Multi-Channel Funnels are a new set of reports that show which channels your customers interacted with during the 30 days prior to a conversion or purchase. In this series of three posts, Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations of Shoes of Prey, shares how he uses these new reports to improve sales for the business. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 to catch up on the series. - Ed.

In our first post, I discussed why we like Google Analytics’ new Multi-Channel Funnels reports and how we improved our site experience based on insights gained from the Top Conversion Paths report. Today I want to focus on another report: the Assisted Conversions report.

Assisted Conversions report
The Assisted Conversions report summarises the roles and contributions of channels that brought traffic to our website. Prior to Multi-Channel Funnels we used to attribute sales to the last channel (e.g. organic search, paid display, etc.) that the customer interacted with--in other words, the last channel to send us the customer’s click.

What does this mean? Let’s take, for example, a visitor who first came to our site via a link they saw on Twitter, then a few days later clicked on one of our ads running on the Google Display Network, then came through an organic search result on Yahoo, and finally visited our site by clicking on a text ad on Google Search and made a purchase.

We traditionally attributed the sale to the Google Search text ad as that was the source of the last interaction. It also meant that we completely discounted the contribution made by the preceding channels that brought visitors to our site. This method of attribution just doesn’t reflect reality.

The Assisted Conversions report helped us change our view, because for every channel that brings traffic to our website, the report can now tell us how many:

• Last Interaction Conversions a given channel contributed towards (i.e. that was the last channel used before a purchase was made)
• Assisted Interaction Conversions a given channel contributed towards (i.e. it contributed towards a purchase, but was not the last channel used)

Insights: Social media influences sales down the line
When evaluating the Assisted Conversions report, we tend to focus on the “Assisted / Last Interaction Conversions” metric, which is displayed as a ratio between the number of Assisted and Last Intereaction conversions. This metric is able to tell us which channels are best for direct response (lower ratio) and which channels are best for influencing sales further down the line (higher ratio).



What we were able to see is that social media channels, such as our Shoes of Prey blog, Twitter, and Facebook, have a high combined Assisted / Last Interaction Conversions ratio of 8.67. What this means is that these channels contribute significantly to conversions early in the funnel and this may not have been picked up if performance was measured on last interaction conversions only.

Actions: Re-evaluating how we value our social media efforts
The Assisted Conversions report helps us evaluate our social media channels. In the past we weren’t sure how effective our social media campaigns were towards driving sales. Today it’s clear that they play an influential role in making sales happen further down the line. We’ve now ensured that our marketing budgets are apportioned appropriately based on these insights.

We’ve started taking action on social media sites to help our potential customers purchase their shoes sooner. For example, we’ve updated our social content to ensure it includes educational material on shoe design, and experiment with our calls to action to encourage visitors to design their own shoes.

Because social media plays an important role in driving sales further down the funnel, we are taking steps to acquire a larger social audience. We now run online campaigns to capture more fan page likes, Twitter followers, Google+ followers, and blog subscribers. We also started promoting our social media channels more prominently on our website and newsletters.



I strongly recommend that you take a close look at your Assisted Conversions report if you aren’t doing so already. By comparing assisted conversions against last interaction conversions, we revised our outlook on certain certain channels (e.g. social media) that we assumed weren’t performing well.

Posted by Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations, Shoes of Prey

Multi-Channel Funnels are a new set of reports that show which marketing channels your customers visited your site from during the 30 days prior to a conversion or purchase. In this series of three posts, Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations of Shoes of Prey, shares how he uses these new reports to improve sales for the business. You can read Part 1 here. - Ed.

In our first post, I discussed why we like Google Analytics’ new Multi-Channel Funnels reports, and how we improved our website and our customers’ experience based on insights gained from the Top Conversion Paths report. Today I want to focus on another equally insightful report: the Time Lag report.


Time Lag report
The time lag report shows how many days passed between when the visitor first came to our site and when they made a conversion (i.e. in our case, sales). This provided us with useful insights into the length of our online sales cycle.


Insights: Make the design process easier for our customers



When analysing our sales cycles earlier in the year, we noticed that 40% of our conversions (and 37% of our revenue) happen one or more days after the first visit. Furthermore, we could see that 13% of total conversions happen 12 or more days after the first visit. This reinforced our conclusions from the last post that our customers take time to make a decision on which shoe design they would like to purchase. We need to take steps to shorten this for them.

Actions: Email campaigns to help customers make decisions sooner
These insights convinced us to put into action a number of email campaigns to help our potential customers make a decision sooner.

We first developed an email marketing program that keeps in regular touch with our customers over time. We knew from the report that for every day that a customer stays away from the design process, the more likely they will drop off without making a purchase. These emails were designed to remind them about their unfinished designs and also provided design tips.

We also tested another email campaign where we sent customers content related to their unfinished design. We tested offering free shipping or free leather samples of the leathers used in their design. The leather samples offer got a reasonable take up but hasn't shown a big uplift in sales yet. The free shipping offer didn't perform very well though. We hypothesise that our customers care more about the quality of the product over saving a few dollars on shipping. Moving forward, we’ll focus on the quality aspects of our products when doing this kind of outreach.

We also started an email campaign targeting visitors who abandoned their shopping cart. We ask for feedback on why customers abandoned their cart and offer to answer any questions they might have. We’ve received some great feedback, but most importantly, we were able to “re-activate” shoppers who abandoned the purchase process. This campaign has not only lead to a 7% increase in sales, but has also provided valuable learnings on how to fine-tune our purchase process.


Results: Shortening the time-to-purchase
In combination with what we have done here, and with our actions we shared in our first post, we have seen a decrease in the time to purchase. Over the course of 4 months, we’ve seen same-day purchases increase by 20% and 12+ day purchases fall by 8%.




Multi-Channel Funnels helped us understand the time lag between when a visitor first comes to our and when they complete a purchase. These insights helped us formulate a “continuous touch” strategy that has helped us increase sales. I would be interested to hear what your ideas are for reducing the number of days between a first visit and purchase.

Posted by Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations, Shoes of Prey

Multi-Channel Funnels are a new set of reports that show which marketing channels your customers visited your site from during the 30 days prior to a conversion or purchase. In this series of three posts, Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations of Shoes of Prey, shares how he uses these new reports to improve sales for the business. - Ed.

What are Multi-Channel Funnels reports?
We were excited to be one of the earliest testers of Google Analytics’ new Multi-Channel Funnels reports. Multi-Channel Funnels are a new set of reports that show how customers arrived at our site (i.e. which channels they interacted with) during the 30 days prior to a conversion (e.g. newsletter sign-up) or purchase. We get a better understanding of what role website referrals, searches and ads play towards influencing a purchase; and how much time passed between the visitor’s first visit and their purchase. What this means is that we no longer have to base our decisions based on the source of the last click. Using these reports, we can now look at all the channels that visitors may have used prior to converting. This gives us much more powerful insight into which channels are working for us.

I would like to walk you through how Shoes of Prey gained useful insights that helped our business through these sets of reports. Today, in the first of our three articles, I’ll focus on the Top Conversion Path report.



Top Conversion Paths report
We use the Top Conversions Paths report to understand the sequence of channel interactions that led to conversions. For example, if we study this conversion path (the number of times a customer visited our website, and from where) below, we can see that two conversions happened due to a series of interactions where the visitors:

1. First visited us three times via a direct visit (i.e. using a bookmark or typing our URL directly into their browser)
2. Then visited us by clicking on a paid ad
3. They returned twice more to our site, but this time from clicking on organic search results
4. Then they visited us again directly three more times
5. Finally they came to us through organic searches. They ended up purchasing a pair of shoes on the very last search.

We could then further break out these results to see more details, for example, which particular keywords attracted the visitors when they came to our site via Paid Advertising and Organic Search.



Insights: Is there confusion among some of our customers?
When analysing recent top conversion paths, we realised that a significant number of sales occur due to a series of direct visits from people who had typed in the URL or came from a bookmark. Some visitors were making up to 30 direct visits before purchasing a pair of shoes!

It was heartening to see a lot of all-direct visits, as it signified that these visitors had made up their mind to purchase their shoes from us. We realised, however, that we need to take efforts to help our customers design and purchase their shoes in a fewer number of visits. We understand that our offerings could be overwhelming for some customers when they could choose from over four trillion shoe combinations!





Actions: Reducing the number of visits to purchase
We took steps to drive more of our potential customers to our leather videos. We wanted them to learn more about the products in a shorter period of time and encourage them to design their shoes sooner.

We also implemented a website chat solution that allows customers to ask us questions while browsing the site. We can answer their questions in real-time and hopefully help them arrive at a decision sooner.

We have also been continually testing changes to our user interface that would help customers reach a decision on which pair of shoes to purchase. These include testing different forms of wizards and guides, and even highlighting how to get started.

Results: Shortening the purchase cycle
Taking these steps have helped our customers make a purchase decision sooner. In the last three months we’ve seen a 40% increase in our conversion rate and a shortening of all-direct paths before a sale. We’ve seen same-day purchases increase by 20% and 12+ day purchases fall by 8%.




We found the Top Conversion Paths report to be an eye-opener. It clearly demonstrated to us how our potential customers were interacting with our site prior to making a purchase. I encourage you to start looking at your Top Conversion Paths report now - I guarantee that you will find at least one conversion path worth exploring that you had never considered before!

Posted by Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations, Shoes of Prey