Knowing your basic web analytics will allow you to gauge the performance of your website fairly accurately; however, it can also be misleading to rely only on basic analytics as they give the most importance to the last channel via which a conversion was made – whether it be a paid ad or a direct referral.
It’s equally, if not more, important to know the role that preceding channels played in that conversion, as well as the amount of time between the visitor’s initial click and his/her transaction.
With the advent of the more advanced marketing or multi-channel funnels, marketers today can get a better sense of their customers’ journey to and within the website, and allow them to understand the impact of all channels, and make sounder investment decisions.
Here are the top five reasons to use multi-channel reports:
- Better understanding of the channels: The Multi-Channel Funnels reports show how all the online marketing channels collaborate to generate conversions. Understanding the mix of channels that lead to the most conversions, will enable marketers to improve their channel strategies.
- Role of preceding channels: Knowing what the initial channel was that brought on the conversion can help a marketer understand the impact of the original channel. For example, is the blog consistently bringing in the initial traffic which eventually converts into a sale? In that case, a marketer will know to spend more time and resources on the maintenance of the blog.
- Time to conversion: How much time is taken between the first interaction and the final sale is an important measure. For example, if people are coming to the site via an email campaign but are not converting within a small window, it could mean that either the rates were not competitive or they needed more information and time to make the conversion. Analyzing this situation could motivate the marketer provide more compelling content, a better converting site design or more competitive rates- thereby decreasing the time taken to convert.
- Insights into audience: The funnel report also provides solid insights into the behavior of the audience. How they come, where they go, how much time they spend before converting etc- all this data can provide invaluable insights on what your audience is looking for and help gain new, converting customers as well.
- Better investments: Gaining a better understanding of the winning channel mix and the audience behavior will allow the marketer to make sound investment and budget allocation decisions: Which channels should get the most time/money investments, what kind of messages should go out to the consumer, is the website set to convert etc- all of this can be better determined leading to greater ROI.
Contributed by Manisha Kumar, Director of Technologies
