In brief
- Almost nobody buys on the first visit. The purchase comes after several sessions, often on two devices, sometimes two weeks apart.
- The journey has six stages: discovery, comparison, decision, purchase, delivery, repurchase. Each has its customer question, its content and its indicator.
- Comparison is the most neglected stage. You win it by removing uncertainties (full price, real lead time, returns, proof), not by lowering the price.
- Last click makes you cut the wrong levers. Before stopping a campaign that does not convert directly, look at the time between first contact and purchase.
Open your analytics tool and find the conversion paths report. Look at the column that counts the days between first contact and purchase. On most of the small business sites we audit, that delay exceeds a day for a large share of orders, and a week for a significant fraction.
This finding changes how you read everything else. A campaign with no sale on the day is not necessarily a failure: it may be a first-visit campaign, whose effect shows up twelve days later under another label. The real issue is not that your visitors hesitate, it is that most sites are built only for the visit in which people buy.
Nobody decides in one visit, and your reports know it
Take a site that converts at 2%, a common figure in e-commerce. Out of 100 visitors, 98 leave without ordering. The useful question is not how to force those 98 people to buy straight away, but how many will come back and what they will find when they do.
Two mechanisms make these returns hard to see. Changing device first: someone discovers a product on their phone and orders it in the evening from their computer, which makes two separate visitors for your measurement tool, unless a customer account links them.
Then cookie lifespan. Since 2019, Safari has capped cookies set in the browser by JavaScript at seven days. A three-week journey is structurally invisible there with client-side measurement, which is why we advise you to check how reliable your measurement is before analysing anything. As long as you judge a campaign on same-day sales, you are judging the end of the journey, never its beginning.
The six stages and what you must provide at each
A purchase journey is not a succession of pages, it is a succession of questions. At each stage, the customer asks one, and they carry on or stop depending on whether you answer it.
| Stage | The customer’s question | What answers it on your side | The indicator to track |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Does this kind of solution exist? | Editorial content, organic search, awareness advertising | New visitors, searches for your brand name |
| Comparison | Why you rather than someone else? | Comparison page, customer reviews, technical sheet, product FAQ | Visitors returning within 30 days, pages per session |
| Decision | What am I risking? | All-in price, displayed lead time, return conditions, guarantee | Add-to-baskets, contact requests, exits from the product page |
| Purchase | Will it go smoothly? | Short checkout, varied payment methods, costs shown from the first step | Basket abandonment step by step |
| Delivery | Where is my order? | Immediate confirmation, delivery tracking, getting-started guide | “Where is my order” contacts, gap between promised and real lead time |
| Repurchase | Will I come back to them? | Reminder at restocking time, consistent offer, loyalty | Customers placing a second order within 90 days |
Of these six rows, how many can you measure? In most of the small businesses we see, Discovery and Purchase are tracked, the other four not at all.
Comparison, the stage where you lose without knowing it
The middle of the journey is the blind spot. The visitor knows you and opens three tabs to compare you with two competitors. What happens there almost never comes down to price alone, but to uncertainty: between two similar offers, the customer chooses the one that leaves them the fewest unanswered questions.
Four actions reduce that uncertainty without touching your margins. Show the total price including shipping before the basket. Give a lead time in working days, not a range. Write the returns procedure in one sentence rather than pointing to the terms and conditions. Show reviews that talk about the specific product, not the service in general.
Our screen-by-screen friction diagnosis gives the observation method. The stake here is different: it is about what the visitor takes away with them when they close the tab.
After the purchase, the next journey has already begun
The order is not the end of the journey, it is the moment your customer pays most attention to you. They have just spent money, they are waiting for a parcel, they open your emails.
Three moments decide repurchase. The confirmation, which must arrive within seconds with the estimated delivery date and a way to reach someone. Delivery tracking, which avoids anxiety and calls to customer service. And finally first use, where a short guide makes the difference between a product adopted and a product put away in a cupboard. These three moments are the best candidates for automation, as the e-commerce marketing automation scenarios show.
One indicator is enough to know whether this part works: the share of customers who order again within 90 days. If it stagnates, your acquisition has to pay for itself on a single sale and your whole economy rests on advertising.
Last click makes you cut the wrong things
By default, most reports attribute the sale to the last channel clicked. On a one-visit journey, the convention has no consequence. Over twelve days and four touchpoints, it produces a false picture.
| Day | What the person does | What last click attributes |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Sees a video on social media, lands on your blog, leaves | Nothing |
| Day 4 | Searches for your name on Google, views two product pages | Nothing |
| Day 9 | Clicks a retargeting ad, adds to basket, abandons | Nothing |
| Day 12 | Types your address on their phone and orders | 100% of the sale |
That is the mechanism that pushes a manager to cut a useful discovery campaign, because it shows zero direct sales. Since September 2023, Google has removed the first-click, linear and time-decay attribution models from its tools.
Three things to look at instead: conversion paths, which show the sequences of channels actually taken; the time between first contact and purchase, which sets the window for judging a campaign; and the trend in searches for your brand name, the best available signal of the effect of discovery levers. The article on what GA4 brings a business shows where to find them.
The mistake not to make A manager sees that an awareness campaign cost €900 for two attributed sales. They cut it. The following month, revenue holds: journeys started before the cut are still maturing. In the second month, direct visits and brand searches fall. In the third, retargeting and email lose their fuel. The lever that was cut was not unproductive, it was being measured in the wrong place.
What you can do this week
- Pull your median time between first contact and purchase. That figure sets the window over which to judge your campaigns. If it is eleven days, a seven-day review means nothing.
- Measure your share of customers placing a second order within 90 days. Your back office is enough. It is the only indicator that tells you whether your acquisition is profitable beyond the first sale.
- Go through your six stages with the table above and deal, starting from the top, with the first row for which you have neither content nor an indicator.
- Rewrite three elements of your product or offer page: the delivered price, the lead time in working days, the returns procedure in one sentence.
- Call five recent customers. Ask them how long they took to decide and what they looked at elsewhere. An hour on the phone will teach you more than a month of dashboards.
This work comes before testing: optimising a page makes sense when you already know where your visitors stop, as our CRO method for low-traffic sites explains.
What to remember A purchase journey is judged on its duration, not on one session. Two figures are enough to change your decisions: the median time between first contact and purchase, and the share of customers who come back within 90 days.
Frequently asked questions
How many visits does it take on average before an online purchase?
There is no universal average, and relying on a figure found online is the best way to get it wrong. The number of visits varies with average basket, sector and awareness: a €30 purchase is often decided in one session, €2,000 equipment almost never. Pull your own figure from the conversion paths report.
How do you track a customer who moves from mobile to computer?
You need an identifier common to both devices: encourage account creation before purchase, then pass that identifier to your measurement tool. Server-side measurement also improves identifier persistence on browsers that limit the lifespan of JavaScript cookies. Without it, the same customer counts as two visitors.
Should you stop a campaign that generates no direct sales?
Not before checking three points: your median time between first contact and purchase, whether the campaign appears in conversion paths in a position other than last, and the trend in searches for your brand name since it launched. If it often appears as the first touchpoint, cutting it will bring the rest down two to three months later.
Is the purchase journey different in B2B?
The six stages remain the same, but the timescale lengthens, often from several weeks to several months, and several people are involved in the decision, which makes attribution to an individual even less relevant. Comparison there mostly plays out on downloadable documents, customer references and how quickly a quote can be obtained.
Where to pick up the journey in your business
You do not need to rebuild your site to make progress here. You need to know how long your customers take to decide, at which stage they stop and what they do not find on your site at that moment. Those answers are already in your data; they are simply not being looked at.
Our work on user experience and conversion optimisation always starts there: rebuilding the real journey before touching a single page. On measurement, our sister company Datafirefly Limited, publisher of the DataFirefly server-side tracking platform, offers a free plan of 10,000 requests a month to make the tracking of long journeys reliable.
This journey is not the only one. A growing share of your customers discover your brand on a marketplace, where it is the platform’s algorithm that decides what is put forward, not you. The rules are different there, and so is the margin: we detail them in opening a marketplace without losing your margin.
Unsure how long the purchase journey really is in your business? In a first meeting, we pull out together your median time between first contact and order, your share of customers making a second purchase, and the stage where you have neither content nor an indicator. Let’s talk.