The end of the linear funnel: why modern customer journeys are anything but a straight line

The traditional marketing funnel has served us well for decades. It's a neat, satisfying model that takes potential customers from awareness to consideration, and finally, to conversion. It provides a clear, logical framework for digital teams: fill the top with leads, nurture them, and watch them leave the funnel happy, paying customers.

But if you're being honest with yourself, you know this story is rarely true.

When you think about how your customers actually use your digital channels, the reality is far more chaotic. They don't follow a simple, predictable path. They browse, get distracted, jump between devices, leave, and come back. They might see a social media ad, skip the homepage, go straight to a pricing page, and then disappear for weeks before returning to convert.

Did you design your website to help and educate users, but do you really know how they’re using it? The disconnect between the elegant funnel you imagine and the messy, beautiful reality of the customer journey is the single greatest challenge—and opportunity—for digital businesses today.

This is what the concept of funnel analysis was created to solve, and while it’s great for tracking predetermined steps, it’s also static in the sense of not capturing the flows between those steps, where the true user journey lies.

The funnel fallacy: a tale of limited visibility

Funnel analysis is invaluable for what it does. It tracks a predefined series of steps and shows you where your users are dropping off. It’s perfect for analyzing a checkout process or a sign-up flow. It can tell you that 40% of users drop off at Step 3 of your checkout, allowing you to focus your optimization efforts there. It's a powerful tool for analyzing a linear, predefined path.

But here’s the critical question: What happens in between those steps?

Funnel analysis provides a beautiful, but limited, view. It’s like a single snapshot in a movie—it tells you a user went from point A to point B, but it offers no context on the vast, complex world of interactions that took place in between. It can’t show you:

• The content a customer read that convinced them to add an item to their cart

• The 3 other pages they visited before returning to the product page

• The frustrating pop-up or broken link that caused them to leave the funnel entirely

• The fact that they exited your site to read a third-party review before coming back to complete the purchase

In essence, a funnel shows you the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of a drop-off, but it provides little to no insight into the ‘why.’ You know a customer left, but you have no idea what caused them to. This is particularly problematic because the modern customer journey is anything but a straight line. Customers are in control, and they move fluidly between channels and touchpoints, often interacting with a brand multiple times before making a purchase.

A limited funnel view makes it nearly impossible to optimize for the full customer experience—the kind of experience that builds long-term loyalty and drives significant revenue. You can fix the checkout flow, but if a customer is still frustrated with your navigation, content, or product discovery, you're only solving problems for one small piece of a much larger puzzle.

Embracing the chaos: the rise of journey analytics

So, if funnels aren't the full story, what is? Journey analysis.

Unlike traditional funnels, which are limited by your assumptions about how a customer should behave, Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability shows you how they truly navigate your site. It’s not constrained to a predefined, linear path. Instead, it visualizes the reality of user behavior, mapping out every click, scroll, and interaction.

Journeys provides a holistic view of the customer experience by surfacing a network of pathways rather than a single, rigid funnel. It reveals fascinating and often surprising insights that a funnel analysis could never uncover, such as

• Where users truly land: you might assume a user's journey begins on your homepage, but Journey Analysis could show the majority of traffic lands directly on your blog, a product page linked from an ad, or a dedicated landing page. This insight is crucial for optimizing your top-of-funnel content.

• The actual next steps they take: funnels assume a user goes from a product page to the cart. Journey Analysis might reveal most users who view a product page first navigate to the ‘About Us’ page or read a customer testimonial, indicating a need for social proof before committing to a purchase.

• The real exit points and their context: when a user exits, a funnel just shows a drop-off. Journey Analysis reveals the context. Did they exit from a page with a technical error? Did they leave a detailed form to return to it hours later? This insight allows you to understand if an exit is a problem (a point of frustration) or simply part of a multi-session journey. Did you know that websites able to make their user journeys deeper (aka more pages consumed per session) by over 10% increased their conversion rates by 5.4%? Understanding these frustration points is critical for conversion.

Beyond the single session: mapping the full user lifecycle

The true power of Journey Analysis is its ability to reveal patterns that span across multiple visits and sessions. Today, customers rarely convert on their first visit. They research, compare, get distracted, and come back. This is why a holistic approach to understanding the user lifecycle is so crucial.

As detailed in this blog, From first click to long-term loyalty: introducing the User Lifecycle Extension for Experience Analytics, a full understanding of the customer journey extends far beyond the single-session conversion. It’s also about recognizing customers often exit a session to come back later. A customer might browse your products on their phone during a morning commute, then return to their desktop later that evening to make a purchase. Without a tool that connects these sessions and understands from which marketing channels bring them in, you lose the full story.

Journey Analysis surfaces a critical insight that directly impacts this lifecycle: how many times a user typically returns before converting. This knowledge allows you to balance your efforts between optimizing for immediate conversions and building the kind of long-term loyalty that turns one-time transactors into repetitive buyers. You can design a nurturing strategy that meets users where they are, acknowledging that their path is a marathon, not a sprint. This is how you turn single-session visitors into a long-term user segment.

Drilling down into individual user frustrations

While high-level journey maps provide powerful insights into overall trends, the true magic of this approach lies in the ability to drill down to the individual user level. This is where you can see the raw, unedited movie of a customer’s experience.

By examining individual session replays and their corresponding journey paths, you can pinpoint the exact moments of frustration: the rage clicks on an unresponsive button, the excessive scrolling on a page with confusing content, or the endless back-and-forth between a product page and a how-to article. In fact, Contentsquare’s 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks report revealed that, on average, websites see 401 frustration factors (errors, bad user experience (UX), etc.) per 1,000 sessions. These small moments of friction add up, leading to a frustrated user and a lost opportunity.

By pinpointing these common frustrations, you can create and activate specific user cohorts. This is where Contentsquare’s Users feature comes in. Think of it as a central hub where you can see everyone who’s visited your site. You can access the detailed profile of any user, including a list of all their past sessions. This allows you to watch their session replays to see exactly what happened, and why they might have been frustrated.

For example, you could group all users who experienced a rage click on a specific page. With this insight, you can not only fix the underlying issue but also proactively reach out to that exact segment with a follow-up email, a personalized offer, or even a support message. This level of granular detail allows you to provide proactive, human-centric support at scale.

A bonus feature is the User Identity tool. By activating this, you can attach user IDs from your other tools, like a CRM. This lets you connect anonymous sessions to known users who weren't logged in when they were browsing your site, giving you a more complete view of a single user's journey.

This is not just about fixing bugs; it's about connecting with your customers on a human level. It’s about seeing their struggles and providing a seamless, frictionless experience. By using the same identity data you already have in your current systems, you’ll have the perfect setup to efficiently support your customers and build the foundation for lasting relationships. And Contentsquare’s AI, Sense, lets you do this at scale, surfacing key insights in minutes and recommending what you should look at next.

Because at the end of the day, it's not just about the destination—it's about the entire journey. And by understanding that journey in its full, complex, and beautiful form, you’re not just building a better website; you’re building a better business.