The Journeys tab in Polar offers a powerful, visual way to analyze how your customers move through different marketing touchpoints before converting. It helps you identify patterns in multi-touch attribution and optimize your ad strategy accordingly.
Overview
Once you've installed the Polar Pixel and configured UTM parameters, you’ll gain access to the Customer Journey report under the Acquisition tab.
The Journeys tab aggregates customer journeys to show clear patterns at a glance. The focus is on understanding how many touchpoints occurred in a journey, which channels were involved, and how long the journey was.
Key Insights You’ll See:
Total Trackable Orders: Reflects the number of orders we could track in the selected time frame. This may be lower than your total store orders due to non-Shopify sales or customers opting out of tracking.
Journey Lengths:
1-Touch Journeys: Indicate impulse purchases.
2-Touch Journeys: Suggest mild consideration before conversion.
3+ Touch Journeys: Reflect longer, more considered journeys.
Channel Distribution: View how often channels like Facebook, Google Ads, organic search, email, and direct traffic appear at different stages of the journey.
Cross-Channel Influence: Understand how channels work together (e.g., awareness from Facebook followed by conversion via Google Ads).
Common Use Cases
Identify the most common pathways to conversion
See which channels assist conversions versus drive them directly
Analyze how branded and non-branded campaigns contribute to the customer journey
Segment by product or customer type to understand nuanced differences
How to Use It
1. Apply Filters to Dive Deeper
You can filter the visualized data to answer specific questions, such as:
How do customers who start on Facebook actually convert?
Are repeat customers coming from different channels than new ones?
What marketing paths drive conversions for a specific product?
Example filters you can use:
First Touch Channel (e.g., Facebook Ads)
Customer Type (e.g., New vs Repeat)
Product Titles in Order (e.g., “contains bike shorts”)
🎯 Pro Tip: Want to focus only on multi-touch journeys?
Apply a filter like "Channel Touchpoints Count" to only show journeys with more than one channel involved.
2. Explore Campaign-Level Attribution
Switch the breakdown to Campaign to understand:
Which branded campaigns assist in conversions
Whether branded Google searches are influenced by Facebook ads
Setup Requirements
To view the Customer Journeys tab:
Install the Polar Pixel on your store
Configure UTM parameters correctly
Wait at least two weeks after installation to collect enough data (the Pixel is not retroactive)