If you are conducting a campaign of online marketing to get traffic to your website and generate conversations it is essential that you are measuring and analyzing everything that happens. With Google Analytics you can easily control what traffic sources are best result is giving to you.
If you have previously worked with Google Analytics you will be familiar with terms such as referral traffic, direct traffic, organic traffic, social networking … these are just some examples of possible sources that carry traffic to your website and ultimately can become a sale.
Within Google Analytics, acquisition of traffic through the channel section we can see all visits that have reached us through the different sources of traffic and see a column at the end called transactions. This column shows the number of conversions that has made each of the traffic sources. However, this basic option to analyze conversions by source of traffic with Google Analytics is not correct, since this section only takes into account the last interaction.
That is, imagine you are looking for information about a product you want to buy and access a web you’ve seen in a Google Adwords ads. Like what you see of this company and its product but you decide to investigate a little further. Finally you decant by that company and directly looking for the name in the search box and accessing their web. According to the report, the source of traffic generated by the conversion is direct traffic. While in some ways it is true, the online advertising through Google Adwords has played a key role because without it likely that conversion would not have generated.
How to analyze all traffic sources involved in conversion
Is it possible to see all traffic sources or interactions that have made a user before a conversion? Luckily itself is that Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that provides basic information as the first example we have seen or deeper as we will see now.
What we have to do is access the Multi-Channel Funnels section through Conversions> Multi-Channel Funnels> Top Conversion Paths. Precisely in this section we will see the flow of sources that a user has continued to generate the conversion. Thanks this you will see the easy way as on many occasions, a purchase that has been ultimately through a organic search for your company or directly, first was preceded by a payment campaign.
If only we saw the last interaction and this was organic traffic would think that our campaign of payment does not work and therefore reduce our investment in Google Adwords. This would be a mistake as as result would also see as conversions by organic traffic fall for that product if previously paid traffic has influenced the entire decision process. What you need to do is analyze the whole process of interactions and different traffic sources that have influenced to generate the final conversion and not only the ultimate source.