Conversion path analysis in GA4
Conversion is the most important and interesting event for you. It is extremely interesting to know how this happened. What steps did customers take before downloading the file or purchasing the item? When a customer conversion occurs, it is rarely the customer's first interaction with your website or brand. To understand the steps, you need to look at the conversion paths that will illustrate the overall sequence of platforms and touchpoints involved.
You can use these insights to optimize your website or campaign to fit your customer journey.
In this article, I will explain what exactly you can find in the Advertising > Attribution > Conversion paths tab and what you should be looking for when planning a conversion path analysis.
The data visualization section allows you to identify the most valuable conversion paths. There are three categories of touchpoints: Early, Middle, and Last touchpoints. The aim of touchpoints is to inform us how each channel initiates and supports conversion activities.
The early touchpoints express the first 25% of customer interactions on the path (rounded to the nearest whole number). This segment is empty if the path has only one touchpoint.
The middle represents 50% of touchpoints in the path. If the path has < 3 touchpoints, this segment is empty.
The last category, shows the final 25% of touchpoints in the path, rounded up to the nearest whole number. If the path consists of just one touchpoint, this segment has the touchpoint.
You can click over the header and see conversion credit and the precise number of conversions.
Let's look at the table below. What can we find in it? The table includes information about the number of conversion events, the sum of purchase revenue, the days to conversion (the time from the first touchpoint to the conversion), and also the number of touchpoints that create the conversion. All this information provides a valuable comparison that allows us to find out which channel brings real business value.
Channel Groupings are rule-based groupings of your traffic sources. In this report, you can see your data organized according to the Default Channel Grouping, a grouping of the most common sources of traffic, like Paid Search and Direct. This allows you to quickly check the performance of each of your traffic channels.
The drop-down at the chart's top displays data by source, medium, or campaign dimensions.
Using the conversion path report helps you analyze which channels at which stage of the path are supporting the conversion. In addition, they help to assess what are the most popular path patterns.
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