Understand your customer’s actions just before they become a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of closing deals. Your peers will say you have the Midas Touch.
Understand your customer’s actions after they become a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of world class customer service. Your customers will rave about you and send more customers your way.
Understand your customer’s actions just before they quit being a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of customer retention. Your profits will rise because you know the cost of customer acquisition is high and the cost of retention is low.
Google Analytics can answer these questions, but you need to segment using advanced sequences to make it happen. This article will show you how. First, we will show the “out of the box” standard reporting in Google Analytics. Then the second half of the article will show how to take it a step further with advanced segmenting.
- Jump to: What Google Analytics will tell you without segmentation
- Jump to: Advanced sequencing your customer’s journey
What Google Analytics will tell you without segmentation
Google Analytics has standard reporting that is powerful. Four reports; Assisted Conversions, Top Conversion Paths, Time Lag, and Path Length, provide wonderful insights about the journey of your customer. You will find all four reports under Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels
Sadly, these reports are often ignored for a variety of reason. One reason is many businesses are so hyper-focused on single-visit conversions that they regard everyone else as “tire kickers” or not serious. But if you pause and think about how you make major purchases, you will probably realize you rarely convert on the first visit. Master the customer journey and you will master your sales.
Assisted Conversions
You’ve probably heard it takes 6 to 8 touches to make a sale. Looking at Analytics, we often find that roughly 30% of conversions come after previous visits to the site. We suspect, but can’t prove, that some portion of the remaining 70% had some prior touch point that we can’t measure. Why? Because it takes 6 to 8 touches to make a sale.
The Assisted Conversions report shows the top online channels that contribute to a conversion. Here is an example with 393 conversions. But 117 of those were assisted conversions. The top assisted conversion channels were:
- Direct – almost certainly from another touch point we can’t measure
- Paid Search
- Organic Search
- Referral
Top Conversion Paths
The Top Conversion Paths report is similar to the Assisted Conversions report. But it gives you more detail on the exact path. A notable difference is it shows you all the channels used in a single conversion. As an example, the 3rd highest assisted conversion path comes on organic for the first visit, and then direct traffic on the second visit where the user converts. You see this is valuable information that provides more illumination than the Assisted Conversions report.
NOTE: The Top Conversion Paths report doesn’t replace the Assisted Conversions report. It compliments it. You want to look at both. Together they help you piece together the puzzle.
What if you’re trying to gauge the effectiveness of a paid advertising campaign? You could conclude that the paid advertising isn’t converting at the rate you want. But then you look at this report and see that 3 of the top 10 multi-channel paths start with paid search, but they convert on a different channel. This isn’t a complete answer – you still have further questions. But now you know to not gauge the paid channel on last visit conversions alone.
Time Lag
You are getting the picture. Not everyone converts on the first visit. In fact, often 30% of total conversions are the product of a multi-visit conversion path. But how many days does it take to convert. This report shows that most of the conversions come on the first visit. More importantly, many conversions come 12 to 30 days after the first visit. In fact, almost twice the number of visitors convert in 12 to 30 days than convert in 1 to 13 days. So, you may be about to give up on them after a couple of weeks, but the data shows that can be a costly decision. This will drive decisions such as retargeting window. Hopefully it also drives the discussion to understand why it is back-loaded like it is. There are rich insights here.
Path Length Report
Yes, many conversions are not on single visits. A single conversion may come through multiple channels in their path to conversion. They don’t convert immediately – in this example, many convert after two weeks. But how many visits does it take to convert? You see how the picture is coming together. This report shows that for the multi-visit conversions, the majority convert in two to four visits. Now the questions you should start asking is why and what types of visits are most valuable?
What’s your customer’s journey? Are your sales strategies aligned with how your customers research purchasing decisions? Research shows that buyers and sellers are misaligned. Discover insights from over 500 global companies.
Advanced sequencing your customer’s journey
You see the Google Analytics out of the box reports are valuable. They give wonderful insights to the number of channels, the number of visits, and the number of days it takes to drive a conversion. But, they don’t answer an important question. What is my customer doing that eventually leads to a conversion?
Google Analytics is like a young child. It is full of potential and capability, but it needs direction and focus to reach its potential. Advanced sequences in custom segmentation is where you apply that focus. This is where you’ll answer what your customer is doing that leads to a conversion.
The best way to approach this is to think about building blocks. This blog article would be 20,000 words and growing if we tried to cover all the scenarios. Let’s approach this like ingredients in the kitchen. We will show you how to make various ingredients. Then you figure out how to combine them to get the recipe you’re looking for.
First, you must identify your customers
You may say “Easy! My customers are the people who convert.” That is true in the world of single-visit conversions. But our data shows at least 30% convert on subsequent visits. Your industry or website may be even worse. Unless you are Amazon, you should assume it takes multiple visits for your customers to convert.
Then you need a way of tracking customers across multiple visits. This means separating visits before they convert and visits after they convert. The best way to do that is to set a cookie and link it to a custom dimension in Google Analytics. Once you’ve set that property as a custom dimension, your ability to segment increases significantly.
Remember what we said at the beginning of this article:
Understand your customer’s actions just before they become a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of closing deals. Your peers will say you have the Midas Touch.
Understand your customer’s actions after they become a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of world class customer service. Your customers will rave about you and send more customers your way.
Understand your customer’s actions just before they quit being a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of customer retention. Your profits will rise because you know the cost of customer acquisition is high and the cost of retention is low.
The examples in this article are around a subscription website that uses MemberPress to manage subscriptions. We created a custom dimension called “Recent Subscriber” and a custom metric called “Page View Count.” This allows us to segment on paid subscribers and to know how many page views they had across multiple visits. You can read more about how we set this up in Using Google Tag Manager to Set Cookies & Custom Dimensions.
Next, become familiar with Advanced Sequences in Custom Segments
Look near the top-left of most Google Analytics reports and you will find the segmentation. It probably says something like “All Users.” Click on that to reveal many different segments you can select. Segmenting your visitors is powerful and necessary to dig deeply into your visitor behavior. But this article isn’t about the built-in segmentation. We’re only looking at advanced sequences.
Click on “New Segment.” It should be a big red button revealed as soon as you click on segmentation. Select “Sequences” under “Advanced” and you should see the image below. This is where we’ll be doing our work today.
Ingredient #1: Exclude visitors who were subscribers on their first visit
This is an important ingredient to mapping the journey up to the point where they became a subscriber. Here are the components:
- First, we choose to exclude – not include.
- We want users – not sessions. We’re trying to map user behavior across sessions, so we are most interested in user behavior.
- The sequence starts with their first interaction. In this case, we want to make sure we are only looking at users who weren’t subscribers on their first visit.
- We use the custom dimension “Recent Subscriber” as the property we’re filtering on.
Ingredient #2: Include visitors who’s first visit was organic and they weren’t a subscriber
You’re probably already thinking of ways you would modify the first ingredient for your custom needs. Here’s an example where you add a step to specify the channel they came in on for their first visit. Do you want to know how effectively your organic channel drives memberships? Add a condition (for that first visit and only that first visit).
You can see we changed this slightly from Ingredient #1:
- Changed from “exclude” to “include”
- Changed recent subscriber “matches regex” to “does not contain”
- Added that the medium for the first interaction needs to be organic traffic
You can see this is an important ingredient in evaluating different channels. You will discover behavior changes based on the channel – even the source within the channel. Don’t expect paid social to behave the same as paid search. Paid search brings someone actively looking for a solution. Paid social brings someone who’s day got interrupted by some ad you threw into their Facebook news feed. Their behavior will be different.
Ingredient #3: At some point they became a subscriber
This ingredient enables you to segment on users who became subscribers within the date range of your analytics report. When someone becomes a subscriber in MemberPress, the thank you page has a URL parameter “membership=”, so we add that to the filter. This lets us look at sessions where visitors became paid subscribers. This may be useful to you as a stand-alone filter. It becomes much more powerful when combined with other filters.
The key components:
- We are filtering on users – not sessions
- It can be anywhere in their journey – not just the first visit
- The visit included them becoming a subscriber (they weren’t one previously)
Ingredient #4: Exclude / Include sessions after they became a subscriber
This is a powerful ingredient. Do you want to know what the user did up to becoming a paid subscriber? If so, exclude these attributes. Do you want to know what they did in the session they became a subscriber? Then include these attributes.
The key components:
- Now we are looking at sessions. We are not interested in the sessions after they become a subscriber.
- This can be any user interaction. Not just the first.
- You want to filter on the Recent Subscriber dimension being true. This means they were a paid subscriber on this visit or a previous visit.
- You want to exclude sessions where they became a subscriber. Including this as an AND of the Recent Subscriber = true condition means you are only looking at sessions after the session where they became a paid subscriber.
Ingredient #5: First visit was organic traffic to a specific group of pages and was not a paid subscriber at the time
Do you want to evaluate the effectiveness of your blog, or another group of pages for driving business? This is an important ingredient.
The key components are:
- Not a paid subscriber on their first visit
- Their first visit was from organic traffic
- They landed (organically) on any page within the /commentary/ part of the website
Pulling it together: Mixing the ingredients to give you just the data you’re looking for
Obviously, we could go on for weeks about the different combinations of things you can do. But, now, think about how you can mix the above ingredients to answer just the question you’re looking to answer.
How do my customers behave before becoming a paid subscriber?
In this example, we are going to drill down even deeper and ask how a specific category of visitors behaves before becoming a paid subscriber. This is valuable because it helps you understand the buyer journey up to becoming a customer. You can identify content that leads to action. You can identify content that leads to abandonment. The better you understand those behaviors, the better you can hone your buyer’s journey and funnel.
This segmentation focuses on:
- Their first visit came via organic search
- Their first landing page was in a section of the site that houses commentaries
- They eventually became a paid subscriber – Include visits up to and them becoming a paid subscriber
- Exclude visits after they became a paid subscriber
- NOTE: you still get all of their activity from the visit where they became a paid subscriber – including what they did on the site after paying
How do my customers behave as a paid subscriber?
In this example, we are going to look at only the behavior of paid subscribers. Why is this important? You want to know the things that resonate with your customers and identify the things that aren’t resonating. You can use this data to strategize customer surveys. BTW, I’m a huge fan of 1-question surveys. Your customers aren’t looking forward to a 5-10 minute survey. Participation is low and your results are skewed towards the most angry people (typically the folks who complete surveys). Use this data to ask hypothesize behavior. Then prioritize and strategize single-question surveys to refine your product and customer service.
Our segmentation focused on:
- We want users who are recent subscribers
- Exclude the visit where they became a subscriber
- Focus on visits after they became paid subscribers
How do my customers behave before cancelling their subscription?
Retaining current customers is almost always cheaper than acquiring new customers. If you can profile the behavior before they cancel, you can create plans to intervein before they cancel.
This segmentation selects:
- Users that have canceled
- Include sessions before they cancel
- Exclude the session where they cancel
Wrapping up
You can see we’ve only scratched the surface of what Advanced Sequence Segmentation can do for you. Start by asking a question that is meaningful to your business. Then use Advanced Sequence Segmentation to answer those questions in combination with some of Google’s standard reports:
- Behavior-> Landing Pages: What landing pages are most significant at this stage in the buyer’s journey? What pages contribute to the most conversions?
- Behavior -> All Pages: What pages are most consumed by visitors at various stages of the buyer’s journey?
- Behavior -> All Pages: What pages does my buyer view on their last visit when they convert?
- What campaigns lead to the most purchases – even if they don’t convert on the first visit?
- What landing pages lead to the most purchases – even if they don’t convert on the first visit?
The questions are endless. Find the questions that mean the most to your business and get the analytics in place to answer those questions.
Remember:
Understand your customer’s actions just before they become a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of closing deals. Your peers will say you have the Midas Touch.
Understand your customer’s actions after they become a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of world class customer service. Your customers will rave about you and send more customers your way.
Understand your customer’s actions just before they quit being a customer and you’ll unlock the secrets of customer retention. Your profits will rise because you know the cost of customer acquisition is high and the cost of retention is low.
You have the power. Now it’s time to put it to work for your company.
Related Links:
How to Use HubSpot Reporting Dashboards to Hit Your Growth Goals
Using Google Tag Manager to Set Cookies – Instant Recipe You Can Do (allies4me.com)
How to Keep Your Analytics from Betraying You – Ask the Right Questions (allies4me.com)
What’s your customer’s journey? Are your sales strategies aligned with how your customers research purchasing decisions? Research shows that buyers and sellers are misaligned. Discover insights from over 500 global companies.
Dave says
Hi Craig,
I have traffic coming from PAID channels in the first visit, and not completing all the GOALS. These audience may return to my website via different channel (Direct or Organic) and complete all the GOALS.
Under these scenario how do a pull a report to see of users who have completed all the GOALS but tagging them to their first session CHANNEL.
Thanks.
allies4me says
Hi Dave,
You want the recipe under “How do my customers behave before becoming a paid subscriber?”
Change the first step from “organic” to “cpc” or however you’ve tagged your paid traffic. Then change the other steps to your unique goal criteria.
Good luck!
Craig
Dave says
Hi Allies4me,
Read it through with the calm mind and found a way myself. Yes reading did help. Thanks for the suggestions. 🙂