Understand the Customer Journey Compass

This article explains how to use the Customer Journey Compass module in zDirect. You’ll learn how to track customer engagement across the funnel, benchmark your performance against peer brands and measure the long-term impact of your Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) investments.  

Watch this brief overview video to see how the Customer Journey Compass helps you turn brand data into strategy.

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The dashboard brings your funnel performance together in one place, helping you make data-driven decisions: 

• Viewable impressions: See how often customers view your brand to evaluate upper-funnel reach.

• PDP visits, Add to wishlist and Add to cart: Track engagement actions to see how shoppers consider your articles and where to optimise conversion.

• Total customers: View your total buyer count, split by new and returning customers.

• Brand engagement: Track brand searches, filter usage, brand follows and Brand Home visits.

• Marketing Impact insights: See how significant ZMS ad spend influences customer growth over time beyond standard attribution.

• Streamlined reporting: Download templated reports for yearly strategic planning and quarterly business reviews (QBRs).

• Home: View a snapshot of key performance insights across the tool.

• Benchmarks: Compare your brand’s performance against your peer group.

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

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

• Audience engagement: Explore your reach within your total potential audience.

1. Log into zDirect.

2. Go to the Marketing tab.

3. Select the Customer Journey Compass module.

4. Use the brand filter to select the brand you want to explore.

Use the tool to address key strategic business goals:

To give you context without sharing competitor data, the tool compares your performance against a custom peer group:

• 10 direct peer brands: Used to calculate benchmark key performance indicators (KPIs) based on similar article types (outlines), substituted brands, considered-together brands, price points and brand size.

• 5 additional brands: Included to ensure complete data anonymity.

Funnel stage scores show your brand's position within your segment on a scale of 1–100. Higher scores mean more unique customers compared to peer brands. Scores are relative, meaning a change in customer count may not change your score if peers see similar trends. Consideration and Conversion scores are category-specific, whereas Awareness scores cover data across all categories. 

The Audience Engagement tab highlights growth opportunities by showing your brand affinity audience—customers who demonstrate interest in styles and articles similar to yours.  

• How affinity is defined: Brand affinity connects brands by article design similarity rather than brand GMV. As a result, a smaller brand can have a brand affinity audience as large as a major brand if their articles look similar. The impact of GMV appears in the percentage of engaged customers captured from that potential audience.  

• Demographic breakdowns: You can filter your audience breakdown by country, age, gender and purchase behaviour to fine-tune your messaging and campaign targeting in zDirect.

Marketing impact insights automatically connects your ZMS ad spend directly to your brand's performance, giving you immediate visibility into the business impact of your marketing investment. This analysis is generated automatically, helping you optimise your strategy with up-to-date, actionable insights.

To get started, navigate to the Shopper Insights tab and select the Conversion (Total Customer) KPI.

This view highlights the direct sales impact of your significant spend moments. Action markers on the chart pinpoint months with major budget pushes, showing precisely how increased spend drove customer growth. Click any marker to compare sales performance against the previous month, year-over-year or the following month.

Please note:

• Data coverage: The chart reflects gross revenue from paid media, tracking Total Customers and Brand Engagement KPIs.

• Correlation versus causation: The tool displays correlation—how ad spend and customer growth move together over time. It doesn’t claim that ads were the sole cause of growth, as external factors like seasonality and stock availability also play a role.

• Data requirements: Partners with less than 12 months of consecutive ZMS spend history will see the trend chart and action markers, but the long-term Spend and growth patterns section requires 12 months of spend history to unlock.

If you have questions about your dashboard or need technical support, please submit a request via the support form using the topic zDirect and request type Marketing Tools. You can also contact your Partner Consultant or email zms_customerjourneycompass@zalando.de.