This article continues from How to advertise to unconverted users and provides instructions on how to use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your advertisements.
Understand attribution
It's important to identify which marketing efforts are working and which ones aren't working so you can figure out where you want to allocate your time and money. For example, it's useful to know if your email campaigns are driving more key events or if your social media advertisements don't really convert that many users.
Attribution is the act of assigning credit for key events (or meaningful interactions) to different marketing efforts along a user's path to completing the key event. For example, someone sees your advertisement on social media, searches for you on a search engine, and then visits your website. A few days later, they see a display ad, return to your site, and complete a key event. It's useful to know that each of these touchpoints helped convert the user.
Understand attribution models
Attribution models are rules that determine how credit for key events is assigned to each of the different touchpoints along the user's path to key events. Some attribution models emphasize the first interaction, some emphasize the last interaction, some emphasize each interaction, and so on.
Google Analytics uses the data-driven attribution model by default. The data-driven attribution model distributes credit for the key event based on data for each key event. Each data-driven attribution model is specific to you and your key events. You can change your attribution settings in Attribution Settings on the Admin page.
In Google Analytics, you'll find tools to help you understand:
- how people find your website
- what the most common paths to key events are
- how different attribution models assign credit to different touchpoints
See how people find your website
The User acquisition and Traffic acquisition reports provide different ways for you to see where your users are coming from. The User acquisition report shows you how users who are completely new to your website find your website, while the Traffic acquisition report shows you how new and returning users find your website.
See the most common key event paths
The Key event paths report provides an easy way to see your customers' most common key event paths and how different attribution models distribute credit on those paths. By default, the report uses the data-driven attribution model, but you can use the drop-down at the top of the report to choose a different attribution model.
The data visualization at the top of the report shows how much credit each segment of the key event path receives using the selected attribution model. You can select the lead_form_submit key event from the drop-down menu at the top left of the report.
Compare attribution models
You can also refer to the Model comparison report to see how different attribution models impact the valuation of your marketing channels. For example, you can use the report to compare how the paid and organic channel data-driven model attributes credit to different touchpoints compared to how the paid and organic channel last click model attributes credit to different touchpoints.
What's next
This marks the end of this tutorial series. The following are some resources you can check out to learn more about what was discussed in this series: