This is a great question to leverage for your marketing attribution.

No matter how good your tracking is, there will always be parts of the user journey that cannot be tied together or tracked.

Asking this question gives you some additional insights into what you might have missed and can integrate that into your attribution.

Now one thing that people are often concerned about here is that people will just randomly click on answers.

And while it’s true that this could be the case, I can put you at a little but of ease here:

There are quite a few gotcha’s that have to be considered when setting up this question.

Here is what you need to pay attention to 👇

Asking the right question

This is on is still mostly straightforward.

Make sure that you are asking the customer where they first heard about you.

Where demand is generated is critical for scaling.

So you want to identify what the star of the user journey was.

Giving the right answer option

Each answer option needs to have a 1-to-1 relationship to a channel that is generating demand/get assigned budget. That can be a marketing channel like Influencer.

But can also be anything that could be generating demand like word-of-mouth.

What you want to avoid as much as possible however, is that there is uncertainty as to what channel an answers maps onto.

So if you are running ads on Meta and are working with lots of Influencer, the answer option “Instagram” could mean two different channels.

So what to do in this situation?

Ask follow-up questions where necessary

Post purchase survey tools give you the option to ask follow up questions.

So building on the example before, if the customer said “Instagram” you can ask him:

Where exactly on Instagram

With the answer options being “From an ad” or “From a person I follow”.

Gives you a better understanding of the duration of the customer journey.

This, combined with the user journey data from Klar can be used in order to model out the expected marketing efficiency metrics as you scale marketing budget as not 100% of the increase can be expected to generate a return immediately.

Plus, often buying journey are much longer then people expect, which in turn should inform your creative strategy as you need to supply customers with educational informations that answers their questions while they are considering a purchase.

Depending on your product, the answer options here could be:

If the customer selects one of the last 2 (maybe even 3) questions, a great follow up questions with a free text input would be “What was the reason you finally decided to buy from us?”.

This can be an interested question to ask, should your attribution show a large share of new customer conversions being driven by direkt and branded search.

That way, you could get a better idea as to what customers saw before they finally converted.

This is a great question to inform your benefit/feature hierarchy.

Are there specific features that are more important relative to the other.

If so, you should put these front in your communicaiton and in the way that you organise your content.

This helps you to understand if your customers are already accustomed to the type of product you are selling or if you are the on that is introducing them to the category.

This in turn defines the level of education that is necessary.

At the same time, it also informs your acquisition strategy.

If you realize that most of your customers are switching over from competitors, it shows that you haven’t found a great way to acquire cold audiences that are not yet familiar with the category. This could become a problem mid-term as the pool of customers that could switch is limited.

This one is mostly useful for website optimization and CRO.

What you want to find out here really is if the customers were able to find the information they were looking for when they were looking for them.

Feedback here can inform additional content that might be necessary or how you could reorganize existing content.

Will give you an idea of what questions the customer had you didn’t do a great job in answering.

This you can then start to incorporate more prominently in your website and/or ad creatives.

Great input for your design and tech team that hightlights usability and messaging issues that should be addressed.

This one can be interesting for brands selling on marketplaces, retail and/or that are frequently being gifted.

In that case you cannot rely on the new customer definition in your shop system which in this case would lead you to treat these customers as if they were new customers vs trying to build loyalty.

Your brand/product does not exists in isolation.

Ad algorithms are great at realizing consumers that are in-market for a specific product category and will automatically start to show ads from your competitors.

Thus, you should study their communication. Identify what they’re strengths and weaknesses are and how/where you are different.

Exploit your strengths in your communication and amplify the weaknesses of competitors to make yourself stand out vs your competitors.

Your brand does not exists in a silo but in a competitive marketplace.

As soon as a user clicks on your ads, you can be sure that the ad platforms start serving him ads of your competitors as well.

Therefore, you are always competing and it is crucial to understand where you are better in the eyes of the customers.

That way you can double down on this aspect.

Your brand does not exists in a silo but in a competitive marketplace.

As soon as a user clicks on your ads, you can be sure that the ad platforms start serving him ads of your competitors as well.

Therefore, it is is critical to understand where your customers considers your customers stronger/better.

That way you know where to improve your produuct/messaging to be even more competitive in a head-to-head comparison.

This is the inverse question to Why did you choose us instead of a competitor? and should be asked as a follow up questions to What other brands did you look at?

Will tell you if there is a competitor that you are outcompeting right now.

This is especially interesting, if they are larger.

In that case, you can ask a follow up question “Why did you switch to us”.

This question will help you get a better sense of the overall user journey.

A great follow up question, if someone selected “Yes” here, is asking him the qualitative question (text field question) “Why did you end up buying from our site instead of Amazon”.

If you see that many of your customers also looking for you on Amazon then this has two possible actions:

Especially for products that are not impulse purchases, customers will often do more research on your brand and product.

Initially, I would start with a “yes” and “no” question and then, if the customer selected “Yes” ask him for specific sites via a free text form.

Once you know where you customers research you, you can mark to improve the results they find about you in those places.

In case you are running a big brand campaign or do a limited edition product drop, this can be an interesting question to ask to understand to what extend it might have impacted the customers buying decisions as these things are often though to measure.

This is a great question to inform your benefit/feature hierarchy.

Are there specific features that are more important relative to the other.

If so, you should put these front in your communicaiton and in the way that you organise your content.

This is a great question in order to educate future creatives.

Especially the hooks that you can use in your creative that capture the attention of your potential customers or double down on and agitate the pain in your creative even further.

As I said initially: Your goal is to solve your customers problem.

Therefore it is crucial to know what their problem is.

You might think this is obvious. But many products have multiple use cases.

So try to understand which one is more pronounced for your customers.

Or analyze the lifetime value of your customers in Klar, based on how they answer this questions.

Which will help you understand on which market segment you should focus

Similiar question to “What almost stopped you from buying from us”.

Will give you an idea of what questions the customer had you didn’t do a great job in answering or the concern that weren’t fully addressed.

This you can then start to incorporate more prominently in your website and/or ad creatives.

Customers might buy you for one reason, but then come back for another.

Knowing this is crucial as it will inform your retention strategy.

Let’s say you sell protein powder so people might say they bought you “to gain muscles”.

But when they come back the main reason might be “taste” because that’s where you are better than other options they have tried in the past.

If this is your competitive strength, you can start thinking about how to exploit this.

Eg. When people buy a bag of Chocolate flavour, also include taster packs of other flavours so that they can try more and find one the love.

Understand how your product is helping your customers and gather success stories.

This can be great input for your creative process or onsite messaging.

This is mostly a qualitative questions that is great to gather stories about customers that can be shared internally or inspire ads.

This will give you great insight into how you can adjust your product and offering to make sure that customers will keep coming back.

These might be improvements to your product, new variations of your product like different flavours or sizes or even completely new products and service offerings.

This can be asked to all customers, but for people who only bought once, it’s likely missing acitivation.

I think asking this questions to people who have bought at least twice before is a lot more insightsful.

The only issue here is: Who do you reach them best.

You can try via email but might not get a lot of responses so you might need to get a little creative here.

Don’t blast this request out via a newsletter to 5.000 people but pick a few and send custom emails.

Ideally, you should straight up call them if you have their number.

This is really about quality first, not quantity.

Will tell you the specific use cases your customers have in mind for your product which will give you insight into specific target groups and/or use cases.

Customer activation meaning ensuring that your customers use your product frequently and in the right way, is a foundation of a strong retention.

This will give you a baseline for your product usage and you can work towards increasing this over time.

Plus, you might realize that your customers are not using your product frequently enough to see the results they are looking for.

Similar quesiton to before, only this time targeted at existing customers who are already using your product.

Will tell you the specific use cases your customers have in mind for your product which will give you insight into specific target groups and/or use cases.

This is a great question to understand what you might have to do in order to prevent future customer churn.

This is an obvious one. Having the best possible product is core for your retention and referrals.

There might be some complementary products or product ideas that are a great fit for your brand.

If customers are generally satisfied with product quality, highlight this in your marketing.

If there are concerns, consider quality improvements or reassessing sourcing and manufacturing.

You won’t be able to retain your customers long term, if you don’t have a strong product.

Use feedback to fine-tune the product features. Consider expanding your product line to meet other customer needs, or reposition the current product to target a more specific need.

Address recurring issues quickly, provide timely customer support, and communicate product improvements. If issues are widespread, consider issuing product recalls or refunds.

Know who your customer really is.

Often founders think that their customers are just like them but this might not be the case.

You need to make sure that the people you show in your messaging match the people that are actually buying from you.

It might be that people are buying your product as a gift for a friend, or for their kids and partner.

If this is the case, this is something that can be used in your creative strategy.

Qualitative input that helps you understand who your customers are.