Customer journey analytics track and analyse the behaviour of users from the moment they find your brand to the post-purchase experience.
These tools collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data, helping you to reduce friction and increase conversions through A/B testing and conversion rate optimisation.
Finding a tool that can do all this while still protecting your users’ privacy can be tricky. But we’re here to help.
In this article, you’ll learn what customer journey analytics is, how you can use these tools and what to look for when choosing your own. You’ll even find detailed reviews of the best customer journey analytics tools available today.
What are customer journey analytics tools?
Customer journey analytics tools collect, analyse and visualise buyer interactions across multiple touchpoints and channels.
Through customer journey analysis, marketers can better understand where users come from, how they navigate websites, where they get stuck and what makes them convert.
Unlike traditional analytics tools that focus on isolated metrics or channels, customer journey analytics tools provide a cohesive view of the entire experience. They help marketers create a rich customer journey map that reflects thousands of different user experiences.
To do this, tools use several data collection methods, including:
By integrating quantitative data — what customers do — with qualitative insights — why they do it — these tools help businesses understand customer behaviour on a much deeper level.
Imagine a SaaS brand finds that its checkout page has a really high bounce rate. Using session recordings, they see that one of the buttons breaks on mobile devices, preventing people from making purchases.
It’s an easy problem to fix, but they only discovered it because of their customer journey analytics tool’s session recording capabilities.
Seven of the best customer journey analytics tools
With so many analytics tools to choose from, it can be hard to know where to begin your search.
We’ve made things easier by reviewing seven of the top tools on the market and highlighting their features, use cases, and pricing.
1. Matomo
Matomo app analytics is a powerful, open-source platform that provides a range of behavioural analysis, segmentation and marketing attribution features while still putting data privacy first.
Privacy is a huge concern for businesses these days. Unlike other tools, Matomo helps you comply with data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA with ease. It’s completely open-source (so you can see how the platform collects data) and even offers a self-hosted option, so only you have access to your data.
Privacy shouldn’t come at the expense of customer insights, though. Matomo offers marketers everything they could need from a customer journey analytics tool, including:
- Session recordings, heatmaps and visitor logs that trace the entire customer journey, identify friction and help you improve the user experience
- Customer segmentation tools to analyse how different groups interact with your site
- Retroactive analysis and near-real-time monitoring of website interactions, giving you insights into how recent changes affect behaviour and conversions
- A clean, user-friendly interface that even non-technical employees can start using immediately
Pricing starts from $26 per month for cloud hosting. On-premise hosting is free.
2. Glassbox
Glassbox is a digital customer experience analytics platform that delivers powerful insights through its Augmented Journey Map™ feature.
Glassbox journey map
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Glassbox’s platform captures every user session across your digital channels without you having to tag events manually. This helps it create a comprehensive map of every customer journey, which marketers can use to:
- Identify struggle points, conversion blockers and opportunities for optimisation across websites and mobile apps.
- Understand the why behind user behaviour thanks to session replay capabilities and heatmaps.
- Understand the potential lost revenue of friction and prioritise improvements accordingly.
Glassbox also offers AI-powered insights that automatically identify anomalies and potential optimisation opportunities. The platform’s real-time alerting capabilities help businesses respond quickly to emerging issues before they significantly impact conversion rates.
Pricing is available upon request.
3. Fullstory
Fullstory is a digital experience analytics platform that helps businesses to understand, optimise and personalise their customers’ journeys across web and mobile applications.
Fullstory’s new user activation dashboard
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The tool has everything you’d expect from an analytics platform. It uses auto-capture technology to record every user interaction automatically, identifying friction points and conversion drop-offs.
Marketers can pair the journey maps the tool creates with funnels, conversion tracking and segmentation to see why specific users succeed or fail.
Other key features include:
- Sentiment signals to give marketers automatic alerts when users show signs of frustration. It lets them tackle friction before it leads to an abandoned cart.
- Session replays that bridge quantitative and qualitative analytics, letting teams watch real user sessions to understand the “why” behind the “what”.
- AI-driven insights, real-time alerts and retroactive data analysis help teams quickly spot trends, identify pain points and validate improvements.
Pricing is available upon request. There is a limited free plan.
4. Hotjar
Hotjar is a behaviour analytics tool that helps businesses understand how users interact with their websites and products. It specialises in heatmaps and session recordings that provide qualitative insights into buyer behaviour.
Hotjar heatmaps feature
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Hotjar’s intuitive visual analytics tools provide a clear view of exactly how visitors interact with websites. Heatmaps, for example, provide visual representations of how users interact with website pages, showing where they click, move and scroll. This visual approach means you don’t need to be an analytics expert to understand user behaviour and identify optimisation opportunities.
Other features include:
- Session recordings, which let you watch user sessions to see frustration events in person
- User feedback tools, including on-site surveys and pop-ups that collect qualitative data about buyer motivations and intentions
- User tests, which let marketers run optimisation experiments at scale from within the platform
Pricing starts from $49 per month. There’s a free forever plan that includes unlimited heatmaps.
5. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product and customer analytics platform that tracks and analyses user interactions across web and mobile apps. Its main strength lies in providing insights into how users engage with your product.
Mixpanel product metrics
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Event-based analytics let businesses understand exactly how people progress through their digital experience. Mixpanel provides a wealth of qualitative data in the form of product analytics. But you can support that with qualitative findings from session recordings, too.
Other features include:
- Cohort analysis enables you to observe how different user segments progress through each journey stage
- Retention analysis helps you understand which features and experiences drive long-term engagement
- Multi-touch attribution lets you measure the true result of your marketing activities and find channels with the most impact.
- A/B testing for comparing and analysing the performance of different webpage variants
Mixpanel is free to use initially. Enterprise customers will need to request more information.
6. Heap
Heap Analytics is a product analytics platform that automatically captures and analyses every user interaction on your website and app. It provides a complete view of the customer journey.
Heap marketing KPI dashboard
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Unlike traditional analytics platforms that require manual tagging, Heap automatically captures all user interactions, allowing businesses to analyse behaviour retroactively.
This makes Heap particularly good for comparing and contrasting behaviour as your app and website develop. You can get a feel of which updates immediately improved the user experience and which took time to get used to.
Other customer journey analytics features include:
- Session replays let you go in and see precisely why a specific user didn’t convert.
- Effort analysis helps you find, quantify and remove friction from your funnel.
- Rage click maps and alerts highlight when users grow frustrated and click repeatedly on your site.
- Segmentation analysis lets you compare the journeys of behaviour-driven user cohorts.
A limited free plan is available. Pricing is available on request.
7. Appier AIRIS (formerly Woopra)
Appier AIRIS, formerly Woopra, is a marketing analytics platform that provides a holistic view of everyone who visits your site. Near-real-time analytics let you see who’s making a payment, browsing your product pages or opening your emails.
Appier AIRIS journey map
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Appier AIRIS helps you build detailed customer profiles and use them to personalise the user experiences. The platform’s integration with AIQUA’s personalisation platform means you can create highly personalised experiences.
Other features include:
- Optional journey reports to visualise the impact of touchpoints on customer success
- Multi-touch attribution to understand the impact your campaigns had on conversions
- Cohort analysis to segment by date, geography, device, source, job title and more
Pricing starts from $49 per month. A limited free plan is available.
What can you do with customer journey analytics?
Customer journey analytics tools are incredibly versatile. They can pinpoint what stops users from converting or track how they behave after they purchase.
Eventually, marketers should use them to track the entire customer journey. But if you’re new to customer journey analytics, consider starting with one of the following use cases.
Personalise the customer experience
Use customer journey analytics to understand what your customers need and want — then provide them with the perfect, personalised experience.
Cohort analysis — a form of behavioural analytics where you analyse the behaviour of users who share similar traits — makes this possible.
An analytics tool with cohort analysis functionality lets you group users by the actions they take (downloading a gated asset, making a purchase or leaving a page, etc.) or demographics (where they’re from, which device they use, etc.)
Different cohorts experience your product or service differently. So mapping and analysing cohort-specific journeys lets you optimise the experience for each group at every touchpoint.
Take smartphone users. Their browsing experience will be very different from that of desktop users. Understanding the specific differences will let you personalise your mobile site to improve the experience and increase conversions.
Reduce churn
Churning is a fact of life for SaaS brands and other subscription businesses. While it isn’t possible to eliminate churn, you can take action to reduce it with customer journey analytics.
By analysing the journeys of people who churned compared to those who remained loyal, businesses can identify specific points of friction or problems that result in an unsubscribe.
Once you know why customers churn, you can take a proactive approach to retaining the ones you have.
Suppose the results show that decreased login frequency and increased support ticket submissions are predictors of churn, for instance. Customer success teams can then email users who haven’t logged in for several months to ask them what’s wrong.
Conversely, you can identify the actions that predict strong customer loyalty, such as completing onboarding experiences and utilising multiple features, and take steps to encourage existing customers to exhibit similar behaviour.
Reducing churn by even a small percentage can significantly impact revenue and profitability, making it one of the most valuable applications of journey analytics.
Find and eliminate friction
Customer journey analytics excels at identifying friction points that prevent customers from completing desired actions. By analysing where customers struggle, hesitate or abandon actions, businesses can identify and prioritise improvements that have the most significant impact on conversion rates.
It will be much more critical (and profitable) to fix any friction customers experience during the checkout process compared to your homepage, for example.
You’ll want to combine quantitative metrics (analytics KPIs like time on site and bounce rate) with qualitative insights captured through session recordings and heatmaps to paint a complete picture of user frustration. While web analytics reveal where problems occur, session recordings show exactly how customers experience these issues — and, most importantly, how to fix them.
Attribute and increase conversions
Understanding which marketing channels and touchpoints contribute most effectively to conversions is essential for optimising marketing spend. Use the multi-touch attribution models in your customer journey analytics tools to understand how different interactions influence purchase decisions.
While traditional last-click attribution models give all credit to the final touchpoint, multi-touch attribution offers more sophisticated results that distribute credit across two or more interactions. They uncover the early-stage touchpoints that play a crucial role in initiating customer journeys that ultimately lead to conversion.
When you know every channel that contributes to a conversion, you can make better decisions and allocate your marketing budget more effectively. If SEO significantly outperforms social, for example, you can choose to spend your social budget on content marketing efforts.
What to look for in a customer journey analytics tool
The number of customer journey analytics tools extends far beyond our shortlist above. Narrow down your search by looking for a tool with all of the following features:
Customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping is essential for understanding complex customer paths.
Matomo lets you connect different customer journey paths to clear goals — like purchases, signups, or downloads. This allows teams to:
- Monitor how users progress toward key outcomes
- Segment journeys by goal completion
- Compare paths across personas
By segmenting journeys based on whether users completed a goal or conversion, it’s easier to see what’s working well and repeat those patterns.
Choose tools that provide visual representations of every customer journey and let you break down journeys by behavioural or demographic cohorts.
Pay particular attention to tools that generate journey maps based on actual behaviour data rather than hypothetical journeys. Google Analytics, for example, is notorious for using data sampling, whereas Matomo gives you 100% accurate data.
Behavioural analysis
Behavioural analysis tools help businesses understand what customers do and why they do it. Choose a platform that combines quantitative and qualitative tools, like:
- Session recordings
- Heatmaps
- User feedback collection
For more detailed analysis, Matomo Form Analytics goes deeper into how users interact with forms, breaking down:
- Where they hesitate
- What they skip
- When they drop off
The more qualitative and quantitative feedback you can gather, the better.
Marketing attribution
Attribution modelling helps marketers understand which channels contribute most significantly to conversions.
Finding a tool that offers multiple attribution models is key. Matomo, for example, provides the following models:
- First interaction
- Last interaction
- Linear
- Position-based
- Time decay
As a result, you can shift marketing budgets to channels with the most significant impact and track changes over time.
Segmentation
Segmentation tools let you break users up into cohorts that share characteristics.
Segmentation should extend beyond simple demographic or acquisition-based groups to include behavioural and engagement-based segments. This more sophisticated approach helps businesses understand the relationship between customer behaviours and journey outcomes.
In Matomo, for example, you can segment visitors by the date they convert, the first time they visited your site and several behavioural metrics, like their browser or device.
Custom reporting
Customisable reports ensure insights reach the right stakeholders in the most helpful format. Choose a tool that lets you create tailored reports highlighting the metrics most relevant to specific teams or business objectives.
While Matomo’s standard reports are great for most use cases, we know every business has unique needs. That’s why you can choose from over 200 dimensions and metrics to build the specific reports your stakeholders require.
Data privacy
Data privacy matters when you’re collecting customer journey data.
GDPR and CCPA compliance features help businesses meet their legal obligations while collecting valuable journey insights. The best tools include features for protecting PII, managing consent and handling data subject requests.
Bonus points if the tool gives you complete control over customer data, preferably storing it on your own servers rather than third-party cloud services
You can configure Matomo to follow even the strictest privacy laws, such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD and PECR.
Your users will never feel like they’re being tracked, either. The platform has an opt-out mechanism, the ability to anonymise IP addresses and can be configured to avoid processing any personal data.
Optimise your customer journeys with Matomo
Customer journey analytics tools are essential for marketers who want to understand and improve the customer experience.
With Matomo, you can:
- Credit conversions across channels with Multi-Touch Marketing Attribution
- Understand which journeys lead to conversions
- Segment journeys by persona or traffic source
- Use Form Analytics to identify drop-off points
- Optimise UX with Session Recordings and Heatmaps
Whether you’re optimising a signup form or scaling a campaign, you have what you need to take action.
Start your 21-day free trial today to explore the platform’s full customer journey analytics features — no credit card required.
