Digital advertising has increasingly become the main source to generate revenue/leads/sales/conversions for most of the companies. The main problem faced by companies however, is which part of the digital medium is working for them and to which medium/activity should the credit go to.
If a user searches and clicks on an ad but does not convert; he will instead search the web to compare and look out for the best possible match/price for what he needs. When he converts, the credit goes to the last channel he came from and thus the marketers have no clue if the other digital mediums are working or not.
So now to put an end to all this, Google Analytics has gone a step ahead in terms of measuring the source and giving the rightful credit; Google Analytics has introduced Multi-Channel funnels in analytics.
What are Multi Channel Funnels?
Multi-channel funnels are useful to track the source for your conversion. Initially when a user clicks on a paid search ad and then converts through the brand keyword or a social medial campaign, the credit used to go to the last click that is a brand campaign or a social media campaign and not a paid search campaign. With multi-channel funnels, now we can track the right medium from which he came from and attribute it to the respective campaign.
What do we have in Multi-Channel Funnel Reporting?
It starts with the following:
Overview: This is the default page you are taken to when you select the funnels. It is a page where you can see the summary of the sources and the % of assisted value from each source. In the image below, we can see the multi-channel visualizer which shows the % of the attribution from different channels to the overall value.
In the above figure we have selected two channels i.e. organic search and paid search, where we can see that organic search has attributed to 53% and paid search has attributed to 51% to the overall conversion value of the account respectively.
The below visualizer shows that out of the total paid search conversions, 40% got some assistance from organic search i.e. in the overall conversion path for paid search 40% of the conversions had organic channel in their conversion path.
Assisted Conversions: This report helps you to know how many leads or sales you have received from a respective channel along with the value of the conversions/sales.
This report has two tabs i.e.
The ‘Assist Interaction Analysis’ shows the assisted conversion of each channel along with the premium and the same can be seen below.
If we try to analyse all the tabs, we can see that paid search has generated a value of $2,810 through the traditional way of calculations i.e. last click conversions, but we also should not forget that paid search has generated a value of $4,143 through assisted conversions. The other tab is the first interaction analysis, where it shows all the paths that were initiated through paid search channel.
The value may be less, but we also should not skip out on the value generated by paid search when it is the last interaction channel before the user/customer makes a purchase or transaction.
Top Conversion Paths: This report shows the travel path of all the users through different channels before conversion/purchase along with the conversions and value generated for the same. We can simplify the same by seeing that all the paths the user had taken or just two paths and so on.
Time Lag Report: This report helps us in understanding the user’s behaviour; and helps us in planning our sales cycle with the targets accordingly. This helps us to understand how many days a user takes before converting or making a purchase and the total value generated by the same. In some cases, we can also see that some conversions which happened at a later stage were more in value than the latter.
Path Length Report: This report helps us to understand the user’s behaviour that is related to our site before making a purchase/conversion on our website.
We can also see that users have researched a lot on our website before making a purchase and that is the path that has the highest number of conversions and the maximum value generated.
Way Ahead: We can use these multi-channel funnels for a number of analysis that we do using Google Analytics and the same can be incorporated to the data that we get from our AdWords and credit the overall value to the respective mediums through which the targeting is done. We can create many custom segments for each channel and dig more into it by creating advanced segments and reports.
I will share the same in my next blog on how can we leverage multi-channel reports for the respective mediums.