Are you using Google Analytics as your only form of online marketing tracking and attribution? If so, I beg of you – please read this article and research some other options.
I talk to marketers every day that are still using Google Analytics as their only method to track all of their marketing performance. These marketers spend millions of dollars on marketing each year, and they choose to use a free product purchased in the early 2000s to track their investment. In response to this, I always ask “why?” and help marketers understand that there is a better way. It’s time that marketers invest in robust attribution tracking. eMarketer estimates that 84.2% of US companies with at least 100 employees will use digital attribution models of some kind in 2021, with 65.3% using multichannel attribution models.
I recently wrote a blog about walled gardens on Above The Fold’s website. Many marketers utilize Google Analytics (GA) because every marketer, for the most part, uses Google and GA is free as part of using the Google Suite. But, if we use our critical thinking skills for a moment, we realize that it’s in Google’s best interest to provide a reporting tool that over-attributes toward their walled-garden actions. GA only tracks last click behavior in the user journey – and, what a coincidence, Google’s PPC campaigns are (or most of the time) the last click converter in all user journeys.
Think about the last time you made a purchase – you likely saw an ad on Facebook that enticed you to consider the brand name. It helped you to remember the brand name, which is super memorable in and of itself. Then, you saw the brand again in an ad while watching your favorite show on Hulu. Then, while researching your next summer camping trip, you saw a banner ad on the side of the page featuring the brand. That banner ad got you so interested in purchasing with the brand that you opened a new browser and searched for the brand name in Google. You then clicked through a pay-per-click ad and went to the site, and purchased.
The only action that Google Analytics tracks in that illustration is the last action – the action where you went to Google, searched for the brand name, and purchased. All the other interactions the client had with the brand through other marketing channels (the excitement around being introduced to the brand in the first place) got NO CREDIT.
Now, as a marketer, who puts A LOT of work into building brands and ads that excite users and engage users, this should make you mad. That all the work you put into marketing… that all the creativity you put into brand engagement, customer experience, etc. Google takes credit for it all through GA.
Let me illustrate my point by showing you the conversion funnel:
The target at the bottom of the funnel represents the last click action a user takes when they purchasing or submitting a lead on a site. On average, it takes a user 10-12 touchpoints in a user journey to get to that last touchpoint – so why are we giving all the credit to the last touchpoint?
Think of it in terms of a soccer team. Defense, offense, and the midfielders all need to work together to get a goal. Each player needs a turn with the ball to get it in the goal ultimately, and without the team-work of all members, it’s statistically less likely to get a ball in the opposing team’s goal. That’s how marketing channels work. We know that the more channels we layer on, the better our conversion rate gets. But marketers lose sight of that and keep putting more and more money into the Google engine because their reporting keeps telling them that that’s the only channel that’s working.
It’s time for marketers to get more thoughtful about multi-touch attribution. If that’s hiring someone internally to create your own attribution product based on artificial intelligence (AI) learnings from your organization, great! If it’s hiring a multi-touch attribution tool to help you, that’s great too, but we cannot give all the credit to Google anymore. We are smarter than that!
If you need help with how to get started in multi-touch attribution tracking and reporting, Above The Fold can help. Please reach out to us to get help now.
