Most online marketers use and love Google Analytics. We get excited by the numbers and spend hours figuring what is working and what is not. Google Analytics is continually improving and rolls out new features regularly. The next new feature it is rolling out is exciting; multi-touch attribution and multi-channel funnels.
“Huh?” you say? Here is the problem: Google gives “referral” credit to the most recent referrer… so if yesterday a visitor finds your site a link at your chamber of commerce, and then today returns after searching for you by your business name in Google, and then books a room in your hotel booking engine… Google’s brand name search gets ALL the credit (assuming you are one of the 35% or so that actually track referrers for online bookings… see our online marketing benchmarks yourself.).
This last-touch referral drives marketers crazy. Adding “first” touch referrals is nice… but there are often other channel involved. Enter Google’s new Multi Touch Funnels which will give us reports on how all the channels work together. You can read about it at Google or watch this video:
Or, this video:
If you really do want to try this service out, it is still in beta, but, you can Request Access to New Multi-Channel Funnels.
It will be interesting to see how this actually works. I haven’t used GA for conversion attribution because the “last touch” skews the numbers so much that it’s worthless. This is a good upgrade for GA, but I doubt they’ll back up the cookie log with an ip log, and that means GA users still won’t be able to track all conversions. GA is good for general visitor info and stats, but it’s best to use something different for conversion analytics.
Finally, G.A is catching up. There are lots of emerging Attribution Analytics providers around. I often wonder why GA took so long … from experience Search is often the last touch/click which is why our new clients are so focused on instead of integrating other channels in their marketing mix with “fair” attribution spread down the conversion funnel.
Now that Display is taking off in a big and set to rival search share of wallet .. Google wins both ways in validating their Display/SEM offerings instead of just Search