion rate will show how

the user falls out between steps and gives you
an identifiable benchmark for whether your
upcoming optimizations will actually improve
the user experience.

Finally, looking at conversion rates will show you

just how much a bad flow can impact your chance
of users completing the task you want them to.
Observing User Behavior
Get your shoes off the couch!

B REAK I T O U T

Your next step will be to break out each
area of the digital property by the product
owner. This will help you give them their
source of truth for how they will measure
and understand what they are responsible
for in the end. You will have sections like
Homepage, Search, Browse, Product
Page, and Cart. Even though the main
goal is to stretch out your user segments
across the entire digital property to get one
united theme, it’s important to help your
product managers make their portion of the
funnel better. Also, since you will likely be
presenting this to leadership, you don’t want
to air all the dirty laundry. Instead, just let the
main pain points that impact the overall user
experience and bottom line bubble up.
Usually, you have two sections when you
break out your digital property: Executive
Summary and Deep Dive. Executive
Summaries tend to be as long as the Deep
Dives, which is because the slides should be
simplified to focus the attention of those with
little context. Then, the Deep Dive consists
of slides with lots of data and many more
points. It should read like a blueprint for
the problems and solutions for the
actual product owners.
 C H APT ER 5

CONVERTING & COMPLETING THE TASK:

CLOSE FRIENDS MOVE TO THE KITCHEN
& BREAK OUT THE GOOD STUFF
Focusing on conversion as the main
goal of your user experience
Converting & Completing the Task
Close friends move to the kitchen
& break out the good stuff

TH E FE W, T H E VA LUA B L E

You’re now at the point where you want to highlight the most important folks at the party. These For example, you may hear a product
are the ones who put up with your lame living room furniture because they actually like you. owner or executive say,

This same theory also applies to your users. Any user who gets to the point of conversion might
“Wait, you’re telling me that people
still be frustrated by poor communication and half-met expectations, but they tolerate any
who sign up for our loyalty program
hiccups because of what you have to offer. So, here you have two goals. First, you should drive
on a mobile phone are worth 3X more
more of the general population into your user experience. Second, you should deepen the
than those who do it on a desktop?”
relationships with those already in the funnel. Basically, you want to focus on the value you give
your users who have become customers, and use that as your leverage for gaining more.

No product owner or executive will say they don’t want more revenue, but you have to quantify
A great response would be,
what each converting user makes for them, and then use that to show why they should invest
in fixing the barriers that keep more users from becoming customers.
“Not only that, I’m telling you that
they sign up half as much as those
At this point, you’re using lots of segments. However, you want to
on a desktop device. What do you
TIP mostly focus on the insights you gain from the outcome (conversion
think of them loyalty apples?”
and user value) of the user journey through your digital property.
Converting & Completing the Task
Close friends move to the kitchen
& break out the good stuff
LE T ’S BRE AK OU T T HE GOOD ST U FF. 1 8 -YE AR, SI N G LE MALT SCOTCH ANYONE?
At this point in the party, you know what
your friends think about the ugly blue paint
on your front door. You’ve heard all the jokes
about how their grandma has the same
couch, but even hers isn’t covered in plastic.
And your real friends are wondering why
you let that creepy guy in the black trench
coat stare at them uncomfortably the whole
night in the kitchen (going full Orin, am I
right?). But at this point, your goal is really
to cement the relationship with those few
friends you actually value, so you break
out the $200 bottle.
For user journey analysis, let’s just say
that A/B testing is the 18-year-old, single
malt scotch. And you, my friend, need
to be to optimization what “The Nose”
Richard Paterson is to whiskey (if you’re lost,
google it and you’re welcome). Every single
recommendation that comes out of your
masterful insights must be positioned as an
A/B test. And unfortunately, it’s common for
a new feature launch to go horribly wrong
because the data didn’t support what was
happening in the real world. You can run all
the UX lab experiments you want, you can
pull year-over-year trends of clicks on that
unsightly brown button, but launching a
new experience without testing it in
iteratively larger random samples of
users can spell disaster.
Converting & Completing the Task
Close friends move to the kitchen
& break out the good stuff

A DVI C E

Cover your career butt, and move your

organization to a culture of testing out
the hypotheses that surface from your
analysis. Don’t shoot in the dark. All of this
will eventually lead to a growing fan base
of conversion, a better user experience,
and an increase in revenue.
 C H APT ER 6

INCREASING CUSTOMER
RETENTION: THE AFTER-PARTY
Okay, let’s land this bird...
Increasing Customer Retention
The after-party

WHER E ’ S T H E R U N WAY ? WE G OT TA L A N D T H I S BI RD

Michael Pena and Paul Rudd have a great comedic dialogue in Ant Man & the Wasp: So the main goal is to make sure that in the
end, you’re not a fish trying to swim up on
LU I S shore and battle a hawk. At the party, guests
...I’m running the company, right? And if we overquote him, have been slowly exiting, but your tight-knit
he’s gonna go somewhere else, I mean we gotta land this bird. crew is in the kitchen, drinking all of the good
SCOTT stuff. At this point in the evening, you may be
He ain’t going anywhere. And the expression is, “landing this fish.” wondering how to keep the party going. Or
LU I S better yet, how to get them to come back for
another celebration. With all the work put in,
No, it’s land the bird. Just like you land the plane.
it’s time to really land this bird and make
You gotta land the plane to be in business.
SCOTT sure you’ve got yourself a committed,
loyal set of friends.
I know it’s silly to get hung up on these kinds of things but I do...
LU I S

But how am I going to land a fish? It can’t walk! And if it

swam up on shore, and it battled a hawk, who’s gonna win?
SCOTT

You really turned me around on this thing, it’s ok we’re gonna land [the business]
Increasing Customer Retention
The after-party

You’ve got an immense amount of data, insights, and recommendations that you need
to compile into a digestible format to drive your business forward. As a refresher, we
do this by building our presentation in two parts: Executive Summary and Deep Dive.

So the question is, how do you get from Deep Dive to an Executive Summary? This is
also done in two parts. One can be shared, and the other is the Cognetik secret sauce.

1. First, we get old school and tell Larry over in legal to fire up the HP LaserJet, and we print
out our entire Deep Dive again. Now to do this, you’re gonna need either a very large
conference table or a good size area on the floor. To see the insights that are bubbling up
to the surface, go ahead and lay out the entire presentation in one view. And if you are going
to do it, try to be in a better mood than we were when a picture was taken of the process…

2. Your next step is to start listing out the major insights you found and start arranging them
in order of importance. You want to have a good idea of the overarching story here, and
also how impactful your insights/recommendations really are. Now, you have to decide
what is the best logical sequence to arrange these in and how you will build that narrative.
Increasing Customer Retention
The after-party

Your narrative can be deductive or inductive, depending on the situation.

Deductive means you spill the beans in the beginning and then walk through the details. To be honest,
we would do this only if there are very few insights, such as one really big one, and just supporting details.

On the other hand, when you have four or five major insights and they all lead to the biggest one, then inductive would be
your best bet.

Inductive means that you follow a rising narrative hook (usually some comparative insight), rising storyline of the user
experience and why this is important, then knock ‘em dead with the “aha” moment of the impact to the business.

Honestly, the complete framework for how we arrange our insights is a trade secret that can only be shared with our analysts.
It’s our secret sauce because it took years to realize the best way to organize these points.

Either way, at this point you should have a compelling narrative that distills all of your analyses across an entire digital property,
spanning hundreds of metrics and dimensions. Putting all this together into one presentation will really show off your data-conjuring
and storytelling prowess. How dare your audience not take immediate action and give you the title of Party Master?
 GO HOME DATA, YOU ’RE DRU N K

Well folks, it looks like the party’s over and you’re drunk
on data and the possibilities of a promotion. Go home,
get some sleep, and don’t be too ashamed of the
things you said in your insights-driven stupor!
About Cognetik

We empower digital leaders with insights and products to accelerate decision-making,

improve digital experiences, and become data-driven organizations.

To succeed today, organizations must consolidate data from every touchpoint and generate clear
insights to continuously improve every element of their digital business. Our team of thinkers and builders
partner with Fortune 1000 clients to help them chart a clear, confident, and data-driven path to get the
most out of their analytics operations, gain a competitive advantage, and increase revenue.
Contact us today at
Sales@Cognetik.com
or www.Cognetik.com