Search Marketing Sage

Multi-Channel Attribution is a pretty big topic in our industry, and most of us aren’t as knowledgeable as we would like to be on the subject. Attribution modeling attempts to solve the problem of which channel gets credit when a user touches multiple channels prior to converting. The problem with attribution models historically has been that they segment attributes at the single channel level: paid search, social media, direct traffic, organic search, etc., and often lack the ability to simultaneously compare various models across a multi-channel format.

Google Analytics Social Reporting continues to grow and provide insights into how social media is tying into your company’s goals. Last summer, I wrote about the recently introduced Social Visitors Flow, Social Sources and Activity Stream, and Social Plugins Reports. On Tuesday, Google Analytics announced that they redesigned some of the social reports to make it easier to see the activity happening around your content. The two new reports that were introduced are: Trackbacks and Data Hub Activity. Both of which were already previously available.

These reports already existed, so what’s the big deal? Google developed these two new stand-alone reports to provide greater ease in digesting this data. The data is clearer and now, you can drill down through this data separately.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides webmasters the ability to view website performance data from a variety of angles.  Recently, Google released the Google Solutions Gallery – a collection of prefab Dashboards, Custom Reports, and Advanced Segments. The solutions gallery puts a variety of ready-made solutions directly in the hands of marketers. The gallery is a useful solution for marketers of all experience levels, whether it presents a new way to look at data that they might not have otherwise considered or simply provides a starting point to further customize their own reports.

As you all know, I’m a huge advocate of Google Analytics. The more insight you can get into your site traffic, the better. So, if you are an online retailer, I hope you have already implemented, or at least have it on your radar to implement Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking. Just like most other Analytics data you can derive, the purpose is essentially to give you more information regarding visitor actions, just now on a more advanced level.

What is Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking?

In a word: Amazing. Ecommerce tracking helps you better understand exactly what visitors are buying, and where they came from before they bought it. Even though it’ll take a bit of work to get it up and running, it will be well worth the extra effort. Through this tracking feature, you’ll be able to see products, transactions, and time to purchase, which are better defined below:

If you know me at all, or Search Mojo, or anyone in the search industry for that matter, we are all big advocates of using Google Analytics to track activity on your site. Having the insight into where your traffic is coming from and what visitors do once they arrive on your site is very valuable to your bottom line, whether you realize it or not.

Goal-setting is important for any aspect of your life, but in this particular instance, for your online efforts. Establish goals in Google Analytics to track conversions that you’ve set as high priority, or even if you’re just curious how many you are getting. The main goal types used are a URL Destination setting, tracking a goal when that specific URL is triggered. You can also set goals for things like if a visitor travels to a certain amount of pages per visit, or stays on the site for a certain length of time.

One conversion type that is under-utilized and could give site owners a lot more insight into mini-goals, or goals that can’t be tracked via the URL Destination type.

Setting Up the “Event” Goal Type