Welcome to the Customer Journey Compass

Here's a summary of features:

• Home: Get a snapshot of the key insights from across the tool.

• Benchmarks: Put your brand’s performance into the competitive context.

• Brand Engagement: Understand your brand-level engagement among shoppers.

• Shopper Insights: Deep dive into your brand’s insights across multiple dimensions.

• Viewable impressions: Understand how often your brand is actually seen to assess and grow your upper-funnel reach.

• PDP visits, Add to wishlist, and Add to cart: Discover key product engagement actions to see how shoppers are considering your brand and optimise conversion.

• Total customers: See the number of customers who made a purchase, and whether they are new or returning customers.

• Brand searches, filters, follows and Brand Home visits: Identify shopper engagement and connection with your brand through key branding metrics.

• New! Marketing Impact insights: Identify how significant investment moments influence your total customer base beyond standard attribution.

• Streamlined reporting: We’ve introduced new reporting options to help you with your yearly strategic planning and quarterly business reviews (QBRs).

Measure your success with Marketing Impact Insights We’ve made it easier to see how your ZMS ad spends fuel your brand’s growth. Marketing Impact Insights, now available on the Customer Journey Compass (CJC), automatically connects your investment to customer trends on a single, easy-to-read chart. You no longer need to rely on manual data exports or complex spreadsheets. Instead, you can see exactly how significant budget pushes impacted your customer base in the same month, year-over-year and the following month. Whether you are looking at brand interest in the Brand Engagement tab or total customer impact in the Shopper Insights tab, these insights are always current and built from your own numbers. If you have more than 12 months of data, you can even explore long-term patterns to identify your most reliable growth levers and scale with confidence.

You can now view a list of 15 peer brands (10 direct peers used for benchmark KPI calculations and 5 additional brands to ensure data anonymity.) associated with your brand to understand the peers used for comparison.

The Potential audiences insights allows you to see the untapped growth potential on Zalando, so that you can better address this audience through marketing activities. To learn more about this feature, please watch the video above.

Where can I find detailed explanations of all of the KPIs?

KPI definitions will appear upon hovering over the KPI label on the tool. Alternatively, you can click on the information icon to see the KPI glossary

How are the peers defined?

The peers are selected based on five main criteria: 

• similar product types

• substituted brands

• considered together brands

• similar product prices 

• brand sizes, which were defined as the most critical criteria when it comes to peer definition based on extensive user research 

How do the scores work?

The funnel stage scores show your brand's position within the segment at each funnel stage, ranging from 1-100. Higher scores mean more shoppers or customers compared to other brands in the segment. Scores are relative, so changes in customer numbers may not always affect the score if other brands see similar trends. Consideration and Conversion scores are category-specific, while Awareness scores are based on data across all categories. Please click here for definitions on all of the scores.

Can I aggregate data across dimensions?

Data should not be aggregated manually across dimensions. In many tables on the dashboard, you will see customers broken down by categories, months, countries, etc. It might be tempting to add up the customer numbers across categories, months etc. to have a more aggregated view. However this will result in wrong data. Because the Customer Journey Compass shows customer data (number of customers who did [action], rather than the total number of [actions]) adding up customer numbers across categories, time periods, etc will result in double counting as some customers might shop across categories, etc. 

Why can I not select more than one option when applying filters?

This is a limitation due to the way the data is set up.  Since the Customer Journey Compass shows customer data, and each customer may have bought from multiple categories, aggregating the data from different filter options would result in double-counting some customers, leading to the data being incorrect. Therefore, currently it’s only possible to select one option per filter. However, filters can be combined (eg. Category = Clothing AND Article type = Jeans AND Country = Germany AND Article gender = Women).

Why is the conversion rate in the monthly data different to yearly data?

If a customer buys from the brand in multiple months of the year (or from multiple categories), they are counted multiple times. When aggregated on a yearly level, the Conversion rate can be much higher or much lower than the conversion rate seen on a monthly basis depending on the uniqueness of customers.

Why is some data missing, but shown as ‘NA’ or ‘anonymized’ instead?

‘NA’ indicates that there is no data available. ‘Anonymized’ indicates that there are not enough customers to fulfil the minimum legal requirement in order to be displayed on the dashboard, therefore the data is also not shown. 

How do I know if the data is up to date?

At the bottom of the page, there is a traffic light display indicating whether the data is up-to-date. You can also cover over this text, to see details on when the data was last updated.

When is data updated for the previous month?

It’s updated on the 3rd of every month. Users should be able to see data for previous month on the 8th at the latest.

Can I download the data for offline use?

Yes, simply click on the ‘download’ button at the top right hand corner of each data table, and a xlsx file will appear in your ‘Downloads’ folder.

How is potential audiences defined?

We start by identifying your brand affinity audience. These are Zalando shoppers who show interest in brands and styles similar to yours. From there, we segment this audience further to give you a more detailed view.

You’ll see breakdowns by:

• Country: understand where your strongest audience potential lies across regions

• Gender and age: get demographic insights to fine-tune your messaging

This breakdown helps you spot high-potential audience clusters and refine your campaign targeting across Zalando.

How is it that a small brand can have a larger brand affinity audience than a bigger brand?

The “brand affinity” audience, in its current definition, does not take GMV of each brand into consideration.  The brands are connected to each via the articles they sell, and if they are similar looking to each other. Then, it connects brands to customers.  This means that a relatively small brand on Zalando may end up having the same size or larger brand affinity audience as a large brand, if the articles they sell are similar looking to other brands. The impact of the GMV will be seen in the percentage of “engaged” customers that are reported within the audience. It is more likely that a brand with many articles and customers will have captured a larger portion of their brand affinity audience, than a smaller brand.

My Marketing Impact Insight chart shows no action markers. Why?

Action markers identify months where your spending increased significantly compared to your recent baseline. If your ZMS budget is consistent month-on-month — such as an always-on strategy — the tool may not show any markers, even if your absolute spend is high. You can still view the trend chart and customer KPI line in full.

I have less than 12 months of ZMS spend history. What will I see?

You will see the trend chart and any action markers relevant to your data. The long-term Spend and Growth Patterns section requires more than 12 months of consecutive spend history. This section will become available once you meet that threshold.

Does Marketing Impact Insights prove that my ads caused customer growth?

Marketing Impact Insights shows the correlation between your ZMS ad spend and your customer growth trends. It shows how the two moved together over time but does not claim that advertising was the sole cause of growth. Other factors like seasonality, stock availability and market conditions also influence your numbers. The tool highlights patterns clearly so you can interpret them alongside your own brand knowledge.

What does the data in the Marketing Impact Insight chart cover?

The chart reflects your ZMS gross revenue from paid media. The customer KPIs shown, such as Total Customers and Brand Engagement, are the same KPIs we track elsewhere in CJC.

For dedicated support on the Customer Journey Compass, please contact your Partner Consultant, or reach out to zms_customerjourneycompass@zalando.de