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The quality of insights that you can expect to glean from clickstream data is directly dependent upon the quality of meta-data that you can attach to visitor sessions taking place on your digital platforms.

Visits, page views, bounce rates, cart abandonment etc. are all great metrics but their utility wanes when it comes to their ability to provide any actionable intelligence about advanced efficiency metrics (attribution, channel ROI etc.) and effectiveness metrics (think strategic business outcomes like market share, category growth etc.).

Advanced metrics inevitably require combining data from various sources and businesses to make …

If you are a marketer, optimizing for conversions is probably etched in bold in your job description. After all, getting users to complete the desired action on your website – be it clicking on a PPC ad, filling up a form, subscribing to the blog, or making a purchase – is the primary objective. The more efficiently you can drive conversions, the more you end up saving in terms of time, money, and effort.

Needless to say, every little tweak you make to your website to convert a visitor into a customer or a passive user into an active one, …

Customer journey mapping is extremely popular and more companies are turning to this practice. In fact, a recent Google search of the term “Customer Journey Maps” turned up 5.3 million results.

What are customer journey maps, and why are they such a big deal?

In short, customer journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s relationship with an organization. They are supposed to allow marketers to understand customer needs and address them effectively.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, customer journey maps are not easy to design and often fail to meet their objective.

Personas, proposed by Alan Cooper, a noted pioneer software developer in the late 1990s, is a method that has gained increasing attention over the years. In fact:

Personas have now become the new standard and a fundamental part of a UX designer and conversion optimizer’ toolkit.

But, many marketers have tried them and given up, so it begs the question:

Are personas as useful as we think?

The most serious limitation of the personas method is that it is difficult or impossible to verify if they’re accurate.

What’s more?

If only CRO was so easy: find the exact point at which the user loses interest in a page. Figure out why. Fix it. Eat a bagel.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’re familiar with the obstacles that prevent this dream from fruition.

For over a decade we have worked hard to figure out ways to simplify this. CRO is never that easy. But identifying problems and figuring out why can be easier than one thinks.

People believe that the key ingredient to making an attractive and useful webpage lies in its design quality. But the real underlying current that drives a visitor forward is the site’s usability and navigation. User satisfaction significantly depends on the informational architecture of a website and how it delivers the necessary information.

When it comes to understanding your customer’s experience, there’s really no easy way. Many turn to customer journey maps. There are positives and negatives that come with customer journey maps, and like any other marketing research and documentation, it comes down to two things:

Identifying the goal and purpose behind it, Knowing how to actually apply and use it.

If you go with customer journey maps, we highly recommend you keep the two criteria in mind.

Editor note: This is a guest post by McKenzie Gregory who is a content writer on the marketing team at Emma.

Consider these two scenarios:

Scenario #1: You’re grabbing a cup of coffee on the way to work. You order what you want, pay for it, get your coffee, and go on your way.

Scenario #2: You’re grabbing a cup of coffee on the way to work. The barista smiles and greets you by name – in fact, he started making your regular order as soon as you walked in. You pay for it (adding a nice tip, of course), get …