Understanding Google search funnels – Part 1
Ever since Google search funnels was launched, I’ve been trying best to make sense of it all.
At first, it sounded like an amazingly simple and fancy looking dashboard, where you’d be able to go in an find out in nice colored visuals how users “travelled” around your site. But wait, when I actually, took the dive in, things weren’t looking as simple as it promised to be.
But the more I spend time with it, the more was revealed – the good side that is.
Let me share with you some of the interesting things you could do with search funnels.
Find out the steps users took before reaching the final goal.
Oh! If you didn’t notice yet, everything in GA revolves around goals. So you got to have them in place for things like search funnels to work efficiently (it would otherwise too). Goals basically, mean that there is a direction and objective as to why a user visits your website. It differs from one website to another.
For my personal website, the “goal” is someone checking out the contact page. For an ecom site, the goal would be a check out confirmation page – or whatever the objective is.
So, assuming that you have goals in place, its easy to find out what steps and route users took before achieving the goal. Here’s how.
Go to “Standard Reports” > Goals > Reverse Goal Path
Now, you’ll be able to see how the steps before the final goal, users took. These would be URLs, which you can analyze further to figure out how it all worked together.
Find out top traffic sources that led to a final goal/goals
So, assuming that there are many traffic sources to your site, it would be easier with search funnels to figure out which channel attributed most to goal conversions. To understand how this works, you got to understand the way conversion paths work.
There are three types of conversion paths – a) First Interactions, b) Last Interaction and c) Assisting Conversions
Most of the time, website visitors travel back and forth between channels and sources before reaching a final goal, some folks leave the conversion paths midway as well. Essentially, data is all over the place, you got to know what to look for, where.
To figure out the top traffic sources that led to a final goal, you got to check the top assisting interactions.
For this, click Conversions > Multi Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions.
Here, you can see the various channels that attribute to final conversion goals.
analysis of social media traffic that helped goal conversions
You could also go couple of steps deeper and figure out all the assisted conversion paths from social media traffic.
While you’re at: Conversions > Multi Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions.
Click on “Social Network” and it should give you all social media traffic entrance paths.
Here, you’ll get the overview based on social networks traffic. In order to find out the specific pages that generated the social media traffic, click on “Secondary Dimension” drop down menu and type in “Landing Page URL” (select it from the metric that pops up as you type).
Now, you should have the exact URLs that assisted in goal conversions. See screenshot below.
To Be Continued in Part 2.
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