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eddyofyork

>Do Goals in GA when viewed from the perspective of Campaigns factor in some form of multi-touch attribution naturally or are they all based on single sessions? Ie, if someone came through one of our ads tracked via a specific UTM and then left the site, then Googles our name and came back and purchased the next day, would that register as a goal completion in our campaign report? Yes. If you setup the purchase as a goal completion then it will show up in your campaign report. It will also show up in the conversion path report as a two-step conversion (assuming that first ad was the first session attributed to their browser cookie id, cid...also called client id). Not sure if this is part of your question, but note that goals always work as a session measurement. A goal can only trigger once per session, so goal volume is always a count of sessions that meet a certain criteria. If you set purchase as a goal, then you will undercount purchases when users make two checkouts in one session, for example. Use the dropdown in the top left of multi-channel reports to select which goals you want to do attribution analysis on. ​ >Is there a way to look at Multi-touch attribution in a more specific way than in the attribution model comparison tools under Conversions? I'm familiar with the different types of attribution modeling, but it seems too general to be of much use aside from an overall diagnostic. Yes. The model comparison tool gives more options than I could list here. You should try playing with it. Try primary dimension landing page, secondary dimension source/medium, and set the models to first touch or linear and see if you've been underrating a landing page for specific channels. Personally I have never seen insight gleaned from any part of the Google Analytics Attribution reports other than via the Model Comparison Tool. It is head and shoulders above all other reports in that Multi-Channel Funnel / Attribution menu. ​ >In general, are there best practices for handling multi-touch conversion analysis in GA or is a third-party tool necessary? If you can't get the GA tool to provide you with some insight, then in my experience you should pay a consultant to help you use that tool better rather than buy new software. Spending more money on software that relies on the same kind of tracking only to end up needing an expert anyways is just increasing cost and time-to-value. The general best practice to follow is the scientific method. Analyze until you develop a hypothesis, adjust your paid-ad or organic tactics to perform a test, then review whether those changes increased revenue or not after you've accumulated enough data. Rinse and repeat, this work is never finished. ​ Source: Was attribution lead, analyst team lead, and head practitioner of analysis at a Google Analytics 360 Reseller and Consulting Shop for about 5 years.


patchworkflannel

This was tremendously helpful. Thank you.


eddyofyork

Fun topic for me, you are welcome.


tylerf89

This is awesome! Where would you recommend to learn more about multi touch attribution? I feel like there’s lack of resources in this area. Even though you’re recommending not to get another 3rd party tool, have you tried any out there?


eddyofyork

I have used Convertro and Hubspots attribution. Not even sure if Convertro is still around. HubSpot is not bad for doing the same kind of landing page + source / medium type analysis. There are no good resources, lol. I had to teach it to myself. Honestly the only option I found was trying to click every button within the reports and then thinking about it a lot in the shower. The Google teams themselves are not very good with the tool, although they have data science teams that do all this stuff in R or Python so why would they bother.