Today, Google has made the new Multi Channel Funnels report suite available for everyone inside of Google Analytics. Multi-Channel Funnels show which marketing channels customers interacted with for 30 days prior to purchasing or converting (completing a goal). This is great, because now we can see which channels initiate, assist, and finally help complete the conversion. In order for this feature to provide any value, you must have Goals and Ecommerce setup in your Google Analytics account.
There are 5 new reports and today I’ll give you a brief overview of a few. The first report you’ll see is the overview. Here you can see there where 1,261 conversions and of these 405 were assisted. Assisted means they used a combination of traffic sources. This could mean they visited our site twice from referral. The later reports will break this down more.
Assisted Conversions is next up. This starts to break down those assisted conversions and shows which channels contributed and whether it was first click, last interaction, or both. The values in this table are derived from the values that we assigned to our goals. This conversion value will be especially useful if you have e-commerce enabled and setup in Google Analytics. Keep in mind that in this report you can change to look at first click vs. last interaction and these are not mutually exclusive. A visitors path could look like Organic -> Direct – > Organic and in this case Organic would get both a first click and last interaction conversion. An awesome new feature in this section is the ability to make your own channel groupings, which for example could be a list of branded keywords and this can all be done on the fly.
The Top Conversion Paths Reports, display the conversion paths in a very user friendly manner. For the example below you can see that most of the users who are converting on this site, stick with the same channel. When looking at this and other reports, it is important to not just look at the overview as we have done for these examples, but also to drilldown and look at individual goal and e-commerce conversions.
These new reports open up many new layers of analysis. Multi-Channel Funnels complements the recent update to sessions. We will be providing more posts, about more detailed analysis that can be done inside of each of these reports. If you have any unique insights into how you are going to use these reports leave a comment below.
