Using a permanent URL to share Custom Attribution Models & Custom Channel Groupings

The need to customize and fine-tune your marketing measurement solutions becomes a key discriminator in unlocking additional value which might have been missed when applying out-of-the-box views on your data. For this reason, the Multi-Channel Funnel Analysis within Google Analytics Attribution provides the ability to configure content based channel groupings, as well as customized attribution models. This allows you to better reflect how partial credit is assigned to the marketing efforts driving your conversions. Having the ability to develop these customized assets is great, and now you are able to easily share them with your organization, your customers, or your audience. Here is how sharing a custom channel grouping, or custom attribution model works: 

Step 1 - Build a Custom Attribution Model
Building a custom model is easy. Just go to the Model Comparison Tool report in the Attribution Section of Conversions. In the model picker you can select ‘Create new custom model’, which opens the dialog to specify rules which can better reflect the value of marketing serving your specific business model. As an example, we can develop a model to value impressions preceding a site visit higher within a 24 hour time window. We also set the relevant lookback window to 60 days, as we know our most valuable users have longer decision and decide cycles:

Click image for full-sized version
Ensure you opt-in the Impression Integration, enabling Google Display Network Impressions and Rich-Media interactions to be automatically added to your path data through the AdWords linking. Don’t forget to also check out the recorded webinar from Bill Kee, Product Management Lead for Attribution, providing more details on how to create a custom model.

Step 2 - Access the Model in Personal Tools & Assets Section
In the admin section you can now look at your personal tools & assets. The newly created model will show up in the ‘Attribution Models’ section. You can find custom channel groupings you created under Channel Groupings.


The table shows all assets available, and a drop-down allows you to ‘share’ these assets through a link.


Step 3 - Share the Link - Done!
From the drop-down Actions menu select ‘Share’, and a permanent link to the configuration of this object is generated. This link will point to the configuration of the shared asset, allowing anyone with a GA implementation and the link to make a copy of the asset config, and save it into their instance of GA. You maintain complete control over who you share your assets with. 


Include the link to your brand-new attribution model asset in an email, IM message, or even a Blog Post, such as this one.

Happy Customizing!

Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Data-Driven Attribution: better investment decisions, better marketing outcomes

We've long known that the power of digital marketing is in its measurability. But measurability is only half the battle.  The other half is attribution — understanding how to allocate credit to your various marketing programs and appropriately recognize their impact on the customer journey.

Over the past two years, we’ve built a strong foundation in attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels and the Attribution Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics (as well as additional tools for AdWords and Google Display Network). Today, we’re expanding our attribution capabilities with Data-Driven Attribution in Google Analytics Premium, with algorithmic models and a new set of reports designed to take the guesswork out of attribution. It’s available globally to all Google Analytics Premium customers.


Data-Driven Attribution analyzes the customer journey, whether that journey ends in a purchase (or conversion) or not. Our modeling methodology, grounded in statistics and economic principles, automatically assigns values to your marketing touchpoints. You’ll see a more complete and actionable view of which digital channels and keywords are performing best, so you can achieve a better return on your marketing and advertising investments.

Recently, a large telecommunications company used Data-Driven Attribution to help optimize media spend and placements to help capture small business leads. After using Data-Driven Attribution, they gained newfound confidence in making decisions about Display. They saw leads from Display increased 10% while cost per lead remained flat, and saw that some media placements had been undervalued by 58%. 

Why use Data-Driven Attribution:
  • Algorithmic: The model automatically distributes credit across marketing channels. You define your own success metrics, like e-commerce transactions or other goals, and the model adapts and regularly refreshes using the most recent conversion path data.
  • Transparent: With our unique Model Explorer, you’ll have full insight into model behavior and understand how marketing touch points are valued — no “black box” methodology.
  • Actionable: Detailed insights into the individual contribution of a marketing channel (in both converting and non-converting paths) provide clear guidance, so you can make better data-driven marketing decisions
  • Support: Google Analytics Premium customers can take advantage of their relationship with a dedicated services and support team.
  • Cross-platform Integrations: In addition to our deep integrations with Google products such as AdWords, the Google Display Network, and YouTube, you can pull in data from virtually any digital channel.
Click image for full-size
Applying Data-Driven Attribution to improve your results:
Google Analytics Premium customers can use the Data-Driven Attribution model to select and analyze marketing techniques, such as Display advertising or email campaigns. Easy analysis tools in the attribution reports let you compare values from the Data-Driven Attribution model to your default model, then sort and filter your data to discover where campaign changes could have the greatest impact. After identifying which channels (or campaigns, or keywords) have the greatest potential, adjust your programs and test the results. Once you’ve learned how the Data-Driven Attribution model compares to your prior model (and viewed the Model Explorer to see how the data-driven values were calculated), you can go straight to the ROI Analysis report, which lets you focus on optimization insights.

How it works:
The Data-Driven Attribution model is enabled through comparing conversion path structures and the associated likelihood of conversion given a certain order of events. The difference in path structure, and the associated difference in conversion probability, are the foundation for the algorithm which computes the channel weights. The more impact the presence of a certain marketing channel has on the conversion probability, the higher the weight of this channel in the attribution model. The underlying probability model has been shown to predict conversion significantly better than a last-click methodology. Data-Driven Attribution seeks to best represent the actual behavior of customers in the real world, but is an estimate that should be validated as much as possible using controlled experimentation.

To learn more about Google Analytics Premium, contact your Google Account Manager, or visit google.com/analytics/premium.

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, and Jody Shapiro, Product Manager for Google Analytics Premium

Measure What Matters—A Better Approach to Social Attribution

Webinar on Tuesday 7/16
Register for the webinar here.

When it comes to web analytics, one of the biggest complaints from marketers has long been the lack of technology to measure the ROI of social media. Thanks to our exciting integration between Google Analytics and Wildfire by Google that was first announced at thinkDoubleClick in June, those blind spots are now a thing of the past. This webinar will demonstrate how social media impacts the customer journey and then show you how Google Analytics lets you measure that influence in detail.


We’ll start by showing you the best way to set up your modeling and reporting to include all your social marketing efforts. Then we’ll give you a live demo of the Google Analytics integration with Wildfire. Now you’ll be able to see exactly how each and every social message and page published with Wildfire drives traffic and revenue to your website.

The webinar features Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics and Jessica Gilmartin, the Head of Product Marketing for Wildfire by Google. They’ll be joined by Adam Kuznia, Social Media Manager for Maryland Live! Casino, who will share the story of how he built the gaming industry’s largest East Coast social media community from scratch in just six months using Wildfire and Google Analytics, and proved to his management team the ROI of social.

This webinar is Part 1 of a three-part educational series introducing Google and Wildfire analytics integrations, so be sure not to miss it.

Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 5pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr

Level: 101 / Beginner

Register here.



Evaluate Marketing Spend Efficiency with our Conversion and Attribution Tools

You invest a lot to create your marketing campaigns, and it’s important to see how your spend impacts results. In addition to comparing the conversion performance of your marketing activities, you can now view your imported AdWords cost data directly in the Google Analytics Attribution Model Comparison Tool. By evaluating your AdWords cost data under various lenses offered through Attribution, you’ll get further insight into the effectiveness of your marketing spend. We will gradually roll out this feature out to all of Google Analytics.

Extended Set of conversion data
As previously announced, to make the analysis of your conversion path data even more meaningful, we extended the lookback window within Multi-Channel Funnels to 90 days. This functionality is now available through the standard lookback window selector. Please see our help center for more details.

Explore different attribution models to see revised performance figures
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is one of the strongest indicators for marketers. Our Model Comparison Tool now makes this important metric available to advertisers in Google Analytics. In addition to CPA, we also allow users to look at the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) figure, which compares the value or revenue driven by conversions under different attribution models.

As described in the Customer Journey to Online Purchase, marketing channels influence the customer at multiple touchpoints on the path to conversion. Display touchpoints, in aggregate, appear 3.1 times more often in the upper funnel (awareness, consideration, intent phase) than in the lower part of the funnel (decision phase).*


Selecting Conversion Value & ROAS from the selector in the Attribution Model Comparison Tool allows you to contrast the value driven by your spend. Comparing the performance of a channel by looking at two different attribution models can uncover hidden performance of this channel. In the above example, the Display channel drives 20% more value under a First Interaction model.

Interpret your analysis
The direction of the arrow in the % change column indicates the orientation of the shift. Please note that it matters which model is the reference model, and which model is the comparison model. A positive shift away from the valuation of the reference model will be visualized with an upwards arrow, a negative shift with a downwards arrow. The color of the arrows is used to indicate whether the alternative valuation of the comparison model has caused a favorable shift. Green indicates a significant shift in favor of the comparison model, and red indicates a significant shift in favor of the reference model. A gray dot symbol indicates that there is no relevant change between the reference and comparison model.


Get started today by linking your account to an AdWords cost data source. The more complete your cost data is for a given profile, the more stable and accurate are the insights you can gain from the analysis. Consider using the Cost Data Import service provided through the GA API to add cost data beyond AdWords.

*Source: Google Analytics, Q4 2012. N = US: 130M conversions (12K profiles)

Full Credit Measurement: Attribution with Google Analytics

As we’ve discussed in many previous posts, the customer journey is evolving — most consumers will interact with many different marketing channels before a sale or conversion. And marketers are recognizing this shift in consumer behavior. Instead of “last click” measurement, a strategy that only gives credit to the final interaction, they’re turning to full credit measurement. To help you make sense of the full customer journey, we’ve been focused on bringing you the very best full credit measurement tools in Google Analytics.

Nearly two years ago, we announced our first Google Analytics attribution product, Multi-Channel Funnels. With its ability to measure customers’ different paths to conversion, it quickly became one of our most popular reports for advertisers and publishers alike. We’ve seen great results from our users, including online travel agency On the Beach, who used data from the Multi-Channel Funnels reports and AdWords Search Funnels to explore and adjust their strategy for generic keywords. These attribution adjustments helped On the Beach to drive a 25% uplift in ROI — see the full case study here.

Beyond Multi-Channel Funnels, we also wanted to provide our users with an advanced platform for testing entirely new, more robust attribution strategies, including the ability to test alternative models or understand how metrics, such as site engagement, could impact their existing investments. So last year we released our Attribution Modeling feature — the Model Comparison Tool.

After several months of testing on a public whitelist, we're now in the process of rolling out the Attribution Model Comparison Tool to make it generally available to Google Analytics users without whitelist.  To reflect the importance of attribution, we also created a new “Attribution” section under the “Conversions” reports, so the tool will be found there.

Be sure to check out a previously recorded webinar with Product Manager Bill Kee for a complete walkthrough of the Attribution Model Comparison Tool, or view our multi-part attribution webinar series covering our entire selection of full-credit measurement tools.

Webinar Video & Recap: Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World

Last Thursday, we held a webinar discussing how to effectively measure the customer’s journey in a multi-device world. We focused on high-level best practices and strategies, as well as how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.

Watch the webinar video here to learn more about:
  • Holistic, full-credit, and active measurement
  • Everyday strategies to improve your measurement and marketing performance
  • Basic techniques for marketing attribution
  • Google Analytics features and tools for measuring the full customer journey

During the webinar, we received dozens of great questions from viewers. Read on below for responses to some of the most common questions we received.

Questions and Answers

What other blogs would you recommend for advice on measurement best practices?
Avinash Kaushik is the author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An hour a day. On his blog, he discusses how to use digital marketing and measurement to focus on the customer while maintaining your ROI.

Justin Cutroni is the author of Google Analytics, Performancing Remarketing with Google Analytics, and Google Analytics Shortcut. He uses his experience as a consultant to guide his blog topics. His blog provides readers with techniques for using Google Analytics to maximize their marketing strategies.

Where can I find the “Think Insights” website referenced during the webinar?
Visit www.google.com/think for access to all sorts of statistics and articles about the latest trends in customer behavior. To learn more about the customer journey to online purchase, view the interactive benchmarking tool here.

How does marketing attribution help with intra-channel optimization?
Marketing attribution can help you to optimize intra-channel campaigns by allowing you to see value for each of the specific moments in the customer journey that you may be addressing within that single channel. For example, if you are running a search campaign, you may think about the role that different types of keywords play at different moments to help generate awareness for your brand, move the customer to consider your product, or to help close the deal. Using tools such as AdWords Search Funnels, you can determine where in the customer path those keywords had an impact, and this can help you optimize your keyword mix.

What are first-click and last-click attribution models?
The first and last clicks are important parts of two  commonly used attribution models, the “first interaction” attribution model and the “last interaction” attribution model. Depending on which model you use, all credit for the sale (or conversion) is attributed to either the first or last click. In the “first interaction” model, the first touch point would receive 100% of the credit for the sale. In the “last interaction” model, the last touch point receives 100% of the credit. Historically, many businesses have relied on the last-click model alone, but since this model (like the first-click model) only addresses a single touch-point along the customer journey, it may miss other important marketing interactions.

There is no one specific model that will work for every business or every program within your business. Rather, you should explore different models and experiment to see which model or combination of models best fits your needs. Check out Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling to get started.

What are some tips for measuring the customer journey with Universal Analytics?
Consider integrating Universal Analytics with all of your digital touchpoints (see some examples in this post). Here are a few use cases that our Certified Partners are already implementing to measure the customer journey beyond web:

  • Integrated measurement and analysis of in-store POS systems along with desktop and mobile e-commerce platforms.
  • Measuring offline macro and micro conversions through physical buttons or integration with CRMs.
  • Measuring physical interactions -- for example at display booths at conventions or artworks at major exhibitions -- through to online engagement with associated websites.
Posted by Sara Jablon Moked & Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team

Introducing “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" — interactive insights on multi-channel marketing

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.


The tool draws on Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorized sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries. Purchase paths in this tool are each based on interactions with a single ecommerce advertiser.

You’ll find benchmark data for:
  • how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
  • how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey
The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:
  • As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.
  • Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:
  • Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey
We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values. 

For example,
  • in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.
  • in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.
  • in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:
  • In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work
For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Try The Customer Journey to Online Purchase today on Google’s new Think Insights website.

Happy analyzing!

10 Google Analytics Resolutions for 2013

The following is a guest post from Michael Loban, CMO of InfoTrust a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Analytics Premium Reseller based in Cincinnati, OH.

New Year’s is the ideal time for making resolutions (that we keep until the second week of January). To avoid this cliché, I decided to actually wait until the second week of January to put together my resolutions/ideas/tactics for taking Google Analytics in 2013 to the next level.
1. Address your data phobia. Maybe it is a little bit extreme to say that a lot of digital marketers have an extreme fear of web analytics data, but it is safe to assume that data is what often causes migraines. Staring at pie charts, graphs and percentages until you know what you are looking for is the wrong way to start. The remedy for data phobia is simple – ignore the data you do not need to make a marketing decision. And always remember to align your Google Analytics configuration with your business goals.
2. Assign a monetary value to your goals even if you do not sell anything on your website. Each submitted form, played video, downloaded PDF is worth something. Otherwise, why did you put it on a site? It is not enough to say that you need to decrease your bounce rate by 5%. Equate the decrease in your bounce rate by 5% to the amount of money that you can make when those visitors submit completed “contact us” forms or other micro conversions. For example, work with the email marketing team to determine the value of each new email subscriber. If you get more people to join your email list then you will be able to sell more products via email marketing.

3. Not all marketing strategies are created equal. In order to turn a prospect into a customer you might have to engage in remarketing, email marketing and social media marketing. Use attribution modeling inside Google Analytics to examine how each marketing tactic contributes to a sale/conversion. Here is a blog post from the Google Analytics team on how to get started with attribution modeling. In 2012, Attribution Modeling was only available for Google Analytics Premium customers; in 2013 it will be available across all Google Analytics.

4. For some reason, social media measurement is something companies are still unsure about. It is difficult and complex, but you have to start somewhere. Why not start with Google Analytics Social Reports? This will help you track visitors that social media channels brought to your website, measure the value of those channels by tracking conversions and examine how your content is being shared across social networks. It feels good to say that last month, 10 people from Facebook who came to your website became your customers. Learn more about Social Reports
5. Tools are great, but great analysts are awesome. The true value of analytics is fully unlocked when you get to work on your data and turn it into something actionable. Make sure that you have a team (even if it is a team of 1) that knows how to analyze data to help you reach your marketing goals. 
6. If you begin to analyze your data, and realize that you do not have enough context to make a decision, get more data. Now, you can do a cost data import and Google Analytics will display how non-Google paid search campaigns perform and compare to your other marketing campaigns. Here is a how-to article from Google Analytics on Measuring Performance of Paid Campaigns.  
7. While we are on the subject of trying new things, Remarketing is something that I have promised myself to do more of. Remarketing is now available right inside Google Analytics. Here is a PDF document and a Webinar about Remarketing with Google Analytics. 

8. Mobile optimization is the most exciting digital opportunity for marketers in the coming year, according to new Econsultancy report. Since this is the case, mobile analytics will become more important than ever. Segmenting and understanding your mobile visitors will help you create a winning mobile experience that will lead to conversions and sales. In October, Google Analytics announced a public beta launch for mobile app analytics.

9. Begin measuring your analytics ROI. Time that you spend on collecting, reporting and analyzing data is not free – there is an opportunity cost. In order to prove the value of analytics inside your organization, begin measuring your Return on Analytics. When you accurately collect data, and properly analyze it, you are able to make accurate marketing decisions. Measure the impact of your analytics.

10. ACTION! This is a common phrase on any movie set. This should become a common phrase for everyone who uses Google Analytics. Turn your data into actionable marketing reports and smart dashboards that will help with the analysis. When you see true data analysis, you will want to scream ACTION! This means that the data and data analysis are so clear and crisp that you know exactly what needs to be done to reach your marketing objectives. Don’t settle for anything less. DATA, ANALYSIS, ACTION!
Happy New Year!

Attribution Webinar Recap: Making Attribution work for Your Business

On Friday, November 2, following our public whitelist of the Attribution Modeling Tool, Bill Kee (Product Manager, Google Analytics) and Neil Hoyne (Global Program Manager, Attribution), came together to lead the 5th and final webinar in our series on marketing attribution. They identified opportunities in the customer’s journey from introduction to conversion, including:
  • Google’s recommendations for how companies should structure their own attribution programs.
  • Basics on the methodology and configuration of the Attribution Modeling Tool, and how to create custom models that can improve your business’ performance.
  • Identifying specific opportunities in attribution from brand-to-generic trends to position-based weighting.
If you weren’t able to attend the live webinar, Attribution for Digital Success, you can view a recording here:



You can also catch up with our entire attribution webinar series, which included:
  1. an overview of our research on how the industry approaches attribution (watch here),
  2. the foundational steps for attribution using Google’s tools (watch here),
  3. intra-channel attribution with Search Funnels in Google AdWords (watch here),
  4. cross-channel measurement with Multi-Channel Funnels (watch here),
  5. and finally, our most recent webinar on strategies for the Attribution Modeling Tool (watch here).
We’d like to thank all of our users who have joined us for some or all of these attribution webinars. You have provided invaluable questions, ideas and feedback to help shape the next generation of our product. Some of these requests have already been addressed, including the public availability of the Attribution Modeling Tool (now available via whitelist), longer lookback windows, and cost-data import, and others are sure to come in the future. Stay tuned and stay in touch!

As has been our tradition throughout this webinar series, we’d also like to provide responses to some of the most common and most interesting questions we received during the webinar.

Questions

What business variables influence the decision on an Attribution Model?
Any factor that could influence your business or marketing efforts, including weather, pricing and competitive behavior, could have an impact your attribution decisions. Still, we suggest that advertisers focus on those efforts that could have the largest effect on their business, usually by conversion volume as well as those that they can more easily control (paid search vs. organic search or direct traffic) for the basis of experimentation.

How is the social engagement metric calculated?
Social engagement is measured any time a user clicks from a known social network, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or over 400 others, to the advertiser’s website. At this time, no interactions that occur within the networks themselves, such as a “like” are presented within the Attribution Modeling Tool.

Could you further elaborate on how conversion paths are presented when a user converts multiple times within the 30-day lookback window?
Each conversion has a unique path, which includes all of the interactions the converting user had in the 30 days leading up to the conversion. When the same user converts multiple times, the conversions are treated separately. For example, is a user clicked through from Display, and completed conversion #1, this conversion would have a path length of one from the channel “Display.” If the same user subsequently clicked through from Paid Search, and completed conversion #2, assuming the original Display interaction occurred within 30 days prior to conversion #2, a second conversion path would be recorded with a path length of two: Display, followed by Paid Search.

If we submitted our account to the Attribution Modeling Tool whitelist, how long will it take until we begin to see this feature available in our Google Analytics account?
We understand how important attribution is to your business, and are incredibly grateful for all of the interest that has been shown in the modeling tool since the announcement of the public whitelist. As such, we are working as quickly as we can to add new customers to the tool and will continue to post any available updates directly on the signup form. Once your account has been whitelisted, you’ll see the Attribution Modeling Tool listed within the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, under Conversions.

Could you provide step-by-step details on how to build the models Bill described during the webinar?
We created two custom models to show examples of the types of weighting you can apply using the model builder. The first model, called “Upper Funnel” emphasizes interactions earlier in the path, from channels that are focused on introducing and informing customers, and discounts channels that may be more navigational, like branded search. The second model, called “Lower Funnel” gives more weight to marketing interactions at the end of the conversion path, but does not solely give credit to the last interaction, and excludes direct interactions that are last in the path, giving credit instead to other marketing touch points toward the end. By comparing both models to the Last Interaction model, you’re able to see the contrasts in credit given to channels, and see whether marketing efforts play the roles you think they do or not.

Here are the rules for the “Upper Funnel” model.

Upper Funnel Model, step 1: Click on the model selector then “create new custom model” to open the custom model builder, and enter details as pictured (click to enlarge the image):


Upper Funnel Model, step 2: Turn on “apply custom credit rules” in the custom model builder, then enter model details as pictured (click to enlarge the image):


And here are rules for the "Lower Funnel" model.

Lower Funnel Model, step 1: Click on the model selector then “create new custom model” to open the custom model builder, and enter details as pictured (click to enlarge the image):



Lower Funnel Model, step 2: Turn on “apply custom credit rules” in the custom model builder, then enter model details as pictured (click to enlarge the image):


Marketing attribution is a challenging yet worthwhile pursuit. Our hope is that this webinar series will help you as you begin (or continue) your attribution journey. For more information on the Attribution Modeling Tool, please visit our website and the Google Analytics help center.

Happy analyzing!

Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Conversion and Attribution

Attribution Modeling for Digital Success: Webinar this Friday + Public Whitelist

Last year, we launched Multi-Channel Funnels, giving marketers insight into how customers interact with multiple touch points prior to conversion. Since then, we’ve begun to see a great shift in the industry, as marketers move away from simple, last click attribution, toward a more holistic picture of how digital marketing channels work together to drive conversions.

Earlier this year, in Google Analytics Premium, we added the Attribution Modeling Tool, which lets marketers build models that distribute the credit for conversions across channels and touchpoints, and quickly compare multiple models side by side. We’ve received great feedback about how the tool provides fast and easy insight into channel value.



Yesterday at the Google Analytics Summit, we announced wider availability for the Attribution Modeling Tool through a public whitelist. We also shared our plans for a new 90-day lookback window, better sampling controls, and the ability to import cost data for use in attribution models.  To help you get started, this Friday we’ll host a webinar, Attribution Modeling for Digital Success, giving an overview of the tool. We’ll cover the opportunities and challenges of attribution modeling, how to interpret and build models, and ways to take action on the results.

Webinar: Attribution Modeling for Digital Success
Day: Friday, November 2
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Webinar sign-up: goo.gl/YTulu
Whitelist sign-up: goo.gl/uHckk

A recording of the webinar will be available on the blog and YouTube soon afterward. You can also check out our attribution playbook and product fact sheet for more background -- and you can view earlier webinars in our Attribution webinar series.

Hope to see you at the webinar, and happy modeling!