Multi-Channel Funnels

Have you ever wanted to find out which online medium has outperformed others? Google Analytics’ Multi-Channel Funnels lets you do just that – and a lot more.

Recently, Google Analytics released for everyone a metric called Multi-Channel Funnel (MCF) that was till then in beta. For a digital marketer, this is one of the most important enhancements.

What are Multi-Channel Funnels?

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics help explore the actual path that visitors/ prospective buyers take before they eventually become your customers. This option allows you to explore metrics like first interactions, last interaction, and assisted conversion.

Multi-Channel Funnels allow marketers to look beyond the ‘last click attribution’ model of Google Analytics and find out visitors’ interaction points leading up to final conversions within a 30-day period.

You can get answers to these questions:

• What role did prior referral medium play in that conversion?
• How much time passed between the visitor’s initial interest and associated final conversion/ goal?

How do Multi-Channel Funnels work?

• Multi-Channel Funnels track a user’s movement, referred to as ‘conversion path’, across multiple online referring sources over a 30-day period.
• Using Multi-Channel Funnels, we can see what additional channels have contributed in the final conversion/ goal.
• According to the Google Analytics Blog, conversion path data includes interactions with virtually all digital channels. These channels include, but are not limited to:
  • Paid and organic search
  • Referral sites
  • Affiliates
  • Social networks
  • Email newsletters
  • Custom campaigns that you’ve created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs

    

• Get to know time to conversion through time lag.
• Know more about a user’s interaction with your website before a desired action is performed.

Why use Multi-Channel Funnels?

• Find all your digital marketing channels in one place.
• Understand the worth of all your marketing efforts provided all are integrated within Analytics.
• Get a snapshot of steps your customers take before purchasing or converting.
• Tailor your marketing efforts based on specific channel performance.
• Allocate the right budget to the performing channel.

What you need to ensure that it works properly:

• You have set up goals or ecommerce tracking is enabled.
• All campaigns are tracked in GA with proper tracking codes.

It is imperative for digital marketers and analysts to know about cross-channel optimization to allocate budgets across their respective marketing channels. Multi-Channel Funnels will help them track user interactions across various online marketing channels.

In part 2, I will focus on MCF Reporting, so watch this space.

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Contributed by: Kamaljit Saini, Practice Lead::Search Marketing, Puretech Internet