When telling a good story, we all know too well that jumping to the conclusions never really made it an engaging or informative story. You would miss too many of the best details— and the punch line for that matter!
The same rule applies to Multi-Channel Funnels. Nowadays, customers make informed purchase decisions by researching, comparing, and visiting a variety of different places, so measuring return solely based on the last click gives an incomplete picture and potentially misses important insights about how you reach your most valuable customer, according to Google.
The beauty of the Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics allows you to view the customer’s interactions from multiple digital media and show how these channels work in cohesion to create sales and conversions. This tool can really assist you in making crucial marketing decisions regarding your advertising dollars.
Why Should you use Multi-Channel Funnels?
In simplest terms, Multi-Channel Funnels helps with the following:
- Better understand the value of your marketing efforts at a large and small scale
- See a complete picture of the steps your customers take before purchasing or converting
- Improve your marketing based on channel performance
- Make the right digital advertising budgeting decisions
There are five Multi-Channel Funnels reports. These great reports track a user’s movement, referred to as ‘conversion path’ and show what channels customers interacted with during the 30 days before the purchase.
This program helps answer several essential questions such as:
How much time was in between the buyer’s initial interest and actual purchase?
What medium helped produced this conversion?
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
