Democratising Path to Purchase Insights

Gener8’s interconnected data feeds enable you to understand the customer purchase journey like never before

Google’s ‘Messy Middle’ research highlights that the customer path to purchase is no longer linear, but instead is a complex journey of exploration and evaluation before making a final purchase. Indeed, customers now move through various touchpoints—social media, reviews, search engines and increasingly GenAI agents —constantly oscillating between exploring new options and evaluating those they've discovered. This back-and-forth creates what Google refers to as the ‘Messy Middle’, a phase where consumers cycle between these two mindsets multiple times before making a decision.

While this research framework intuitively makes a lot of sense, the reality for brand owners is that tracking the full customer journey remains a significant challenge. This is because site analytics tools like Google Analytics can show what users do on your site, but they don’t reveal the touchpoints that led them there beyond the referrer. Put simply, brands are blind to whether a customer might have read a review, watched a YouTube video, or explored a competitor's website before finding their site through a Google search.

Gener8 bridges this gap with interconnected datasets that track every step of the customer’s digital journey, allowing brands to see exactly how users arrive at their site and to identify conversion enhancement opportunities. This article will explore how our solution can help brands navigate the Messy Middle and optimise their strategies to drive increased conversions.

‍

Leverage Gener8’s interconnected panel

At Gener8, we have a panel of 100k+ UK users that share multiple datasets linked together through one user ID, which allows us to pinpoint the exact second a customer made a transaction, either through:

• eReceipts from our Purchase Intelligence feed, or
• Visit to the purchase confirmation page from the Consumer Browsing feed

From there we can look backwards in time - whether that is in minutes, hours or days - and identify key touchpoints in the purchase journey, such as:

• Generic searches on search engines
• Visits to a review site mentioning the brand/ product
• Views of relevant videos on YouTube
• Visits to publisher pages mentioning the brand/ product
• Opening of relevant apps

This allows you to gain deeper insights into customer purchasing journeys than ever before, especially since Gener8 is the only platform in the world that connects clickstream behaviour with eReceipt transactions.

This enables you to:

1. Get a macro view of digital customer journeys. Assess the average user purchase journey in terms of pages visited, visits to the basket, and the time taken to complete a transaction from the first visit (see below)
2. Quantify the value of off-site touchpoints. Identify off-site behaviour gaps, such as generic searches and review site visits, and understand their impact on conversion.
3. Benchmark against the industry and competitors. Compare your site’s performance with close competitors and the industry vertical as a whole, highlighting strategic areas for improvement.
4. Zoom into individual customer journeys. Dive deep into unfiltered user journey paths to identify common trends and potential UX enhancements (see below)

‍

See the big picture

So, what are the benefits of having a macro view of customer shopping behaviour? By analysing ASOS purchases over a 30-day period in March-April, we found that customers:

• Visited an average of 36.5 ASOS pages before making a purchase
• Made an average of 2.1 visits to the basket
• Took an average of 3 hours and 27 minutes from the first ASOS page visit to complete the transaction
  
  

This high-level purchase journey data can be utilised for:

• Benchmarking Performance: Whether comparing against competitors or assessing your own site, this information helps to set clear benchmarks for digital shopping behaviour.
• Understanding the Purchase Cycle: It helps to understand how long it takes, on average, for customers to convert, providing crucial data for improving conversion rates.
• Optimising User Experience: For businesses without a sophisticated user site behaviour tracking system, this data is essential in uncovering user actions before they log in or make a purchase, which is often overlooked.
• Identifying Key Drop-Off Points: By understanding the average customer journey, you can pinpoint where customers are disengaging or abandoning their baskets, allowing for targeted improvements.

The ability to see the big picture behind customers’ path to purchase becomes even more powerful when paired with user purchase journey segmentation. For example, by segmenting all ASOS purchases based on a matrix of site visits and time to transaction, we identified three distinct behavioural customer segments:

• Quick Converters – Those who make fast decisions with minimal browsing
• Considered Browsers – Those who take a moderate amount of time or site exploration before purchasing‍
• High-Intent Explorers – Those who spend significant time and explore extensively before completing a transaction

Notably, despite having vastly different purchase journeys, each segment accounts for a roughly equal share of ASOS site visitors—indicating that ASOS would benefit from dedicating attention and resources to all three customer segments.

While analysing ASOS customer segments, we found that High-Intent Explorers are also more likely to be frequent shoppers (i108), typically making two or more purchases per month.

Furthermore, an analysis of segment demographics revealed that Quick Converters typically fall into either lower-than-average or significantly higher income brackets. This polarisation suggests potential for deeper segmentation, as their purchasing behaviour may be driven by distinct motivations—such as price sensitivity in lower-income groups or convenience and time-saving preferences among higher-income individuals.

‍

Zoom in at user level

Gener8’s high data granularity allows you to explore unfiltered user journey paths in detail, enabling you to validate intended user flows and uncover opportunities for UX improvements.

For instance, in the ASOS user journey above we were able to highlight:

• The Google search that drove the user to the women’s tops category page
• The moment that the purchased item’s PDP was first visited
• Off-site cashback browsing behaviour, that ASOS would typically be blind to by going off their site analytics alone

‍

How can I access this data?

We utilised Gener8's Consumer Browsing and Purchase Intelligence datasets to uncover rich path to purchase insights.

Gener8 Labs’ complete data and insights solution empowers media and marketing businesses to find actionable consumer and market insights, using our unique, consented, first party panel data sets that are all connected around one user ID.

Discover how you can power your decisions and gain a competitive edge from our behavioural truth set by contacting us today!

‍