While this is true in the sense that the individual finally converted after searching

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For the brand, it's clearly not the way they found out about your services. For the purposes of setting strategy, you need to understand in better detail your "visitor acquisition" channels that eventually lead to conversions. Sam's superb post on SEOmoz's conversion rate lessons from 2009 touches on this in point 2. Enter multi-touch analytics tracking. Most analytics packages use last-touch attribution by default meaning that conversions are allocated to the most recent source of a visit for that visitor.


We are interested here in first-touch attribution or ev australia business email lists en multi-touch attribution models to understand how visitors are influenced over time by repeated visits to the site. If you are interested in analytics packages that can track multiple touches 'out of the box', I recommend reading John Santangelo's YOUmoz post on Google Analytics alternatives. First-touch tracking in Google Analytics Patrick at Blogstorm has written about over-riding last click attribution (something I also discussed in my presentation Analytics Every SEO Should Know that Scott linked to from the Whiteboard Friday).





But this method only works when you can specify the exact URL of the landing page including parameters as it relies on the utm_nooverride parameter. This works fine for email and PPC traffic, but doesn't help with tracking organic search traffic. For this, we need a slightly more involved method. In my presentation, I touched on the function setVar and a custom function called superSetVar, but in the updates announced in October last year, the GA team released a new function called setCustomVar that is now the best functionality to use.