Article

Google Analytics unveils Multi-Channel Funnel

Five new reports significantly expand retailers' ability to see how shoppers came to their site.

September 5, 2011

By David Henry

In the old days of Web analytics – that is, prior to August 24 - all traffic was attributed to the last source by which a user came to a retailer's website. But with the newly launched Multi-Channel Funnel, Google Analytics users can trace the full digital path a shopper takes, showing how customers interact with organic search, affiliate sites, display ads, social networks, email, video and mobile on the path to purchase. It also offers insights into how these mediums intersect to help drive conversion.

Neha Kale, writer and editor for The Media Pad, offers the example of a customer who sees, but doesn't click, on a display ad for Macy's on a Tuesday, performs a search for Macy's on Wednesday, clicks on a paid ad to visit the site but does not buy anything. But then she responds to a piece of email marketing on Friday and returns to the site to make a purchase. Previously, Google Analytics would have attributed the conversion to the email. Under the new reporting function, however, the display ads and paid search ad are also credited for triggering the sale.

Marketers have always used metrics at every stage of the funnel to make decisions about what to buy and when. But now, according to Richard Frankel, president of real-time targeting company Rocket Fuel, marketers can "turn those decision cycles from manual, annual events into real-time, automation-powered media buying. Marketers can input all the metrics they gather—about brand impact, intent, sentiment, clicks, shares, conversion, and the like—into the media-buying process to make the most accurate buys possible."

"If you have goal tracking setup with Google Analytics, you can easily determine the highest converting keywords your site currently gets traffic from, try to identify patterns in your highest converting keywords, and then translate and apply this knowledge to other areas of keyword research," said James Agate, founder and director of search at Skyrocket SEO.

Google enlisted Hugo Boss for early testing of the program. After using the Multi-Channel Funnel reporting tools for several months to develop its marketing strategy, Patrick Berresheim, director of e-commerce and customer relationship management for the men's apparel e-retailer said: "We found out that nearly two out of every three conversions involves more than one touch point. Knowing more about how our customers find us is very important, and this data helps us make better decisions,"

Vanessa Fox, author of "Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy," points out that creating analytics reports by keyword cluster can show whether "you're gaining or losing search traffic for those keywords and better understand the behavior of those searchers on your site," providing information that is much more useful and actionable.

The five new reports allow retailers and marketers to visualize data in new ways:

• Multi-Channel Funnels Overview provides a summary page that shows total conversions, assisted conversions where more than one source contributed to a visitor's conversion, and a "Conversion Visualizer" that displays multi-colored Venn diagrams to help users visualize the overlaps in conversions.
• Assisted Conversions Reports show all the conversions that occurred during a selected time period. The results can be sorted by source, medium, channel, first or last interaction, as well as other factors.
• Top Conversion Paths Reports show the sequences of channels that led to a conversion, displayed according to a variety of sorting options. Among other uses, this report can be useful in visualizing which keywords or Google AdWords campaigns are performing better than others.
• Time Lag Reports allow users to see how many days it took for conversions to happen.
• Path Length Reports show how many visits, regardless of source, were needed to convert a customer.

Other features of Google Analytics, according to Fox, will enable users to compare their sites with others in the same industry, "path monitoring to see where visitors arrived on the site and where they left, as well as a site overlay to view your visitors' clicking habits. You can also set up alerts when traffic spikes or visitors from a certain group hit the custom value you've set."

According to Forrester Research, Google Analytics is currently used by 161 of the Top 500 Internet retailers.