A Complete Guide: What Are Assisted Conversions?

Explaining the Concept of Assisted Conversions

With the growth of the internet and almost all businesses going online, there are many ways to evaluate performance. Many businesses, however, tend to focus on just a few statistics when making assessments of their performance. If you are one of them, you are losing a lot. So, what do site owners often overlook?

Well, in Google Analytics, there is a concept that plays a very vital role but is often not given attention. If you’ve ever heard of assisted conversions, then you need to understand what it means, and the role it plays when it comes to the performance of your business.

In the simplest terms, assisted conversions are Google’s measures of interaction, except for the final one. Google also defines it as the number of sales that the channel assisted anywhere it appears provided it is not as the final interaction.

From Google’s explanation, the implication is that the higher the number of conversions, the higher the assist role of the channel. What does this mean? Well, if a channel appears in any place, so long as not as the final interaction, then it means it has assisted the conversion.

The explanations seem a bit confusing? Well, in the simplest terms possible, assisted conversions refer to the number of interactions that a customer/visitor has with your business website before eventually ending up in a conversion.

What’s the Value of Assisted Conversions?

Here’s An Example in a Real-World Situation

Google states that it assigns the assists values depending on the transaction that they led to in a website. However, Google argues that the values of conversions can be higher than the total conversion value. How is that possible? It argues that double counting can occur across the assisted and the final conversion values.

But that’s not all. The most important thing to note is that while assisted conversions play a critical when it comes to transactions, they are not always 100% correct. The reason is that a single transaction can have attribution to many values.

If not accurate, why are these conversions important? Look, according to Google, these values play a role in assisting in the determination of the contribution that each channel makes. Hence, even if not accurate, especially with regards to sales numbers, they help determine the contribution that each channel makes in the purchase decision process or conversion.

Let’s use an example of a person searching for the best smartphone. A quick search on the internet for the “best smartphone” returns many results. The customer clicks the top link in the list, which is a paid ad but then ends up not purchasing.

A moment or even several days later, the same customer sees a social media post from the same company, clicks it, and ends up purchasing the product. In Google Analytics, the initially paid ad is the customer’s first step. The process led to an assisted conversion for the paid ad that ended up as a last click conversion for the social media post.

Why does this matter? Well, the main point from the example is that the customer clicked the social media post most likely because of the initial visit to the site through the paid ad. It’s, therefore, the ad that converted the visitor to who ended up purchasing the product through the social media post.

Based on our earlier definition, we can then say that the paid ad assisted conversion. Similarly, any other channel that comes in between provided it’s not the last interaction is said to have assisted the conversion process.

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Reasons You Should Use Assisted Conversions

As a business owner, you are probably wondering how assisted conversions play a role when it comes to online marketing. Now, here is what you need to know. As you’ve most likely noticed from the example we gave, most customers won’t end up purchasing during their first visit.

Usually, anyone searching for any product will often gather information first. More precisely, the first visit is all about making comparisons before making a purchase decision. So, during this time, a customer will most likely make several visits to the website.

Eventually, if the visitor turns to be a customer, there will be many channels that could have contributed to the final decision to buy. Unfortunately, those channels contributing to success are often not accounted for in the usual conversion numbers, yet their role is very vital.

That’s where assisted conversions help in getting the correct full picture of all the channels that contribute to the success of a website. Most importantly, they help in understanding the decision-making process of visitors and how they finally decide to purchase.

Now that you know what assisted conversions are all about and their importance, your best action would be to use them to help boost performance. You need to use them if you want to outsmart your competitors, especially in online marketing.

"Focus on those channels that contribute significantly to success..."

Our Final Take on Assisted Conversions

Assisted conversions dictate the success of your business and subsequently, how you perform amidst the ever-growing competition. If you pay attention to all conversions, you get vital customer information that you need for purposes of improving your marketing.

Take-home point? Focus on those channels that contribute significantly to success. More often than not, website owners focus on many other statistics and numbers, forgetting that assisted conversions do also play a very vital role in marketing. Furthermore, while the information on assisted conversions is part of Google Analytics, many overlook it. So, it makes sense to understand what assisted conversions are all about and how you can use the information for purposes of performance improvement.