Google Assisted Conversions - The Good. The Bad. The Better

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I think we can all agree that Google Assisted Conversions, whether it's for form completion, download, or a transaction is very important in beginning to understand customer journey and what content helps drive your business. But there are issues if you are simply trying to see the total value of your various marketing channels. In this post, I will try to get into what's great about the assisted channels report, what's not so great, and steps you can take to best review your channel's value.

The Good

Understand Channel Relevancy:


In the view, you can see how relevant each of the channels was to the main conversion. For this example, since it's a transaction we see how much revenue actually was attributed to that channel outside of last non-direct click attribution. As you can see, organic search as an assisted channel has a very high value as compared to last-click attribution. With this insight, you might think that you need to continue down the path of SEO optimization and content creation.

The Bad

Hard to Gauge True Value:

In the previous image we noticed the amount of assisted revenue gained by channel, but if you utilize the top paths report you can see that it's not a true value. Often times users could use several different channels before they convert. The assisted report will apply value to all of them, but really this could be double-counted and not give you a true sense of the value of the channel.

The Better

The best thing for beginners to do that really wants to understand the value of a channel is to see how often that channel is being used, regardless of where on the totem pole of conversion it is. You can get fancier with attribution modeling, which you should, so you can really get to the bottom of where you would want a channel to appear in your customer journey, but for you to provide any investment in something, knowing a digital channel is used more often in sales than not will really help.

How to do this: This is very simple so I won't even use "h" word (hack) for this.

1) Download the top paths file for the given time frame to an excel

2) Highlight your file and use the "Filter" tool

3) Use the text filters under the "channel grouping path" and find a channel. I generally use "contains" rules as it eliminates any errors in writing or in my memory :)

4) After you did that, just highlight the number of transactions and then highlight the value and see if that channel was higher in either of those. In my example I just pulled up (not pictured) I had 26 transactions and $1,400 in sales from paths with Organic. For my paid channel I had 3 conversions and $123 in value.

Conclusion
This is a quick indication that we always need to be sharply focused on creating content and improving our SEO so we can get more organic traffic to our website. What it also tells me is that paid does help sell folks, but in terms of people who need more than one experience with your site, it is better served to invest slightly heavier in organic.

At the end of the day, this is a quick and dirty way to evaluate your channels. There are more sophisticated methods, but if you want to ensure you are spending your time and money in the right places, these reports and tactics can help your digital strategy monthly.


Location: Omaha, NE, USA

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