Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics Goes Live

I’ve been waiting along time for Google to release this, but last week I finally got access to multi-channel funnels. I must say I am quite impressed – although I can already see a few problems. I’ve been trying out the non-brand vs brand channel grouping that Shark SEO ran through on SEO Gadget, which is kind of cool.

There is one thing that I think needs adding – I’d like to be able to segment channels based on their landing pages – if you have a different landing page for each stage of the buying decision making progress then you can accurately determine where they are likely to be in that process. This is definitely something I’d like to see in future, and I can imagine it is fairly easy to do.

I’ve actually been surprised to see that there seem to be many different paths taken by users to sites, making it very difficult to draw some conclusions in some cases. For example, this is a snippet of the report for one of my clients (click the image to enlarge):

From this I can conclude, organic plays a big part in their conversion process!!! Not terribly useful. But this next report is great for justifying SEO – you know that problem you have where you know your SEO efforts are working, but the visitor isn’t buying on the first visit? Well this is the solution, simply show your client this (again, click the image to enlarge):

I was a bit confused looking at this, I wasn’t sure if a last interaction conversion counted as an assisted conversion, but if you look at the differing numbers you can see it most certainly doesn’t. So from this we can see that organic actually assists the majority or conversions aswell.

Proven SEO Results
SEO’s can actually use these new multi-channel funnels to justify and prove their SEO results. If we drill down a bit further by creating our own custom channel grouping, in this case I’ve used Brand Organic and Non-Brand Organic, and we take a look at assisted conversions, we can see how much money is spent on the website which probably wouldn’t have happened without Non-Brand Organic:

If you look at that image you can see that although SEO brought in around £64,000 revenue on a last click basis, it actually contributed to a further £82,000 – all in all it has contributed to £146,000 revenue. This is very important if the company in question has low margins – it may make the difference of it being a profitable campaign or a loss making one – so take note, because it might just help you retain that client that can’t see the benefits they are getting!