Google Adwords. It’s a platform that continues to give businesses the opportunity to show their adverts to their potential customers at their time of need. It’s simply brilliant and when managed correctly, it can be highly profitable. So, you’ve got yourself an Adwords account that has conversion tracking (I hope) and you’re seeing conversion numbers or total conversion values giving you the full picture in relation to your return on ad spend right?
Well, in reality, this isn’t the case at all.
Assisted Conversions
There is a metric, which Google kindly introduced into Google Analytics called Assisted Conversions. An assisted conversion is basically a metric that monitors the number of conversions for which this channel appeared on the conversion path, but was not the final conversion interaction.
Basically, if you’re a company (The We Sell T-Shirts Company) that sells T-Shirts and I see one of your adverts on Google, click the advert and then leave your site without purchasing, the paid advert at this time didn’t result in a conversion for your company. However, the very next day I go to Google and type in your brand name (The We Sell T-Shirts Company) click on your organic link and purchase a t-shirt, organic traffic will be accredited with the conversion. The fact is that this customer wouldn’t have known that you existed had your PPC campaign not been running when they originally wanted to purchase your product.
The key message to understand here is that no one individual channel stands solely on its own and this can be a major factor in the failure of marketing strategies. It is completely natural for customers to want to browse around, particularly the industries that become more and more saturated with regards to competition.
Marketing has many different strings on many different bows but they all affect the performance of one another. I have seen PPC campaigns lose significant profitability due to the neglect of organic & social media channels. Aim to be visible and be visible everywhere and you might just bag yourself a customer for life.
How to find assisted conversion data
For those of you out there who would like to take a look at your assisted conversion data you can do so by navigating to conversions > multi-channel funnels > assisted conversions.
It’s important that when you’re looking at the table in analytics you are clear about the two following metrics:
- Assisted Conversions – again, this is for conversions, which this channel appeared on the conversion path, but was not the final conversion interaction.
- Last Click Conversions – this metric is the number of conversions for which each individual channel was the final conversion interaction.
Finally, make sure that you’re looking at different periods of time and taking seasonality into account and you’re good to go.
In Summary
Assisted conversions are absolutely pivotal to judging a true reflection on your returns from your online marketing channels and shouldn’t ever be overlooked. The figures soon change when you take into account the number of sales you would have missed should you have not had all of your online marketing bases covered.
