Why customer journeys are no longer linear
Marketers have traditionally used funnel models to explain how someone moves from discovering an organisation to becoming a customer.
The AIDA model, for example, describes a journey through Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action.
It remains a useful way to think about the different jobs marketing needs to perform. However, it should be treated as a planning model rather than a literal map of customer behaviour.
Real customers do not always move through each stage in order. They may enter the journey with considerable knowledge, move backwards while comparing options, pause their research or skip stages completely. Several people involved in the same purchasing decision may also be at different stages at the same time.
The funnel can help you plan your marketing. It cannot reliably predict the route every customer will take.
From the marketing funnel to the messy middle
Google describes the complex decision-making period between an initial trigger and a purchase as the “messy middle”.
Within this space, customers repeatedly move between two activities:
- Exploration: Discovering possibilities, gathering information and expanding the options under consideration.
- Evaluation: Comparing those options, looking for evidence and narrowing the shortlist.
A customer might compare several organisations, discover another option and begin evaluating again. They may then leave the journey and return when their need becomes more urgent, budget becomes available or another stakeholder becomes involved.
From the customer’s perspective, this behaviour is entirely rational. They are gathering enough information to make a confident decision. From a marketing perspective, the journey is difficult to predict and almost impossible to observe in full.
Five ways the customer journey has changed
1. Discovery can happen almost anywhere
Search engines remain important, but they are no longer the only place where customers begin their research.
AI tools, recommendations, industry platforms, events, advertising and third-party content can all introduce someone to your organisation.
Adobe’s 2026 AI and Digital Trends research found that one in four customers already use AI-powered platforms as their primary source when searching for information, making purchase decisions or finding recommendations.
This means search engine optimisation alone is not enough. Organisations also need clear, consistent and credible information that can be understood by customers and surfaced through AI-generated answers.
2. Customers may arrive highly informed
A significant amount of research can happen before somebody completes a form, makes a call or appears in your CRM.
They may already understand your services, know your competitors and have a shortlist before your organisation becomes aware of them.
The 2026 Ipsos B2B Buyer Journey Report found that 77% of participants considered vendor research the most time-consuming stage of the buying journey.
Your website and content therefore need to support independent research. The first conversation with your sales team may be less about introducing the organisation and more about validating what the customer has already learned.
3. Trust is assembled across different touchpoints
Customers rarely trust an organisation because of one advert, web page or marketing message.
Trust develops through a collection of signals. These might include customer outcomes, independent reviews, accreditations, expert content and conversations with your team.
Consistency is critical. If an advert makes one promise, the website presents another and the subsequent sales conversation feels different again, confidence can quickly weaken.
The customer’s journey may be fragmented, but their experience of your organisation should still feel connected.
4. Every important page can be an entry point
The homepage is no longer guaranteed to be the first page someone visits.
A customer could enter through a service page found on Google, an article referenced by an AI tool or a case study shared by a colleague. They may arrive several levels into your website without any previous understanding of the organisation.
Every important landing page should therefore provide enough context to help a new visitor:
- Understand who you are
- Recognise the relevance of the page
- Find supporting evidence
- Identify an appropriate next step
When reviewing your website journey, do not only start from the homepage. Review the experience from your most common landing pages too.
5. Action is not the end of the journey
An enquiry, booking or purchase may be the conversion you measure, but it is not the end of the customer experience.
Response times, onboarding and service delivery all influence whether somebody remains confident in their decision.
These experiences can subsequently produce reviews, recommendations and case studies that influence future customers. A poor handover can also undermine much of the trust your marketing worked to create.
Customer journey planning should therefore involve marketing, sales, customer service and the people responsible for delivering the service.
Where traditional marketing can fall behind
Many marketing teams are organised around individual channels. Paid advertising has its campaigns, SEO has its plan and the website may be managed separately.
Each part might perform well individually while the overall journey remains disconnected.
Common problems include:
- Different messages appearing across touchpoints
- Campaigns that do not continue coherently onto the website
- Content that generates interest but provides no suitable next step
- Every visitor being pushed towards the same “Enquire now” call to action
- Teams reporting against different measures of success
- Budget decisions being driven primarily by last-click attribution
The answer is not necessarily to place everything within one team or platform. What matters is having clearer coordination around customer needs, the role of each touchpoint and the outcome everyone is trying to support.
Salesforce’s 2026 State of Marketing research found that 64% of marketers were struggling to keep up with changing customer behaviour. Connecting the customer experience provides a practical place to start.
The Connected Journey Framework
During the webinar, we introduced four jobs that marketing needs to perform throughout a non-linear customer journey.
These are not additional funnel stages. They can happen repeatedly and in different orders.
Discover
Make sure people can find and understand your organisation wherever they begin researching.
This includes improving visibility in traditional search, AI-generated results and the channels your audience already trusts.
Reassure
Give customers clear reasons to feel confident about choosing you.
Useful reassurance can come from case studies, reviews, outcomes, accreditations, team experience and detailed answers to important questions.
Progress
Make the next useful step clear without assuming everybody is ready to enquire.
Depending on the page and the customer’s level of confidence, progression might involve viewing relevant evidence, checking availability, downloading useful information or starting a conversation.
Learn
Use evidence to understand what customers are doing, where they experience friction and what influences their decisions.
Insights should then be fed back into your website, campaigns and content so that the experience improves over time.
How to measure a non-linear customer journey
No analytics platform can provide a perfect view of every recommendation, conversation, AI-generated answer or internal discussion that influenced a decision.
The aim should be to build a credible body of evidence by combining several sources.
This can include:
- GA4 events, path exploration and attribution reports
- CRM data, lead quality and offline outcomes
- Call tracking and meaningful micro-conversions
- Hotjar heatmaps, recordings and surveys
- Self-reported attribution, such as asking customers how they first heard about you
- Server-side tracking where it can improve the quality and resilience of your data
As a Hotjar partner, WebBox uses behavioural insights to understand what happens within individual pages, including where users hesitate, become frustrated or abandon a journey.
Server-side tracking can also strengthen your measurement foundations, but it does not remove the need for consent or reconstruct every anonymous interaction. The goal is better evidence, not perfect visibility.
The key takeaway
You cannot control every route a customer takes.
You can, however, make each touchpoint easier to understand, trust and act upon.
The customer journey may be fragmented. The experience you provide should not feel fragmented.
Apply for a free digital audit
If this webinar has made you question how well your website and marketing channels work together, apply for a free digital audit.
We can help you understand:
- Where customers are likely to discover and evaluate your organisation
- Where website or campaign journeys create friction
- Whether important pages provide enough clarity and reassurance
- Where your tracking and behavioural insight could be improved
- Which changes should be prioritised
The audit is tailored to your organisation rather than produced using an automated report. We begin with a conversation about your objectives and challenges before reviewing your digital presence and presenting our recommendations.
