It’s 2pm on a Tuesday. Do you know where your shoppers are?

You’ve analyzed your traffic, fine-tuned your ad campaigns and scoured activity across your marketplaces. But do you really know what your consumers are doing?

Despite the depth of data available today, the e-commerce consumer path to purchase can often feel like a moving target. Constant changes to mobile technology, social media and search algorithms are continually reshaping how consumers interact with brands and retailers.

In 2000, nearly one out of five shoppers made a purchase the first time they heard about a brand. By 2015, that number had shrunk to one out of 100 as the average number of touchpoints it took for a person to ultimately buy had more than doubled, from two to five. Just 2% of today’s first-time visitors will complete transactions before leaving an online store or marketplace.

In other words the days of a consistent and reliable “search, click, buy” process are long gone. In its place is often a complicated web of deliberate steps, each one inching your target consumer closer to the “buy now” button over the course of many days, weeks or months.

This continually-evolving journey is no longer a clear-cut funnel, but more of a maze. Each consumer path is unique and uncertain — which means today’s e-commerce seller hasn’t reached its full potential until it’s maintaining a strong presence at every twist and turn.