Two days back Google Analytics integrated multichannel funnel, I have been waiting for this feature for a while now. It is very important to understand customer buying process to optimise your marketing campaign. In e-business, there is no single channel strategy you have to change strategies quite often because of the fast changing innovations and dynamic internet channels.
The multichannel funnel will give clear indications on how customers interact in different channels during the buying cycle. To understand more about the process we will first look at the customer buying cycle.
The internet channel closed the gap between the manufacturer and the customers their by now manufacturer can remove lot of parties in the distribution channel. A typical example here is DELL, they removed most of the retailers in their distribution channel and saved a lot of cost. With the help of social media the gap become even more closer, manufacturer can now communicate directly with the customers and convert them. Customers have the flexibility to communicate directly with companies even after sales. The main thing to remind here is social media is just an enabler so it is very important to make it right and communicate right message to the customer through social media.
It is very important to understand which channels are playing their roles in customer buying process. The internet helps customers to do research by reading reviews, asking opinions in various social media and other internet channels. They can easily come up with list of potential options with their criteria such as where to buy, which brand to buy, which site suites their requirement etc. The channels may vary according to the products, customers requirement, and customers attitudes. For example a life time product like refrigerator may require good after sales support so it would be a primary requirement for a customer, others might be looking for discounts so they might go to affiliate sites to get a discount. So according to the products, channels like search engines, social media, affiliates, review sites, may play some role in the customer decision process.
What Multichannel funnel trying to achieve is helping us to understand how customers are using various marketing channels during their buying process. It would be good to read my previous post about understanding e-commerce channels to learn more about different channel effects and KPI’s in ecommerce marketing. Often paid search marketing, organic search marketing play some important role in educating about the brand but if customers prefer to get discounts they may go to an affiliate site. Although search engine marketing plays a critical role in brand awareness but the last conversion came from an affiliate channel the credit for conversion will go to the affiliate which is not good to optimise your marketing campaign. To understand more about how multichannel funnel work it is would be good to watch the video provided below.
In the figure below you can see that display ads and paid search played a big part in the brand awareness which later became a direct visit at the buying stage.
Now let us do some optimisation for your marketing campaign in Google Analytics. If you have affiliate channel in your marketing campaign make sure to add new digital media channel for each affiliates that can help to pin point which affiliate is giving return. Google Analytics by default provide most of the media channel but affiliates sites often show as referral, it might be good to add your affiliate in the analytics. This can be done by editing channel groupings in the Google Analytics.
Add a new custom channel by adding relevant regular expression on the source where conversion / traffic come from.
That is it you are done, keep an eye on this and see who is performing and rearrange your marketing budget / activities according to the result.
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Tags: analytics, digital marketing, digital strategy, ecommerce marketing, google analytics, Marketing, multichannel funnel, sales funnel
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