Customer Journey Insights is a new Google Ads Overview page reporting card pilot for eligible advertisers. It provides transparency into how your campaigns move users across conversion journey stages. For example, Aware, Consideration, Act, and demonstrates the long-term value of your ads beyond short-term sales.
This card shows by default on your Overview’s Home page if your account is eligible. You can also add this card in any Custom views. To optimize your campaigns, learn more About Performance Max campaigns.
On this page
- Benefits of Customer Journey Measurement
- How Customer Journey Measurement works
- Eligibility and availability
- Key considerations for Customer Journey Measurement
Benefits of Customer Journey Measurement
Current ads measurement in Google Ads focuses heavily on final conversions. This approach doesn't capture the hidden value your ads create earlier in the customer journey. Customer Journey Measurement (CJM) helps you measure and understand this hidden impact.
Customer Journey Measurement offers several key benefits:
- Understand user movement: Gain transparency into how your campaigns move users through key journey stages to help you optimize budget allocation.
- Surface hidden long-term value: Measure how your campaigns drive long-term business growth, even if they don’t lead to immediate checkout conversions.
- Defend your marketing investments: Use comprehensive customer journey data to justify and protect your ad spend on campaigns that take more time to drive final sales.
How Customer Journey Measurement works
The Customer Journey Measurement Insights card uses 2 tabs to help you analyze customer behavior at the campaign level:
- Customer journey tab: Displays the number of unique users who interacted with your campaigns before and after your ad ran. It tracks movement across 4 stages: Unaware, Aware, Consider, and Act.
- User actions tab: Reports the total count of leading user actions, such as branded searches or adding to cart that occurred within each journey stage.
We analyze historical user journey data to define a set of rules that are used to determine which journey stage a user belongs to, depending on how likely the same user will subsequently complete a deep conversion following observed leading user actions. Users will be categorized into the stage if any of the stage-corresponding criteria below is met. Currently, eligible ad interactions include physical clicks and engaged views across Search and YouTube.
|
Journey stage |
Unaware |
Aware |
Consider |
Act |
|
Definition (based on data from the past 30 days) |
User had no observed actions with respect |
On Search:
On YouTube:
Google Ads conversion tracking:
|
On search:
On YouTube:
Google Ads conversion tracking:
Other
|
Google Ads conversion tracking:
|
Suppose a user has no prior ad interactions or conversions with your business for 30 days. Our models categorize them as Unaware.
If the user views your YouTube ad or clicks your Search ad, they might search for your brand. This action moves them from the Unaware stage to the Consider stage, representing a positive customer journey movement.
If a user interacts with multiple campaigns during its customer journey, our attribution system currently does not differentiate which campaign is causing the reported stage movement, but the same user is counted only once across those campaigns.
Eligibility and availability
Customer Journey Measurement Insights is available to advertisers who meet specific criteria.
To access these insights, you must meet these requirements:
- Your campaigns must use Performance Max, Search, or Shopping.
- Your ads must run on Search, Shopping, Discover Feed, or YouTube (within Performance Max).
If you are eligible, the card will display on your Overview page automatically. The card is hidden if your selected campaign is ineligible or if data is unavailable.
Key considerations for Customer Journey Measurement
When reviewing your customer journey reporting, keep these details in mind:
- User coverage: Customer Journey Measurement reporting currently only includes data from signed-in users.
- Data freshness: Reporting currently has an 8-day delay due to the processing time of certain input data. If your selected date range doesn’t have fresh data, the card will not show.
- Historical data: The card displays up to 180 days of backward-looking data and includes 60 days of historical data backfill at launch.
- Timezones: Your reporting uses Pacific Standard Time (PST) in the backend, but displays in your account's local timezone (i.e., same as the rest of your Google Ads reporting timezones).
- Advertiser action: You don’t yet need to take any direct actions or make manual changes. Currently, this card is purely for reporting and transparency.
