Understanding the Relationship Between Various Marketing Channels

In a previous blog post, we covered the value in multi-channel funnels reports. Digging in deeper into the value of this type of reporting, let’s look at the types of channels and insights that are leveraged in these reports.

You can think of this type of reporting similar to how a basketball team works together. Sure we all know who made the winning shot, but think about how that winning shot would’ve never happened if his teammate didn’t make the perfect pass to him. Each team member plays a part in their victory. Similarly, a channel can play the role of first interaction, assist interaction and last interaction in multi-channels funnels reporting.

The various channels that are captured in these reports include, but are not limited to:

• paid and organic search (on all search engines along with the specific keywords searched)
• referral sites
• affiliates
• social networks
• email newsletters
• custom campaigns that you’ve created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs

Reporting occurs during the 30 days that led up to each conversion and transaction. Understanding the relationship between each channel will give you the intelligence you need to help define your most valuable marketing efforts.

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Image credit: Stefan Baudy

The Value in Multi-Channel Funnels Reports

Marketers often tend to attribute conversions to the last interaction a customer had with a marketing channel. However, looking at it from this perspective doesn’t really give us the complete picture.

Are you currently leveraging the insights Google Analytics has to offer? As part of this product, there is a suite of valuable multi-channel funnels reports. Although this isn’t a new feature, you may find that it is underutilized by many. The purpose of these reports is to give you a comprehensive overview of the steps your customers take from inception through to conversion.

Within these five multi-channel funnels reports, you can analysis data and important insights that would have otherwise been missed. Rather than just attributing credit to the last interaction, you can now identify which marketing channels initiate, which assist and which complete conversions.

This type of reporting can provide critical data for your marketing decisions. For example, imagine if you didn’t know that although your display advertising doesn’t provide as many conversions as you would like, it is involved in over 90% of conversion assists. Without knowing a key statistic such as this, the display channel may have been undervalued in the overall conversion process.

Watch this video to learn more about multi-channel funnels.



Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: Horia Varlan