Another update from Google Adwords: The original news are from Google adwords Blog.
In order to help you make more informed decisions about your AdWords keywords, ad groups, and campaigns, we’re excited to release a new set of reports for your AdWords account: AdWords Search Funnels (beta). Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.
What are AdWords Search Funnels?
AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:
You can read the full blog post here.
Check out what other webmasters are saying:
I see this will not be integrated with Google Conversions for sometime, which would make it really useful as I would imagine you could distribute credit to all keywords in the keyword path.
There are PPC management tools that already do this though and they do it with all your incoming traffic, so you can see whether other channels are involved in the sales cycle, but of course they are not free..
I would say that there are analytical tools that are offering such a feature for a long, long time. They are not free, but you can develop a tool that will log the 1st, 2nd to last external referrer. Real problem is with success allocation. Most people are just looking at last referrer, some are using first, some are allocation a portion to each one.
All this information is great but do they give us any tools to help us optimise our campaigns in an efficient manner?
For instance there are various PPC management tools out there that already do this, you can set up rules to divide credit to different sources, or in this case, different keywords.
How do other forum members think that this will help them optimise their campaigns?
