Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics

In Digital Analytics, conversions are credited to the last touch campaign, search, or email   that referred the user when he or she converted.  But what role did first channel (source) play in that conversion? How much time passed between the user’s first touch and last touch channel conversion?

Multi-Channel Funnels reports will help you understand the importance of first touch channel and how these channels contributed to generate sales and conversion.

For example : Many users may purchase on your site after seeing email campaign that you send in terms of driving new users to the website or after searching your brand on google. However, they may have been introduced to your brand via referral. The Multi-Channel Funnels reports show how first touch channel contributed to your sales.               

Conversion Path

Multi-Channel Funnels are generated from conversion path under conversion in google analytics. By default, only interactions within the last 30 days are included in conversion paths, but you can adjust this time period from 1-90 days using the Lookback Windowselector at the top of each report.

The Multi-Channel Funnels overview report demonstrates the value of the following channels but is not limited to:

Direct: These visitors come to you by typing url in the address bar. Mostly, we can assume the customer was aware of you prior to visit.

Organic search: These visitors come to you from search engine like google, yahoo, Bing, etc

Paid search: This refers to visits from paid search campaign that show up on google search result when user searches for any keyword.

Referral: These visitors come to your website through other content websites like blog, press release etc

Email: This refers to the email you sent to bulk emails and your website URL is given there.

Social: This refers to the traffic from social networking sites like Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn etc

How Multi-channel funnel section looks like

This Dimension carries five sections in terms of reporting:

1. Overview Report:

This is the summary page that compares the number of conversions and assisted conversions from different channels.

Overview report also features multi-channel Conversion Visualizer, which shows % of total conversion against different channels.

Below graph gives a brief understanding of how each marketing channels performed to drive sales or conversion.

2. Assisted Conversion:

Assisted conversion report shows how many conversions each channel/source initiated or assisted (first touch channel) and completed with the value of conversions.

As shown in above graph, assisted conversion is the initial interaction of the user with website through channel and last click conversion are those users who actually converted.

3. Top Conversion Path

Top Conversion Path reports show all unique conversions path that lead to sales/conversions. You can also create custom channel grouping as per your business needs like combine organic & paid search traffic and create a channel named search only.

Below screenshot shows channel path and how users converted through each channel.

4. Time Lag Report

This report refers to how many conversions resulted from conversion paths that were anywhere from 0 to 12+ days long as shown in below screenshot:

This report provides inference on the length of your conversion cycle. For this account max. Conversions happened in first interaction

5. Path length Report

Path length report shows how many interactions users had with your site before they converted as shown in below screenshot:

Path length report in multi channel funnel

Attribution – Model Comparison Tool

Model Comparison tool is used to do comparison among different metrics   like first interaction, last interaction, time decay etc.

We can select any of the selection models and compare with another model. Below graph shows different selection models:

Definitions of different attribution models and example:

A customer landed on your site by AdWords ads, returns one week later through social network. Same day, he comes back a third time from email campaign, and a few hours later, returns again directly and makes a purchase.

Last Interaction:  the last touchpoint—in this case, the direct channel—would receive 100% of the credit for the Purchase.

Last Non-Direct Click: all direct traffic is ignored, and 100% of the credit for the Purchase goes to the last channel that the customer clicked through from before converting—in this case, the Email channel.

Last AdWords Click: the last AdWords click—in this case, the first and only click to the Paid Search channel —would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.

First Interaction: the first touchpoint—in this case, the Paid Search channel—would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.

Linear:  each touchpoint in the conversion path—in this case the Paid Search, Social Network, Email, and Direct channels—would share equal credit (25% each) for the sale.

Time Decay: the touchpoints closest in time to the sale or conversion get most of the credit. In this particular sale, the Direct and Email channels would receive the most credit because the customer interacted with them within a few hours of conversion. The Social Network channel would receive less credit than either the Direct or Email channels. Since the Paid Search interaction occurred one week earlier, this channel would receive significantly less credit.

Position Based:  40% credit is assigned to each the first and last interaction, and the remaining 20% credit is distributed evenly to the middle interactions. In this example, the Paid Search and Direct channels would each receive 40% credit, while the Social Network and Email channels would each receive 10% credit.