Understanding Assisted Conversions

[#1]

I've been asked to give a report on valuing Assisted Conversions, but there's a few things I don't understand about them.  First, Assisted conversions aren't new conversions, are they?  For example, a keyword can have an assist that was a last-click conversion for another keyword, but can a keyword have an assist that was not a last-click conversion for another keyword?  Our website has an e-mail marketing team. If a customer clicks on one of our ads, and then registers, and then two weeks later converts through one of our e-mails, does this conversion get attributed to that click, or does it get attributed as an assist?  Thanks in advance!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi ThatGuy!

Assisted conversions are those that happened during the selected time period.

An assist can be a direct visit, so yes, an assist can be a last-click conversion for another keyword.

It the customer converts 2 weeks later through one of your emails and the link opens the same browser on the same machine as the ad click, AdWords will attribute the conversion to the ad (on the date of the original click) and Analytics will attribute the conversion to the email link. It will appear as an assisted conversion in this case, with AdWords in the assist path.

I may be missing something, but I don't see anything in the Analytics assisted conversion  reports that report by keyword. People who click on your email link from their email reader (like Thunderbird or Outlook) that downloads the mail will appear as direct traffic. If they use Gmail through the web, it will look like a referral from gmail.com. Be sure to tag the email links properly so you can track the results.

Hope this helps. Best of Luck!

Pete

[#3]

Thank you pete, your reply definitely helps!  Just one more question, is there any way to separate Assisted Conversions by type (in order to track overall ROI of PPC marketing better)?  For example, can I separate the Assists from one keyword that contributed to a last-click conversion for another keyword from the Assists that contributed to a conversion through another channel (such as e-mail)?

[#4]

Hi ThatGuy,

You can't do that directly with Analytics. But, if the AdWords cookie is still active--it should be or it would not register as an assist--you can look at the many-per-click data for a particular keyword to get an idea of which keywords are contributing to assisted conversions.

As I mentioned, the email conversions will only record if the user is using the same computer and the same browser as the original AdWords click.

Best of Luck!

Pete

[#5]

Hi, ThatGuy.

I think you should look at Multi Channel Funnels (http://www.google.com/analytics/features/multichannel-funnels.html) in Google Analytics, all your answers are there (if I didn't miss something).

As Pete said, if your e-mail links are tagged with campaign tags, you should see something like source = "E-mail campaign name" and medium = "email" (or whatever the marketing team has used).

Any conversion, in Google Analytics, gets attributed to the last click's source with one exception: direct traffic (which can be genuine direct traffic or clicks on outlook / thunderbird links, as Pete said). If someone clicks on an AdWords ad and then comes back through an organic search, organic gets the credit. If they click on an ad, then go to a price comparison site and return from there and convert, the referral (price comparison) will get the credit.

Google Analytics allows you to create "Conversion segments" where you can specify that you want to see all conversion to which AdWords assisted, but where, for instance, the last medium is not "email".

Or you can look at the keywords path and use the medium as the secondary dimension and you can clearly see how people click on a keyword, then return through a direct visit, then an organic search, etc.

Have a look at MCF if you haven't already, it's some piece of work, really.

[#6]

I would have another question for the Assisted Conversions. I've defined a couple of goals and

• i want to check out only the assisted conversions for sales (thank you page) for the google/cpc.

There was no problem for that a couple of days ago when i only had that goal set up. But now Assisted Converisons is showing me all the assisted goals.

How can i filter the information just to see one specific assisted goal and not all of them?

[#7]

There's a button on the top left which says "Conversions". By default, "All" is selected. Click it and select only the goals you're interested in.

I always uncheck goals when looking at transaction assists, otherwise I see much more conversions than there are transactions, because all the other goals are listed there as well. Of course, the total revenue is still ok, but the number of conversions is skewed.

[#8]

And to answer one of the original questions, if you click on the Other link in the Primary Dimension: Basic Channel Grouping line on the Top Conversion Paths section you'll see assists by keyword, matched search query and even landing page if you want to (along with many other dimensions).

Also, you have Conversion Segments, which allow you to see conversions which started with one medium, ended with one, contain something, etc.

All in all very, very neat reports from the Analytics team.

[#9]

Very helpful Adwiser. Thanks a lot!

[#10]

Have fun with them, I sure do .