"The credit of acquiring that customer, and the cost to acquire that customer, really should be spread among all the different marketing activities."
Wow. I have been banging my head against this problem on the ad-tech-product-side for months. But this puts it really clearly. Other than having omniscient view of all marketing activities, any thoughts on even imprecisely measuring this.
Google Analytics has a built-in "multi-channel funnel" report that shows every touchpoint of a user, from their first visit to their conversion.
It also shows "assisted conversions" for each channel. An assisted conversion means at one point the user arrived at the site through that channel, and they did not convert on that visit but they did convert on a later visit from a different channel. It looks something like this:
Social Media (first visit) > Organic Search > Direct > Direct (conversion)
So what would otherwise be a non-attributable conversion ("direct" could mean several things, none of them useful) can now be attributed partially to Organic Search and Social Media, in this example. How much of the conversion you attribute to those channels is up to you.
If you or anyone else could use some help in evaluating their marketing work using funnel tracking, my contact info is in profile.
I guess I was more interested in channels that aren't visible to google analytics (i.e. anything other than PPC?)
how about banner impressions that don't result in a click and aren't run by Google? What about views on guest posts or partner sites?
If your entire marketing strategy is SEO with clickthrough + PPC + on-site content, then, yeah, seems like GA should solve the problem. But if not? Sample size of me: lots of people do marketing activities outside the Google ecosystem.
Wow. I have been banging my head against this problem on the ad-tech-product-side for months. But this puts it really clearly. Other than having omniscient view of all marketing activities, any thoughts on even imprecisely measuring this.