- Circana
- 2 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Table of Contents:
Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) have access to rich data like SEO and search query trends, site and app analytics, retail media performance, marketplace browse and add-to-cart signals, CRM and loyalty data, and in-store observational inputs. These sources show what happened and where, but not why behind shopper choices. Without that understanding, brands risk misaligned messaging, poorly timed offers, and missed opportunities to guide buyers from discovery to purchase.
Path‑to‑purchase surveys are one of the most effective ways to capture key decision moments at scale and turn them into actionable strategies.
What is path to purchase?
Path to purchase is the sequence of steps, decisions, and touchpoints a shopper follows from the initial trigger — need, occasion, or influence — to the moment they buy within a category. The decision to buy a specific brand, pack, price, and retailer is shaped by behaviors like searching online, clicking on a website or app, seeing ads, in-store interactions like browsing a shelf, and underlying attitudes — needs, motivations, and barriers.
Example:
“I need snacks for tonight” → searches “healthy chips” → checks reviews → sees a promo in a grocery app → finds the brand instore → chooses the family size pack at the promo price → buys.
What is the difference between path to purchase and the customer journey?
Think of path to purchase as single shopping trip and a customer journey as the ongoing relationship. Path to purchase focuses on one buying moment, from trigger to purchase, and the choices along the way. The customer journey, on the other hand, examines the long-term relationship with a brand before and after a purchase. It includes phases like awareness, interest, purchase, post-purchase, loyalty, and advocacy. When you work on improving the customer journey, the goal is to enhance the overall brand experience and foster long-term loyalty.
What are the different path-to-purchase stages versus the customer journey stages?
Key path-to-purchase stages:
Trigger: A need, occasion, or influence sparks intent.
Discovery: Shopper looks around: search, social and content, shelf.
Consideration: They narrow down the options using comparisons, ratings, and reviews.
Evaluation: They weigh brand, pack size, price, promo, and availability.
Decision: The final choice is made, reflected as add-to-basket and channel selection.
Purchase: Checkout and payment (online or in-store buy).
Post-purchase reflection: Satisfaction or regret shapes the next trigger.
Typical customer journey stages:
Awareness: Know the brand exists.
Interest/Consideration: Explore and compare alternatives.
Acquisition/Purchase: First conversion.
Post-purchase: First use and experience that shape satisfaction, leading to repeat engagement or walkaway if expectations aren’t met.
Retention/Loyalty: Repeat purchases, subscriptions (ideally leading to advocacy).
Understanding the path to purchase helps brands win the moment by tailoring the messages, packs, prices, and placements to convert intent into a buy. Understanding the customer journey helps grow the relationship — improving experience, support, and loyalty over time. Use path-to-purchase insights to optimize the moment of choice so you win at the shelf, whether digital or physical. Use customer journey insights to stay top of mind before that moment, strengthen satisfaction after, and drive repeat purchases.
How to measure and optimize customer journey touchpoints
To truly understand and improve the customer journey, you’ll need to draw from multiple data sources, including:
Transactional POS, pricing analytics, behavioral analytics (time to purchase, attribution, drop-offs)
CRM and loyalty (repeat, LTV)
Retail media
Social and review sentiment
Support data (effort, resolution)
Surveys (motivations, barriers, fulfilment preferences)
Focus on the right data at each stage of the customer journey:
Awareness: Track category and brand performance across channels and media to see where buyers first find you, so you can invest in the channels, retailers, and media vehicles that spark discovery.
Interest/Consideration: Benchmark pack, price, and promo against competitors to understand why buyers chose you to sharpen claims and price ladders where engagement is high.
Acquisition/Purchase: Monitor sales trends, share, and price performance to spot which retailers and regions convert best, as well as checkout drop-offs to remove friction and target promotions.
Post-purchase: Watch repeat rates and performance shifts by channel or retailer to fix fulfilment and availability issues and reinforce value.
Loyalty/Retention: Track distribution and promo efficiency to tailor offers, expand distribution, protect margins, and keep buyers returning.
How to measure and optimize the path-to-purchase touchpoints
A strong path-to-purchase analysis also combines multiple data sources and measurements to understand both what happened and why it happened, namely:
POS/transaction data: – See what shoppers bought, when, and under what conditions (sales velocity and volume, price, promo lift, feature and display impact, basket metrics, timing)
Shopper panel and loyalty data: Understand who is buying and how often (penetration, repeat versus new buyers, trip frequency, and basket composition)
Survey data: Why shoppers buy and their mindset (motivation, needs, trip type, degree of preplanning)
Digital and media: Link awareness and influence to purchase (ad exposure, conversion rate by channel)
(Optional) In-store, observational data: Understand physical triggers (how long shoppers spend near the product, traffic flow, and similar)
This is how they are used to shed light on the separate stages of path to purchase:
Trigger: Identify where demand grows by retailer, region, and channel and what drives it — price, promo, display. Use incremental velocity versus baseline, promo lift, display lift percent, price elasticity, occasion (impulse versus stock-up). Use surveys to capture buyers’ motivations, needs, and shopping trip type and mindset, and the degree of preplanning to gauge how intentional the trip was at the outset.
Pro tip: Create occasion-based messaging and packs that meet the moment like ”family night,” ”healthier swap,” ”on-the-go,” and similar.
Discovery: See which retailers and channels drive first contact and awareness, by tracking share of search, digital engagement metrics (like content interactions and CTRs), retailer search rank, share of shelf, first-time buyer share, and sales velocity. Use surveys to learn which discovery routes shoppers trust the most (search, social, content, instore cues) and their preplanning activities.
Pro tip: Win visibility with search, retail media, and standout placement.
Consideration: Understand what keeps you in the consideration set by tracking performance versus competitors by pack, price, and promo. Use surveys to probe which purchase motivators and reviews mattered most when comparing options, and clarify retailer selection priorities (price, assortment, proximity, delivery speed).
Pro tip: Highlight benefits and differentiation on product detail page and packaging – keep messaging consistent across omni-channel touchpoints.
Evaluation: Check for out-of-stocks (OOS) and weak value tiers. Use surveys to surface perceived value thresholds, availability pain points, and barriers to purchasing.
Pro tip: Fine-tune pack-to-price ratio, sharpen offer depth where elastic, and prevent OOS in high-potential stores.
Decision: Identify which retailers, channels, and regions convert best by tracking conversion rates. Use surveys to uncover the final decision triggers (promo, trust signals, immediacy).
Pro tip: Reduce friction and remove doubt with targeted promotions, by clarifying delivery, returns, etc.
Purchase: Monitor conversion by retailer and the impact on price and promo on basket size and value. Capture perceived checkout barriers, purchase fulfilment and location experience, and satisfaction from surveys.
Pro tip: Streamline payment and fulfilment, remove barriers wherever possible.
Post-purchase reflection: Track repeat signals and distribution health. Use surveys to capture satisfaction, regret, and next purchase intent to shape loyalty content and offers.
Pro tip: Reinforce value with follow-up content and loyalty nudges.
Six steps to mapping your path to purchase if you’re starting from scratch
Step 1: Collect quantitative data
Gather the essentials. Transactional POS data to know what sold, where, and when. Pricing analytics to understand elasticity and promo ROI. Channel performance to compare e-commerce versus brick-and-mortar. Then add consumer insights for buyer demographics and behaviors. This mix gives you the what and where so you can spot gaps in assortment, pricing, and availability before they cost you sales.
Step 2: Identify dominant purchase paths
Before you can go deeper in the path-to-purchase analysis, you need to map what paths your shoppers take and why. Start by analysing POS and panel data for patterns in basket size, trip frequency, and promo responsiveness to uncover occasions (stock-up versus impulse versus mission-based), and segment shoppers by behavior and mindset (deal-seekers, discovery shoppers, impulse buyers, mission-focused) to understand which paths matter most.
Step 3: Define KPIs to track for the purchase paths in focus
Every data pull, survey question, and experiment should directly address the purchase paths you’re optimizing and the critical moments that need improvement. For deal seekers who prioritize price and promotions, you’d focus on KPIs like CTR on deal ads, promo lift percent, price elasticity, share of sales on promotion, first-time buyer share and conversion rate versus competition during promo periods, perceived value and triggers, and repeat purchase after promo. For impulse shoppers who are driven by convenience and in-the moment influence, include metrics like content and media ad exposure, display lift percent, feature lift percent, and single-item basket rate to capture how effectively you trigger spontaneous purchases.
Step 4: Diagnose drivers and frictions with targeted surveys
Run a path-to-purchase survey with verified buyers to uncover motivations and challenges at each stage. Gather insights on trip mindset, priorities, research habits, retailer choices, fulfilment, and obstacles. Mapping these insights (the why’s) to buyer paths reveals why consideration stalls or purchases shift, turning qualitative feedback into clear, stage-specific hypotheses to test.
Step 5: Map insights to path-to-purchase stages
Combine performance metrics with survey insights and map them to stages like Trigger, Discovery, Consideration, and Purchase. This links metrics to causes — such as trip intent, research habits, and decision drivers — revealing what influences conversion or switching. With this clarity, you can optimize strategies, refine messaging for key moments, and improve the consumer experience throughout the path to purchase.
Step 6: Choose high-impact plays, test, and iterate
Turn insights into incremental experiments. Adjust pack sizes, refine price ladders, target promos, fix out-of-stocks, etc. Measure impact quickly, keep what works, and scale without wasting budget.
Benefits of Liquid Data Go
Liquid Data Go® brings both sources — transactional POS data and survey insights — together in one place, giving SMBs a complete and actionable view of the buying journey.
Path-to-purchase surveys within Liquid Data Go are designed for speed, accuracy, and ease of use. Instead of relying on claimed behaviors, these surveys tap into a verified panel of up to 200,000 omnichannel buyers, ensuring respondents are active category shoppers with known purchase histories. This foundation significantly improves insight reliability and relevance.
Brands can simply select the path-to-purchase survey type within Liquid Data Go, where preconfigured, field-tested questions capture the most important elements of the buying journey, including motivators, trip mindset, planning behavior, online and in-store research, fulfilment choices, retailer comparisons, and any friction experienced along the way.
Once launched, the survey fields quickly and the results flow directly into Unify+ as ready-to-use insight stories.
This unified view supports faster, more confident decision-making without the need for large analytics resources.
Ready to learn more?
Get a demo of Liquid Data Go’s path-to-purchase survey capabilities. It helps small teams in the CPG space map the moments that matter and make fast improvements. Use it to refine messaging, fix availability gaps, optimize shelf strategies and pricing, and strengthen loyalty.
