Ever wonder if paid search is actually working? Is it contributing to converting your web leads? With Advanced Google Analytics reporting, we can dive deeper into your web metrics with three specific reports. The All Traffic, Assisted Conversion, and Top Conversions Path reports show you how channels work together to provide accurate conversions or leads. I am going to take you through each of these 3 reports and explain what each is telling you about your conversions. Keep reading, the breakdown is below!
1. All Traffic Report
The All Traffic report is located under the Acquisition section in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics. You will choose the All Traffic tab which will open up the Channel report that will show you a breakdown of your metrics by each channel. One thing to note is in this report when the last click is direct traffic, the All Traffic report will override the direct traffic action and give all credit to the previous step. For example, if a user were to see an ad for a site (paid search) and leave to later come back to the site directly, the credit would be attributed to the paid search channel, and none would be given to direct traffic.
Let’s throw some numbers into the mix to represent how many goal completions came from your paid search efforts. In the All Traffic channels report, you will add the paid search and display goal completions (103+41) to gives you the total amount of goal completions your paid search efforts contributed to. This report is great for gaining insight to how well each of your channels is turning your visitors into leads. The next report I will dig into takes this idea a step further. We are going to talk about the Assisted Conversions report.
2. Assisted Conversions Report
The Assisted Conversions report can be located under the conversions section in the Google Analytics navigation. You will look under the Multi-Channels Funnel to find the Assisted Conversions report. This report will show you how each channel assisted other channels in goal completions. This report is the most accurate and gives more insight to how much weight can be attributed to each channel when it comes to conversions. This report separates out how often each channel was the last click in a conversion and when it assisted another channel to complete a conversion. This report is great to show that it takes more than just one channel to convert your traffic into leads. To explain how to use this report I am going to continue looking at the paid search channels, paid search & display. You will see in the screenshot below that the paid search channel assisted in 13 conversions and display assisted in 19. This means there was 13 different times a paid search campaign was used to enter the site and the visitor later came back through another channel (organic, direct, etc) and completed a goal.
So how do you figure out how many conversions you are receiving from your channels including the assisted conversion value? Looking at the paid search and display channels, you would add up both the assisted conversion value (13 + 19) with the last click or direct conversion value (36 + 87). This total amount (155) will equal how many times your paid search efforts led to a conversion.
The biggest thing about these two reports is they cannot be used cohesively. The Assisted Conversions report separates traffic out in a different way compared to the All Traffic report. When looking at the Assisted Conversions report for paid search and display last click conversions, the amount should be less than what is reported in the All Traffic report. When a visitor completes a conversion by coming to the site directly, the Assisted Conversions report gives credit to the direct channel you see. Whereas the other report overrides the direct traffic and gives all credit to the previous step or previous encounter.
You may question why you can’t add the assisted conversions value you find in the Assisted Conversions report with the revenue you see for each channel in the All Traffic report… the reason you can’t do this is because the conversions would be double counted. These two reports are mutually exclusive and should not be aggregated. Although each of these reports are important for measuring your site’s metrics, all these reports measure conversions in different ways and should be analyzed individually.
3. Top Conversion Path report
The last report I want to introduce to you is the Top Conversion Path which is located in the Multi-Channel Funnels tab below the Assisted Conversions report. This report helps give a visual as to how your users are interacting with your channels to make a purchase or complete a goal. It will show you the pathway the user is taking before they make their final decision. Looking at the screenshot below, you will see the top conversion path for this client was Organic Search to Direct. What this means is the user started out by finding the site and/or product by searching the web. Then, they later came back directly to the site to complete their purchase. This top path for users led to 22 conversions.
As you can see the 7th row down shows the same pathway in retrospect to the first, but it has a x3 on the direct channel. This represents the user came in the first time through organic search then back again another 3 times directly before converting. This report is great to see how your users are reaching your site and how the visitor interacts with your campaigns before submitting a lead! Again, we can see the effect the paid search campaigns have on getting your visitors to the site and completing a conversion.
All these advanced reports are great tools for really digging into your traffic and learning about how your visitors are utilizing the different channels to become a customer!
