Helpful changes to Google Analytics and Facebook ads

Google has updated Google Analytics and added some pretty cool new features. As a free tool, it’s seriously powerful and most SMEs (and even really big businesses) find it’s incredibly useful.

Obviously – or maybe not so obviously – Google Analytics is a loss leader for them, but it is an excellent lead generation mechanism which helps promote their paid products such as Google AdWords.

Probably the most exciting feature is the Multi-Channel Funnel reports. Bit of a mouthful but seriously useful if you get your head around what this new section is all about.

Multi-Channel Funnels allow you to understand the interaction between your paid advertising, your emails and campaigns and organic search traffic and how they can all work together to create conversions.

Put simply, you can visualise the ‘click journey’ or path which may have started with a Facebook ad click and ended with a Google ad click, resulting in a final conversion.

In the old version of Analytics, it only told you the last click attribution to conversion – in other words, if a Google ad was responsible for a conversion, the poor old Facebook ad got none of the credit for assisting the sale.

In the screenshot below you can see how Google ads were responsible for the ‘introductory visit’ to the website, but then the visitors went away and came back later to convert. In some cases they converted either from a direct hit (if they remembered the site or bookmarked it) or from an organic search. The Google ad would not have been credited with the conversion in the past, but it is now.

Facebook also announced a new targeting feature called Broad Category Targeting. This is also a cool feature and one worth checking out if you haven’t seen it. We are trialling its accuracy at the moment, but it seems pretty useful so far.

Check out some of the ‘interests’ you can reach, from families with kids to small business owners:

Watch out Google: Facebook’s getting a whole lot more serious.

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1. Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.