Tracking Users in a Multi Device, Multi Channel World

As consumers increasingly switch between devices as a part of their online browsing behaviour, measuring purchase behaviour, channel attribution and “true” unique visitor count becomes increasingly complex. Until recently, it wouldn’t be possible to say if a user visited your site the very first time or if he was a returning visitor browsing from a second device. The larger challenge with this inability to track visits was the inability to acknowledge. Leading to suboptimal engagement with site visitors and inaccurate and irrelevant messaging getting communicated. To illustrate this, an existing customer visits your site and he receives a pop-up box persuading him to buy one of your products, let’s say a laptop.  
 
There are two important concerns with this messaging:

a. The customer did not get acknowledged

b. An upsell opportunity was squandered and more importantly the customer was annoyed because he had already picked the very same product that you tried selling a week ago! 
 
The suboptimal user experience that occurred in the above example can be avoided with the help of User IDs in Universal Analytics. Google announced, under its universal measurement protocol, a variable called User ID. A Google Analytics support article defines User ID as: “The User ID lets you associate engagement data from multiple devices and different sessions with unique IDs.” By configuring User IDs, brands can attribute multiple devices, sessions, and engagement data to unique ‘users.’  
 
So with User IDs, brands can address the challenge of not being able to track users accurately as they traverse through devices. A related challenge is to track channels that contributed to your sales and attribute credit.  
 
This whitepaper seeks to addresses these two challenges and provide some solutions to help maximize your site experience. At the end of this paper, you will learn about cross-device measurement, attribution modelling, multichannel funnels, reporting and segmenting with multi-channel funnels, channel labels and channel grouping, and conversion path analysis.

To read the complete white paper, download the PDF version from the link below: