The AISVAS Consumer Purchase Decision Model

The AISVAS Customer Journey

The AISVAS model defines the journey consumers go through before they buy a product or service. It takes AISAS — the “online consumer purchase decision model” created by the Japanese ad agency Dentsu — and adds one more stage: Verify. AISAS was first proposed by Dentsu Inc. in 2004 as a consumer behavior model built for the internet era. Unlike the older AIDMA model, where consumers mostly received information passively, AISAS added “Search” and “Share” to reflect how people now actively look for and pass along information. AISVAS builds on that by showing, step by step, exactly what a consumer does on the way to a purchase.

Let’s walk through how the AISVAS model actually plays out.

Attention: While watching a web drama on YouTube, you notice the bag the lead actress is carrying.
Interest: The bag looks pretty and genuinely useful.
Search: You search online to find the exact bag the actress carried.
Verify: You find it listed on an online store — the same bag from the drama — and read through buyer reviews carefully.
Action: You buy the bag.
Share: Once it arrives, you take it to a nearby café, casually place it next to your coffee cup, snap a photo, and post it on Instagram.

Growth approaches every campaign through AISVAS

At Growth, we believe the customer is everything in marketing. Our job is to understand how customers feel, think, and act, and to address what’s actually bothering them — which is why we build our work around laying out consumer behavior as fully as possible through the AISVAS model, then making sure each stage runs smoothly.

Take the Attention stage, for example. We ask:

Does the audience we think could become our customers even have a chance to notice us?
Where, exactly, does that moment of noticing happen?
What do we need to do to make that happen?

We ask the same kind of question at every stage, then work out how to answer it.

Find the points to improve with AISVAS, and the brand grows

Using the AISVAS consumer purchase decision model, a brand can pinpoint exactly what to improve at every stage. The faster and more precisely that process runs, the more room the brand has to grow.

Improving Attention

Run paid media at higher intensity against a more precisely refined target audience to improve Attention.

Improving Interest

Identify exactly what catches your potential customers’ interest, find where that overlaps with your brand, and lean into it deliberately.

Improving Search

Analyze which keywords interested consumers actually search for, then push to rank as high as possible — and capture as much visibility as possible — for those terms. Ranking translates directly into clicks. In Backlinko’s study of 4 million Google search results, the average click-through rate for the #1 result was about 27.6% — roughly 10 times the CTR of the #10 result (about 2.4%) — and only 0.63% of users ever clicked through to page two.

Improving Verify

Actively encourage customers who’ve used your product to leave reviews and testimonials, and put real effort into making sure those reviews are positive.

Improving Action

Add social login, simple payment options, and other tools that make buying easier and faster. And if a potential customer has stalled out with items left sitting in their cart, follow up with email, in-app messages, or SMS to nudge them toward completing the purchase now.

Give customers a genuine reason to share your brand or product — something worth bragging about, something worth talking about.

Training to put the AISVAS model to work in your marketing

Before you sit in on a lecture about this kind of consumer decision model, though, we’d encourage you to ask yourself first: “Do we actually understand our customers?”

The AISVAS consumer purchase journey model

Diagnosis and consulting to put the AISVAS model to work in your business,

training to put the AISVAS model to work in your business,

and hands-on execution built around the AISVAS model.

That’s exactly what Growth does.

We think about our clients’ customers as if they were our own.

Worth reading next

Want to apply this to your own business? If you need a concrete read on your specific situation, reach out through our contact page. We’ll answer with one real customer in mind — not just traffic numbers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the AISVAS model?

AISVAS explains the consumer purchase journey in six stages: Attention, Interest, Search, Verify, Action, and Share. It builds on Dentsu’s AISAS model by adding a “Verify” stage, reflecting how today’s consumers carefully check reviews and ratings before they buy.

How is AISVAS different from AISAS?

AISAS is the five-stage model — Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share — that Dentsu proposed in 2004. AISVAS adds a “Verify” stage on top of that, specifically covering the step where a consumer, after finding a product through search, checks reviews and reputation before actually buying it.

Why does search ranking matter so much at the Search stage?

Because ranking translates directly into clicks. In Backlinko’s analysis, the #1 search result had an average click-through rate of about 27.6% — roughly 10 times higher than the #10 result (about 2.4%) — and only 0.63% of users ever clicked through to page two. If an interested consumer searches and you’re not ranking near the top, you lose them before they ever reach Verify or Action.

How do you actually put AISVAS to work?

You find the improvement point at each stage and act on it: run paid media against a sharply defined target to lift Attention; find the overlap between what consumers care about and your brand to build Interest; push for top search rankings to win Search; encourage positive reviews to strengthen Verify; make checkout effortless to drive Action; and give people something worth talking about to generate Share. The faster and more precisely you improve each point, the more room your brand has to grow.

The AISVAS Consumer Purchase Decision Model

The AISVAS Customer Journey

Growth approaches every campaign through AISVAS