Glossary · Attribuer

Customer journey

The customer journey is the ordered sequence of contacts a person had with a brand before buying. In measurement you never know all of it: you know the touchpoints that left a trace.

Relier une vente à ce qui l’a produite — et refuser d’inventer quand le fil manque. The forty terms of the trade

What it is for

It is what turns a sale into a readable story. Without a journey, a sale is a dot; with one, it becomes a series of decisions you can repeat. It is also the only possible material for multi-touch models: with no recorded journey, a linear model has nothing to split.

How it is reconstructed

You tie a person's clicks together with an identifier, then sort them by date. What was not clicked — a poster seen, a word-of-mouth recommendation, a video watched without a link — is not part of it. The measured journey is therefore always shorter than the real one.

The classic mistake

Mistaking the measured journey for the lived one, then concluding that “customers only have one touchpoint”. In most cases, it is the measurement that only sees one.

Touchpoint

A measured journey, as it is recorded

ClickA story. The person lands on the site. Nothing names them yet.
LeadThey leave their address in a form. The click is tied to them.
TouchpointThey come back through the newsletter. A second touchpoint joins the journey.
SaleThey buy. The amount is split according to the chosen model.

Four beats, and only one of them is a sale. The other three are what make it explainable.

The four beats, shown on the product

What Subtraq does with it

Subtraq records all of a person's valid clicks, not just the first. A partial journey stays partial: when the other touchpoints are unknown, the multi-touch readings say so instead of inventing them.