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

Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this year we introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with any social plugin installed on your site - after all, what can be measured can also be improved and optimized!

MilkADeal started using Google Analytics earlier this year. It is a company in Malaysia that has benefited greatly from using Social Plugin Analytics. By using these new reports, they are able to uncover insights and create significant business process improvements. As reported in the New Straits Times, "In particular, the newly introduced social interaction tracking tool...We've been using it only in the last couple of weeks but we have seen an increase of almost 60% in social interaction visitors to our site," said Wilson Quah, founder of MilkADeal."

By optimizing the instrumentation of a few buttons on their site, MilkADeal is able to achieve better engagement, a big boost in number of high quality referrals, and better outcomes!

Today, we are happy to announce that our partners, AddThis and ShareThis, are making this social plugin analysis even easier. Just as the +1 button is automatically instrumented for you by the Google+ team, publishers using AddThis and ShareThis will now have first class integrations with Social Plugin Analytics!



“Providing real-time analytics to 10 million domains each month, we see what big data can do every day. Integrating AddThis social signals into Google Analytics is a big win for publishers. We’re excited to contribute social sharing insight where it can be viewed in context of the GA interface.”

Will Meyer, VP of Publisher Products, Clearspring

“At ShareThis, we work to provide our publisher network of one million+ websites with actionable analytics on their social activity. It's great to see Google paving the way for the entire industry to derive meaningful insights from the social Web and we're incredibly pleased to be a launch partner."

Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!

Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team

Update: AddToAny users will also be happy to know that their social buttons are automatically instrumented to work with event tracking and social plugin analytics!

Last month we ran a series of GoMeasure with Google Analytics events across Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. In those four events, Googlers and Google Analytics Certified Partners shared insights into how to get the most value out of Google Analytics’ new features as well as sharing site optimisation and conversion tips.

Today we’re releasing the videos of the presentations from the Singapore and Kuala Lumpur events. The videos are of easy-to-digest bite-sized lengths. So you should be easily able to watch them in between meetings or while taking a break. You can also download the slides if you would like to view them on a bigger screen.



Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

What a crazy two weeks it has been! GoMeasure with Google Analytics did a whirlwind tour through Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. In those four events, Googlers and Google Analytics Certified Partners shared insights into how to get the most value out of Google Analytics’ new features as well as sharing site optimisation and conversion tips.

You can view the presentations from the four events via the below links. We’ll also be providing the videos of the talks from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur next week. Stay tuned!

• Southeast Asia Leg: Kuala Lumpur (Sep 8 2011)
• Southeast Asia Leg: Singapore (Sep 6 2011) 
• Australia Leg: Melbourne (Sep 1 2011) 
• Australia Leg: Sydney (Aug 30 2011)

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

Google Analytics Certified Partners play an important role in Asia Pacific’s web analytics ecosystem. They are the Google Analytics implementation and reporting experts, and they partner closely with businesses of all sizes to help them improve and grow their online presence. This is one in a series of articles from Google Analytics Certified Partners across the region.

Anantya is the Executive Director of Think.Web, the first Google Analytics Certified Partner in Indonesia. - Ed.

Rapper, radio broadcaster, host, TV personality and writer: these are the many faces of popular Indonesian independent artist Pandji. As an independent artist, Pandji has to be smart about his Web presence and his budget and he needs an efficient and cost-effective way to get the word out about his work.

That’s where Google Analytics, and the Think.Web consulting team, come into play. In this post, we’ll walk you through how we used Google Analytics to answer two key questions about Pandji’s online presence - “Why do Pandji’s fans visit his website?” and “How do we reach Pandji’s fans?” - and then how we applied those insights successfully to promote a new album.


Why do Pandji’s fans visit his website?
To understand what fans like on Pandji’s website, we decided to analyse three months worth of data from two reports:

1. Top Content report: which tells us which pages (and which music and writings) people like the most
2. Internal Site Search report: which tells us what people are searching for once they reach the site

These reports revealed that Pandji’s fans visit his website to find out more about his latest releases. The Top Content report showed that the “For You” page, where Pandji showcases his latest books, songs, and radio recordings, was the most-visited page on the site after the home page. To confirm this finding, we looked at popular keywords typed into the internal site search. Here too, fans wanted information about recent works, whether it’s a new book, radio recording, or single. These insights motivated Pandji to release his next album 100 percent online, where fans were already turning to find his latest releases.

Note: nasional.is.me is Pandji’s e-book, hardrock is the radio station that airs his show, and “mulanya biasa saja” is the title of one of his songs.


How do we reach Pandji’s fans?
Pandji uses Facebook and Twitter to interact with his fans. To identify which of these mediums provide the best reach and traffic, we used campaign tracking parameters to monitor the performance of Pandji’s social media campaigns. We wanted to pinpoint which medium we should use to promote Pandji’s next album.

Before the actual album release, we posted several times on Twitter and Facebook and used campaign tracking parameters to understand which posts were most effective at driving visitors to Pandji’s website. We learned that almost 11 percent of overall traffic came from promotional messages placed on Twitter and Facebook. We also learned that promotions on Twitter (twitter/promoSMM) performed better than both organic referrals from Twitter and promotions on Facebook (facebook/promo SMM). With this information, we decided to use Twitter as the main vehicle to promote Pandji’s new album, Merdesa.

Putting it all together: Distributing Merdesa online and measuring performance
Pandji released Merdesa on his website as a free download and promoted the release on Twitter. We then partnered with Pandji’s marketing team to monitor Merdesa’s popularity and gain learnings for his next album release. As you can see, we’re big believers in continuous improvement!

To understand performance, we looked at:

• The number of page views of content related to Merdesa
• The number of clicks on the album’s download link

Analysing the results
The Merdesa page was the most-visited page in November 2010 and contributed 24.65% of all pageviews on the site for a total of 8,383 unique pageviews. We then used event tracking to measure clicks on the download links. For each click, we also tracked the title of the song downloaded. We identified 13,399 downloads as of the end of November 2010.

The event tracking reports could also show us which songs were most popular among visitors. With this list, we were able to rank each single on the Merdesa album by popularity. This insight helps Pandji understand what his fans want to hear.

Measure, analyse, recommend, measure again
Through the insights provided by Google Analytics, we were able to identify the key channels through which Pandji influences his fans and what they were most interested in. With these insights in hand, Pandji’s marketing team were able to come up with an effective digital marketing strategy for Merdesa.

We strongly believe in our Measure-Analyse-Recommend-Measure strategy for improving success rates for the marketers we consult with. I hope this inspires web analytics practitioners in Indonesia and globally to adopt a similar strategy!

Posted by Anantya, Executive Director, Think.Web

This is a guest post by Barbara Pezzi, Director of Web Analytics and Search Optimization at Fairmont Raffles Hotels International. Barbara joined the company in 2001 and was, until recently, Swissotel’s Director of Web Marketing. She is so passionate about web analytics that she has decided to make it her full time job. - Ed.

More and more marketers are engaging with their customers through social media channels such as Twitter. In this post, I share how I use Google Analytics to measure and optimise Fairmont’s Twitter activities. These best practices can also be applied to other social media channels, such as Facebook, Google Buzz, and email campaigns.

The problem
We use Fairmont’s Twitter account to increase awareness of our offers and drive traffic to our sites. While we think it’s effective for generating online buzz, we have trouble accurately identifying traffic to our website generated by our tweets. By default, traffic from Twitter’s web interface will be tracked as referral traffic in Google Analytics. If a user clicks on a link to your site from a tweet, you will see ‘twitter.com’ in the Referring Sites report.

A lot of traffic generated by our tweets, however, does not originate from twitter.com. Many users of Twitter do not use the web interface, but instead use one of the many applications available such as a desktop client or mobile app. Additionally, the link we have posted on Twitter might be forwarded via email or SMS. In all these cases, any traffic which in theory should be attributed to our Twitter activities will be reported as direct or other referral traffic.


The solution: tagging our links
We solved this problem by using Google Analytics’ campaign tracking variables within the links that we post on Twitter. Campaign tracking variables allow us to tag our links so that Google Analytics can recognise and measure non-AdWords campaigns that brought visitors to our site. You can use these tags to track paid search and display campaigns, e-newsletters, social media campaigns, and more.

When campaign tracking variables are applied to any link in our tweets, the traffic resulting from those tweets will be correctly attributed to the respective tweet regardless of where the visitor found and clicked on the link.

Generating these tags is very simple using the conveniently provided URL Builder tool.

Tagging can result in lengthy links, which use up valuable characters in a 140-character tweet. You can keep the links short by using one of the many free URL shortening services such as goo.gl or bit.ly.


Campaign tracking variables and URL shorteners in action
Recently we used Twitter to drive traffic to this URL - http://www.fairmont.com/copleyplaza/Vanity/TwooseYourOwnAdventurePackage.htm - to highlight Labor Day specials for our property in Boston. When we distributed this link over Twitter, we tagged it with Google Analytics’ campaign tracking variables so that we could easily identify our visitors who came from our “TwooseCOP” campaign.

When users click the link, they’re redirected by the shortening service to:
http://www.fairmont.com/copleyplaza/Vanity/TwooseYourOwnAdventurePackage.htm?
utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_term=40422&utm_campaign=TwooseCOP

Analysing our social media traffic
Tagging our links takes care of the mechanics of tracking our Twitter traffic. Once we’ve set that up, we wait for the traffic to start flowing in, and then start analysing and taking action on our incoming data.

The tracking parameters will classify the above visits from Twitter in the “social media” medium and the campaign parameter will contain a unique identifier for this particular Twitter campaign. Since we use the same naming convention for all our social media posts, we can easily monitor the aggregate growth and traffic patterns of our social media efforts by viewing our traffic sources by “medium”

We then compare the quality and growth rate of the Twitter traffic generated by our own activities compared to the “organic” traffic (e.g. a guest tweeting about their experience at one of our properties) we receive from Twitter:

Additionally, since each Twitter campaign is uniquely tagged, we can review how each one performed, by first clicking on our chosen traffic channel, in this case “twitter / socialmedia”, and then by selecting “Campaign” in the dropdown box.

We are now able to view how many visits each campaign tweet generated as well as additional data such as “Bounce Rate” and the number or percentage of “New Visitors”. We can also see how these campaigns contributed to room bookings, revenue and conversion objectives by clicking on the “Goal Set 1” and “Ecommerce” tabs. This allows us to understand better what our visitors are interested in and which stories resonated the most.


Segmenting our traffic
We can also take this a step further with my all time favourite feature: advanced segments. You can find out more about advanced segments in my previous post on the subject.

First, I create a segment for our Twitter traffic (you can get a copy of my advanced segment here):

Then I apply this segment to any report I might be interested in. For example, I might wish to see what content these visitors consume when they land on our site:

Or even which hotel they booked:

Marketers are starting to generate significant traffic from Twitter. Just by adding campaign parameters, we are now able to understand how many clicks are coming from Twitter beyond those from Twitter’s web interface. More importantly, we can measure user behavior and conversion data. With those numbers in hand, we are a step closer to measuring the effectiveness of our social media campaigns and better evaluate where to spend our time and effort. And it’s not just about Twitter. You can use these tips on other social media platforms such as Google Buzz, Facebook, email newsletters, and more.

Posted by Barbara Pezzi, Director of Web Analytics and Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International