Why using Google Analytics isn’t enough to analyze multi-channel funnels and how Ringostat reports can complement the data you receive from web analytics services.
What are multi-channel reports?
As you know from your own customer experience, people usually need some time to make a purchase. Their customer journey before calling or placing an order online can be rather long. Let’s imagine that some PPC ad catches users’ attention. They are interested in good/services it proposes, but they are not still ready to buy it. Customers need some time to think, visit a website, search for this good on the Internet, read reviews, stumble on another paid ad and return to the site… and finally, they buy. Google Analytics shows the last touchpoint before the purchase (it’s a last-click attribution model), though it wasn’t the one that really worked and the one that was the main push. Having such a report at hand allows us to identify the value of each traffic channel in the total number of conversions and determine the most efficient sources that perform the best.
Why multi-channel funnels reports are important?
Here’s how these reports look like in Google Analytics:
Our goal selected in Google Analytics is a phone call, so we track the sequences of touchpoints that led to calls. Depending on your targets, you can track visits, registrations and other goals that are configured on your website.
As you can see from this screenshot, there’re not only visits from separate channels. Some sequences leading to calls repeat. For example, sequence number 164 generated 5 calls from different people.
Let’s take a closer look at this string. A referral visit became a trigger event. But it was a paid ad that resulted in conversion (in our case it was a phone call). We don’t consider organic search as a decisive event, because on this stage, people are usually ready to make a purchase. Defining the priorities between channels in this long chain of visits isn’t an easy task for marketers. Especially as there isn’t a universal way to do this. Some of them consider the first and the last channel as the most important, others think differently. Everything depends on the special characteristics of a particular market and behavioral trends of your website’s visitors.
Based on Google Analytics data, you can assign a particular weighting factor to each channel. Its value will depend on the channel’s place in the sequence and the number of visits it generates. Thus, you can determine the efficiency of each advertising channel.
Our target is not to recommend you an appropriate attribution model, but to show the difference between multi-channel funnels reports in Google Analytics and Ringostat so that you know why it’s better to use both of them.
Multi-channel funnels in terms of phone calls
Google Analytics allows customizing the sequences according to a particular conversion type. In other words, when calculating call conversions, you’ll see the relevant statistics. The matter is that phone calls that don’t lead to conversion or a target event on the website are not useful and interesting for marketers. So, how to single the useful phone calls out?
Here at Ringostat, we have released a filter that enables you to analyze multi-channel funnels of different data segments. You choose a group of calls for analysis using special filters and display the multi-channel funnels for these calls only. We’ll consider several of them further on.
Here is how its graphical part looks like:
Here you can see how many calls go through two channels at the same time, and how many fall on each of them separately. In this case, only one call was made after using both Google AdWords and referral channels.
Report on phone calls from paid ads
Let’s choose the calls from paid ads only. Use our filter for this purpose. After doing this, the multi-channel funnels report will show the sequences of interactions that led to such calls. The report will show the statistics on calls generated by PPC.
Report on targeted phone calls
Here you can see a report on another group of phone calls.
In this case, we analyze phone calls with status “targeted”. In the previous report, it was important to understand which channels worked together with PPC advertising. This report shows the channels that generate phone calls. Here the most popular pair is Google AdWords and then an organic visit from Google.
Conclusions
Ringostat multi-channel funnels report doesn’t replace a similar report in Google Analytics, but it allows to obtain an additional benefit. This is about dividing all inbound phone calls into groups and analyzing the journeys that lead customers to calls for each group individually. Ideal for segmentation and further segment analysis.
In this post, we gave only a few examples of calls segmentation: calls from different advertising campaigns and calls with a particular status. However, marketers are free to choose the group of calls for analyzing multi-channel sequences. When using this report, as well as our call distribution report, you receive detailed data on calls, their sources and peak hours of your call center — enough information for making right data-driven decisions.
