Google Analytics Multi Conversion Funnel Report

Google Analytics made three major changes recently and they are all good.
- Enhanced Path flow report
- Muti-channel funnel
- Search Engine Optimization report

In my view, multi-channel funnel and search engine optimization report are the interesting new reports. I will focus the on the multi-channel report for this post. It is pretty revolutionary as many data analysts always wanted this type of data to understand how much a non-marketing channels like “micro-site” or “product reviews sites” actually contributes to sales. A lot of these type of digital channels may not directly close sales, but could assit sales. So getting that data visibility is really awesome!

The multi-channel funnel report allows marketers to understand the popular combinations of paths users took within digital channels to arrive to your tracked website. It is pretty cool because you can filter the channels by medium, keywords, custom group sets, etc.

I still need to play around with it more, but here some ideas that I have to make use of these data.

1) Look at the proportion of contribution to the bottom line by top contributing channels vs. the long tail part of the channel. It is easy to look at the top 10 and neglect the rest, but as we learned from SEO, the long tail of the keywords or channels may contribute a lot to your bottom line. Looking at the average assist/last attribution ratio on the difference between the top x vs. the rest would be interesting, and see how much you need to focus on optimizing the top x.

2) Keywords pattern as consumer move down the funnel. There are some cases where users consecutively use search engines to visit the site. I think there is a value to look into what keywords users are using and how that keywords change as it move down the funnel. It could indicate something about the patterns about the users and marketers could gain some idea about the consumer journey. For example, if users searched “Furniture”, then in their second visit searched “Sofa”, and finally entered “Blue large sofa” could indicate something about your user and your site’s ability to acquire that type of audience. Learn from it and make use of it.

3) Deep analysis around conversion segments. As you may now, your site may be all about to drive sales, and it could have email registration or some kind of feature to drive leads. How does the user’s channel paths differ when the first interaction is Email or when Email is the last interaction?

If you know the leads you bring into promotional programs are likely to convert more and buy repeatedly, then it is worth exploring to see if there is any marketing opportunities to help consumers go down the marketing funnel.

4) Time lag and path length analysis. One of the report has the capability to understand the time difference (in days) between the channel path. If there is any opportunities you can intercept with an ad to close the sales, then I’m sure this report can give you that hint about the best timing to shoot and ad to make those days shorter. Same goes with the path, if any channel segments are closing the sales in shorter path length, then it is probably worth diving into the data to see what is actually closing it.

Here is video of the details and some screen shots.

Sample screen shot of the multi-channel funnels with different combinations of paths

Sample Time Lag report with segments applied.