Attribution Modeling
Attribution modeling is a set of rules that determine how sales and conversions get attributed to your marketing campaigns. The goal of attribution modeling is to help you better understand how different marketing campaigns and different marketing channels all work together to produce conversions. This can help you better allocate and invest your marketing time and budget.
For example, a customer could visit the Google Merchandise Store from a Google Ads ad. They could return a week later by clicking on a link in a social network. That same day, they could return a third time through an email campaign and make a purchase. All of those marketing activities worked together to generate the conversion.
By default, Google Analytics will attribute all of the credit, or ecommerce revenue, to the last marketing activity -- in this case, the email campaign. This is called a “last-click” attribution model.
But shouldn’t some of that credit go to the other two marketing activities?
Multi-Channel Funnel reports
To help you move beyond last-click attribution, Google Analytics has a series of reports called Multi-Channel Funnel reports - or MCF. These reports can tell you what role prior marketing activities played in the conversion process. A channel that contributed to a conversion prior to the final interaction would be credited with an “assisted conversion.”
MCF reports can also indicate the time it took to go from initial interest to purchase. This conversion path data includes interactions across virtually all digital channels including paid and organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, and email campaigns. To use multi-channel funnels, you’ll need to have first set up Goals or Ecommerce.
You can find Multi-Channel Funnel reports in the Conversions section.
In the Overview report, you can see the Store’s total conversions, as well as click-assisted, impression-assisted, and rich media-assisted conversions. You can look at Ecommerce transactions or individual Goals if you’ve set them up. If you’ve linked your Google Ads account, the report will also show specific Google Ads data.
You can also set a lookback window of 1 to 90 days. This will determine the period of time prior to conversion used in the report.
Below the timeline, you can visualize how much each channel contributed to overall conversions and where those overlapped.
The Assisted Conversions report shows the total number and monetary value of assisted sales and conversions broken out by channel. The higher these numbers, the more the channel helped assist with conversions. You can break this out by the Day of Conversion, the Day Before Conversion, and the Path Position, which is the number of interactions involved in the conversion.
In the table, we can see the impact of our Paid Search campaigns and how many conversions it drove. The Store may want to consider investing more heavily in these campaigns to drive awareness.
The Top Conversions Paths report shows conversions and conversion value grouped by the channel combinations that led to conversion.
The Time Lag report shows conversions grouped by the number of days it took from initial interest to conversion. This can give you a sense of how long your users take to make a purchase and potentially inform your remarketing campaigns.
The Path Length report also shows how many interactions on average it took to convert and how much each series of interactions was worth.
Using Channel and Multi-Channel Attribution reports, you can measure whether the campaigns for your business have been successful. You can use channel analysis to better understand what channels work for your business and which are most responsible for facilitating conversions.
