Last Click Attribution is Hurting Social Media’s Feelings

When you sit down and look at your monthly dashboards, hopefully you’re including social media and its contribution to your company’s bottom line. However, if you’re doing what most people are doing, you’re using standard Google Analytics Source/Medium data… and that’s really going to undercount your social media presence. Take a look at the dashboard below, at first glance it seems great, Organic Revenue, Social Revenue. Wonderful right?

The issue with this dashboard, and using Google Analytics Revenue by itself is you’re only looking at the last interaction the user had before they converted (with one exception for Direct not overwriting a campaign). But when we look at social behavior, as marketers we know it’s very common for social to be much earlier in the attribution funnel. Social is often part of discovery, which puts us closer to first-click. Look at the image below from Google on the basic attribution models… remember this doesn’t even include models like time-decay, behavior weight, etc etc

So, let’s take a step back and look at a better number to provide your senior management team. Even without leveraging attribution modeling tools (Google Analytics Premium has it, for the price of $150,000) you can still start getting metrics together to showcase how much social media is influencing your overall ecommerce performance. Within Google Analytics click on Conversions and then Assisted Conversions. Type Social into the search/filter box and voila, you’re presented with data showcasing your “Assisted Conversion Value” for social.

You don’t need to throw out the number from your first dashboard, but really, do yourself (and your social media manager) a favor and start reporting on social assisted conversions. You don’t have to be a master analyst to start understanding the value social has on your business. A piece of advice, if you’re just getting started reference Adam’s post on using UTM tags properly, always set your medium as “social” and you won’t have to use any funky segments or filters to get the full view of data.

Does your organization utilize attribution modeling? Let me know in the comments!