Google Analytics Launches Multi-Channel Funnel Reports

Google Analytics has recently launched functionality to display Multi-Channel Funnels.  Here, at Prime Visibility, we’ve been doing this for Paid Search through SearchForce, our portfolio bid management platform. The ability to track cross channel in GA supplements what we can track in SearchForce with segmentation, device tracking and application tracking.

Multi-Channel Funnel reports show how your traffic sources assist each other through the conversion process. The Multi-Channel Conversion Visualizer shows a Venn Diagram of how sources interact with each other.  Here is an example where the green bubble represents Organic Search, the yellow bubble represents Direct Traffic and the pink bubble represents Referral Traffic. The overlap shows the percentage of conversion paths that include those combinations of channels.

We can also create segments of conversions for analysis.  For example, organic search vs paid search, brand keywords vs. non-brand keywords and so on.  It’s amazing to see how search behavior crosses different mediums.  Here is the “Anatomy of a Conversion Path”:

Google Analytics provides reports to show the keywords that assisted, the last keyword that converted, the top conversions paths, time lag and path length.

This is a great way to get a holistic view of your marketing efforts and see which channels are providing a lift in conversions.  A great example would be to see the effect Social Media marketing has on other advertising channels, especially since Social Media ROI is so difficult to calculate at this time.

Marketing dollars can be measured more efficiently now with the ability to give credit to assisting channels in Google Analytics.  To take this one step further, SearchForce gives us the ability to manage and optimize paid search based upon these conversion assists and determine how valuable each click in the conversion path is.