Update: Video on new Google Analytics multi-channel funnel reports

Thanks to Google we're all used to measuring campaigns on a 'last click gets all the credit' basis (or occasionally first click). That is, all conversions (i.e. sales, leads, form completions, etc) are tied back to the last (or first) media channel that a person responded to respectively clicked on before converting.

Unfortunately, this method ignores all other touch points that a consumer might have responded to leading up to a conversion which also contributed to some extend, resulting in the undervaluation of certain media channels and ultimately the misallocation of marketing budgets (i.e. some channels are more likely to introduce a product rather than closing the deal and these miss out using last click attribution, see graph at the bottom comparing first and last click attribution).

Google is trying to address this through their new AdWords Search Funnel feature, however the Google reports do not include any organic channels or direct to site visits which do play a significant role in a consumer's path to purchase. In fact, organic search terms that include brand keywords and direct to site visits stimulated by some other form of media (i.e. TV, radio, print, etc) account for the majority of conversions on most websites (so we think they should be included).

To solve this issue for one of our clients, NDS (Carecareers), we used some custom JavaScript to record a stack (or path to purchase) of all campaign touch points across paid and organic channels in one of the Google Analytics custom segmentation variables (see chart below for a sample of the raw data). For simplicity sake we only recorded top level channel (i.e. SEO, SEM, direct, etc) in this case but this could be as granular as you want (i.e down to ad groups or even search terms).

The data on its own however is not very useful, you just end up with a long list of unique channel combinations (the above is only showing the tip of the iceberg) so we had to export the raw data from Google Analytics and analyise it using the Tableau business intelligence software. To make sense of the data and accommodate the various different purchase path combinations we decided to follow the ClearSaleing model and classify all touch points as either introducer, influencer or closer (see graph below and at the very bottom).

Looking at the simplified example above we realized that paid search responses play an important role both as introducers and as closers, but not so much as influencers (we're thinking that unbranded terms make up most of the introducers and branded terms most of the closers but we don't have the data yet). Conversely, the importance of organic search, direct to site visits and emails (activity just started) might have been understated in the standard last click based reports up until now as they are more likely to act as influencing channels (SEO might pay off after all).

Given the above results and relatively simple data collection and analysis method we think there's really no excuse for marketers anymore to keep relying on last click media attribution so please drop us a line at insights@datalicious.com if you would like to find out more.