Using Multi-Channel Funnel reports for analysis (4:24) Video Lecture | Google Analytics: A Deeper Study - Data & Analytics

Attribution modeling is a set of rules that
determine how sales and conversions get attributed
to your marketing campaigns. The goal of attribution
modeling is to help you better understand
how different marketing campaigns and different
marketing channels all work together to produce
conversions. This can help you better allocate
and invest your marketing time and budget.
For example, a customer could visit the Google
Merchandise Store from an AdWords ad. They
could return a week later by clicking on a
link in a social network. That same day,
they could return a third time through an
email campaign and make a purchase.
All of those marketing activities worked together
to generate the conversion.
By default, Google Analytics will attribute
all of the credit, or ecommerce revenue, to
the last marketing activity -- in this case, the email campaign. This is called a “last-click” attribution model.
But shouldn’t some of that credit go to
the other two marketing activities?
To help you move beyond last-click attribution,
Google Analytics has a series of reports called
Multi-Channel Funnel reports - or MCF. These
reports can tell you what role prior marketing
activities played in the conversion process.
A channel that contributed to a conversion
prior to the final interaction would be credited
with an “assisted conversion.”
MCF reports can also indicate the time it
took to go from initial interest to purchase.
This conversion path data includes interactions
across virtually all digital channels including
paid and organic search, referral sites, affiliates,
social networks, and email campaigns. To use
multi-channel funnels, you’ll need to have
first set up Goals or Ecommerce.
You can find Multi-Channel Funnel reports
in the Conversions section.
In the Overview report, you can see the Store’s
total conversions, as well as click-assisted,
impression-assisted, and rich media-assisted
conversions. You can look at Ecommerce transactions
or individual Goals if you’ve set them up.
If you’ve linked your AdWords account, the
report will also show specific AdWords data.
You can also set a lookback window of 1 to
90 days. This will determine the period of
time prior to conversion used in the report.
Below the timeline, you can visualize how
much each channel contributed to overall conversions
and where those overlapped.
The Assisted Conversions report shows the
total number and monetary value of assisted
sales and conversions broken out by channel.
The higher these numbers, the more the channel
helped assist with conversions. You can break
this out by the Day of Conversion, the Day
Before Conversion, and the Path Position,
which is the number of interactions involved
in the conversion.
In the table, we can see the impact of our
Paid Search campaigns and how many conversions
it drove. The Store may want to consider investing
more heavily in these campaigns to drive awareness.
The Top Conversions Paths report shows conversions
and conversion value grouped by the channel
combinations that led to conversion.
The Time Lag report shows conversions grouped
by the number of days it took from initial
interest to conversion. This can give you
a sense of how long your users take to make
a purchase and potentially inform your remarketing
campaigns.
The Path Length report also shows how many
interactions on average it took to convert
and how much each series of interactions was
worth.
Using Channel and Multi-Channel Attribution
reports, you can measure whether the campaigns
for your business have been successful. You
can use channel analysis to better understand
what channels work for your business and which
are most responsible for facilitating conversions.