Customer Journey

The customer journey is the full sequence of touchpoints and experiences a person has with a brand, from first awareness through purchase and beyond.

Journey mapping is the practice of explicitly laying out each stage and touchpoint (often revealing gaps — moments where a prospective customer has a question or need the current experience doesn't address) rather than just assuming the intended path matches what actually happens. Real customer journeys are rarely as linear as the diagrams that map them, which is part of why attribution modeling is genuinely hard: people bounce between channels and devices in ways a clean funnel diagram doesn't capture.