If you are in anyway connected to advertising or analytics, you must be familiar with the importance of customer conversion for a successful online ad campaign. It’s essential to know which channels drive people to buy your product or service. With conversion being such a significant aspect of the marketing campaign, it becomes crucial that you analyze the customer journey or conversion route efficiently.
You can determine the value of marketing channels using Google Analytics’ attribution model. But if you want a refined approach to analyze the conversion route, we recommend leveraging its Multi-Channel Funnels feature.
Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) Overview
Earlier, Google Analytics gave complete credit to the last campaign, keyword, or ad that led to customer conversion. Due to this, advertisers couldn’t gauge the contribution made by other channels and campaigns, which may have played a major role in the conversion process.
Multi-Channel Funnels feature helps you understand the customer acquisition process in a precise manner. It explains how different marketing channels attribute to convert a prospect to a customer.
So, it’s a move from last touch/interaction attribution to multi-channel multi-touch attribution modeling. Let’s delve a little deeper to understand this better.
Where can you find this feature in Google Analytics?
Multi-Channel Funnels is available under the Conversions tab in Google Analytics. It lists five types of reports to help you analyze your customer conversion route better.
Overview
Multi-Channel Funnels compare the number of conversions and assisted conversions over a selected period of time. It includes a Multi-Channel Conversion Visualizer, which shows the percentage of total conversions by path and also includes different channel combinations.
Assisted Conversions
MCF shows the number of sales and conversions initiated, assisted, and completed by each channel. Assisted conversions are further divided into three categories:
Assist Interaction: Any interaction on the conversion path, excluding the last interaction First Interaction: The first interaction on the conversion path Last Interaction: The last interaction on the conversion path
Assisting Interaction Analysis
It shows a comparison between the Assist and Last interactions. The analysis gives you an understanding of how much ROI you are getting from your assisting channels which are not playing as last interaction source of conversion.
Last Interaction Analysis It helps you track the channels which initiated the conversion process. For instance, you can analyze the value of your PPC ads even if you have not received conversion after the last click.
Top Conversions Path
The Top Conversions Path report shows all the unique conversion paths that led to the final conversion. It also shows the number and value of conversions.
By default, the report shows the ‘MCF Channel Grouping Path.’ You can also do grouping by source, medium, and other AdWords sources.
Time Lag
This report helps you analyze your sales cycle. It shows the number of conversions and conversion values which happened between 0 to 12+ days after a user’s first interaction.
Basically, this lets you know how many days, weeks, or months it takes for your visitors to convert.
Path Length
In case you want to know the number of times users are visiting your website before converting to customers, Path Length report will assist you. All in all, it shows you the number of interactions users have with your website before conversion.
Apart from these, MCF has two major elements to support the analysis process.
Conversions Segments
These allow to analyze specific sets of conversion path in your MCF reports. For instance, you can filter the MCF report by choosing the user interaction of first or last time with any source, campaign, keyword, landing page etc.
You can select up to four segments for comparison. You can also create your own segment which you can further edit or delete as per your requirement.
Conversion Type
This includes the type of conversions you want to look at. This option is available below the Conversion Segment. You can also view all the conversions influenced by AdWords by clicking on the AdWords option.
With such imperative elements and features, Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels is a win-win solution to track and evaluate different digital marketing channels that work together to create conversions. With complete analysis of up-front and last-click conversions, it shows you a clear picture of not just one marketing initiative, but of your entire marketing strategy.