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A tour of what each report in Journey Insight answers, from domain search and Insight Copilot through to campaign research and custom market creation.

Alterian · 2025-07-06 · 9 min read

Journey Insight 101: how to use journey intelligence

This post introduces Journey Insight and provides an overview of the product, its capabilities and its benefits. We'll dive into the details of the key features in each installment of this series.

What is Journey Insight?

Journey Insight represents a new class of customer journey analytics: journey intelligence. It combines market-level visibility, lifecycle analysis and competitive context into a single solution.

By analyzing digital journey data from millions of customers in 300+ markets, Journey Insight shows where people research, compare, decide, use products and seek support—and how those patterns differ across competitors.

The visibility gap: why traditional analytics fall short

You're missing up to 90% of the customer journey

For most brands, 70–90% of a customer's purchase evaluation happens outside of their owned channels. Much of that journey occurs before they ever visit you, and often ends without ever reaching your site at all. Decisions are shaped by search results, competitor content, comparison sites, reviewers, social discussions, and brand alternatives you can't measure with first-party tools.

Traditional marketing and customer journey analytics only show a few pieces of the puzzle; Journey Insight fills in the rest.

What brands overlook without cross-market context

Without visibility into competitor journeys or market dynamics, it's impossible to know:

  • Where you're winning or losing users
  • Which upstream influences matter most
  • How competitors engage customers earlier
  • What friction points push users away

Journey Insight reveals the entire customer journey and the market forces shaping it. Teams can make faster decisions, align strategy with real market behavior, and uncover growth opportunities hidden from traditional analytics.

How to use Journey Insight to your advantage

With such a powerful, AI-driven intelligence layer and never-before-seen cross-market insights, the potential applications are limitless—but to start exploring those possibilities, you need somewhere to get started.

Journey Insight has a robust set of market research reports. Explore these curated dashboards with interactive data visualizations, or simply use Insight Copilot to ask questions about your brand, competitors or overall market.

Domain and brand search

Search for a brand by domain and identify the markets in which they compete.

Domain and brand search gives you immediate visibility into the competitive landscape around any brand—whether that's yours or one of your competitors.

By searching for a domain, you can see all markets in which that brand appears, the companies they compete against, and how widely their digital footprint extends.

This feature is particularly useful when evaluating unfamiliar categories, researching new entrants, or validating how well a brand is positioned within a market.

The Explore Domains, Markets & Insights search in Journey Insight, where you type a domain to see its markets and competitors

Get started with a domain search

Most teams rely on assumptions or incomplete industry lists when analyzing competitors. Journey Insight replaces guesswork with impartial, behavior-based market placement grounded in real user journeys.

Insight Copilot

Your conversational analyst for journey intelligence.

Insight Copilot transforms Journey Insight into an on-demand research partner. Instead of digging into dashboards or stitching together multiple reports, you can ask natural-language questions and receive clear, contextualized answers supported by charts, comparisons and narrative summaries.

The Ask About This Market screen in Journey Insight, with a natural-language question about Tesla's market share typed against the Automotive Manufacturers market and three suggested questions below

On-demand data analysis

There's no need to overload your analytics team with an endless stream of exploratory questions or wait for deep dives to interpret data. Insight Copilot accelerates decision-making by making complex market intelligence accessible to anyone, helping marketers, CX teams and strategy leaders answer critical questions in seconds.

Customer engagement

Understand market reach, engagement and competitive scale.

Customer Engagement provides a market-level view of how many users each brand reaches, how deeply those users engage, and how traffic patterns compare across the competitive set. The Web Traffic report in Journey Insight provides volume, audience scale, session activity, event intensity and engagement depth—all anchored to real customer behavior.

Journey Insight Web Traffic report for an athletic footwear market: 21 organizations, 280,543 individuals and 6.12 million market events, with unique visits led by Amazon, Nike and Adidas and a pie chart of market events by website

Core metrics for you and your competitors

Website analytics can tell you how your traffic performs, but they can't show how that performance compares to competitors.

Journey Insight reveals the true scale of the market, enabling you to benchmark your position, identify rising competitors, and understand whether shifts in your analytics reflect market trends or brand-specific changes.

Market categories

See how categories overlap, converge and share attention.

The Market Categories report shows how users move across product or service categories within a market. It highlights category overlaps, where customers divide their attention, and how category-level traffic flows shape competitive dynamics.

Journey Insight Market Categories report showing a Venn diagram and table of how 280,543 individuals overlap across the General, Premium and Retail categories

Competing for audience attention

Modern markets aren't siloed; users often compare multiple products, adjacent solutions or alternative offerings during evaluation. Understanding category interactions reveals whitespace opportunities, convergence trends, and which categories present the biggest threat or growth potential for your brand.

Brand loyalty and crossover

Measure loyalty, overlap and audience movement between brands.

This report uncovers how loyal users are to specific brands, how frequently they return, and where they go when they explore alternatives. You can identify exclusive audiences, multi-brand usage patterns, and crossover behavior that signals switching or comparison activity.

The Visitor Loyalty and Crossover report in Journey Insight for the Computers and Laptops market, selecting an organization to see how its audience overlaps with competitors

See which competitors your customers are researching

Understanding when users switch, compare or split their time between competitors helps you pinpoint retention risks, isolate strong loyalty drivers, and identify acquisition opportunities where your competitors are vulnerable.

Market concentration

Assess competitive intensity and discover who truly dominates.

Market Concentration reveals whether a market is broadly competitive or led by a small number of dominant players. It measures share of attention, audience distribution and competitive balance.

This helps your team distinguish between markets that reward innovation versus those requiring differentiation against well-established leaders.

The Market Dynamics concentration gauge in Journey Insight, scoring a market on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index between competitive and concentrated

Inform your go-to-market strategy

A highly concentrated market requires different strategies than a fragmented one. Knowing whether you're fighting incumbents or tapping into white space can dramatically change your approach to investment, acquisition, positioning and messaging.

Market focus and reach

Understand how deeply users engage within a market and how far their attention spreads.

Focus and Reach helps you assess market penetration. See whether users concentrate their activity within a single market or spread their attention across multiple adjacent markets. It highlights how broad or narrow user engagement is and which brands draw the deepest vs. widest audiences.

The Market Dynamics focus and reach gauge in Journey Insight, showing whether visitors focus on one market or reach across others

Inform your go-to-market strategy

A highly concentrated market requires different strategies than a fragmented one. Knowing whether you're fighting incumbents or tapping into white space can dramatically change your approach to investment, acquisition, positioning and messaging.

Journey analysis

Explore upstream influences and downstream behavior across the full customer journey.

Journey Analysis visualizes where users were before they arrived at a brand, where they went afterward, and how they moved across competitors and categories. It allows you to connect search terms, referrals, campaigns and navigation patterns into cohesive flows.

Journey Analysis Sankey diagram of five-step journeys through Apple, showing sites like Google, Amazon, Best Buy, YouTube and Reddit before and after the Apple visit

Your brand is only part of the full customer journey

Traditional analytics start at your front door—Journey Analysis starts long before that, and follows customers once they leave your space, too.

Understanding upstream influences helps you identify missed opportunities, discover key referrers, and see how early-stage perceptions shape outcomes. Downstream behavior reveals retention risks, conversion barriers and competitor strengths.

Campaign research

See how brands reach users across channels.

Campaign Research reveals the actual footprint of marketing campaigns across your market. It shows which channels brands rely on, how diversified their campaign mix is, and which sources drive the most engagement using UTM tags and other data sources.

See where you really need to compete for customers

You may know your campaign strategy, but competitors don't typically share theirs. This feature uncovers where and how your competitors market themselves, which channels produce the biggest reach, and how your campaign footprint compares across the wider user journey.

Customer lifecycle

Understand customer behavior across every stage, from evaluation to retention.

With the Customer Lifecycle report, analyze how users move through different behavioral stages—from initial search-led discovery, to cross-shopping, to repeat engagement and loyalty. These insights are based on real digital behavior, not modeled funnels.

Journey Insight Customer Lifecycle report comparing Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs with the market average across evaluation, purchase, adoption, support and retention, beside user behavior summaries for each stage

Valuable insights for multiple teams

The Customer Lifecycle analysis is ideal for teams across your organization, including marketing, customer success and support.

See how users behave during early discovery, when they compare competitors, and when they return to help you shape more effective acquisition, engagement and retention strategies.

Customer behavior

Deep analysis of engagement, loyalty, frequency and multi-brand patterns.

See audience-level behavioral analysis with the Customer Behavior report to analyze how different user types (light, medium, heavy, multi-brand) interact across the market. You can explore metrics like session behavior, event patterns, return frequency and intensity of use to extract valuable insights and actionable recommendations for your brand.

Refine your strategy to meet different customer types

Not all customers behave the same way. Some compare constantly, some return repeatedly, and some exhibit high-engagement behaviors that signal deeper value. Understanding these segments helps you refine audience strategy, identify high-value users, and benchmark engagement quality.

Market creation

Build your own competitive set for tailored benchmarking.

Journey Insight features more than 300 markets and continues to grow with input from our users.

Users on the Premium and Enterprise plans can request the creation of new, custom markets. Define the exact set of brands you want to compare and our expert consultants will configure and process the new dataset.

Whether you're analyzing a niche segment, modeling a hypothetical competitive landscape, or preparing a pitch, custom market creation enables flexible, scenario-based analysis based on real user behavior.

Free and Professional users are welcome to submit requests for the creation of general new markets. Our team will evaluate the scope and usability of the market to determine whether it will be added to Journey Insight.

See what Journey Insight reveals about your customer journeys

Join Journey Insight in a few minutes—no setup or commitment required—or learn more about which features are included in each of our plans.