Using the GA4 Attribution Path to understand your digital channels

GA4 is a boon for digital marketers in so many ways. This powerful tool lets you dig into tonnes of data to guide your decisions. Today, we’ll take up one of the best parts of it, which is the Attribution Path. 

The Attribution Path feature is great for learning how people interact with your brand. It offers insights on interactions even on different channels. This gives you the keys to optimising visitor and consumer journeys for conversion.

What is the GA4 Attribution Path?

The GA4 Attribution Path is one of the most invaluable features of GA4. It reveals the interactions a visitor has with your site before he completes a key event. 

The key event may be defined in various ways, but for most people, it’s a conversion like a sale or a lead. By seeing the sequence of events that lead to it, you discover the touchpoints visitors on your site go through. 

You can learn the number of days it takes for them to convert, i.e. measure the amount of time between their first touch and last touch. You can even see the various channels led them to your website. You'll often find that users take more than a single touchpoint/channel to your site before they convert.

This is highly valuable information for marketers. With it, they can make smart choices about everything from channel selection to budgeting!

Why is this important?

Firstly, you'll notice some key insights as to the number of touchpoints it takes for a customer to complete a key event on your site. This indicates that every channel works together to help drive your final conversion action. It's important for every marketer/business owner to go beyond a single touch attribution and sythesise their knowledge of the customer journey with what GA4 is indicating.

Secondly, based on this information, you'll be able to figure out which part of your marketing flow is lacking, whether its insufficient traffic at the first stage, or having to leverage on retargeting ads to drive more returning traffic. This can help you make better, holistic business decisions.

Most importantly, for most SMEs, the data you find on GA4 Attribution path isn't 100% accurate, and you should account for that when forming your insights.

What actionable insights can the Attribution Path provide?

The GA4 Attribution Path is a treasure trove of data, but here are some examples of the actionable insights you may get from it:

1. Budget allocation

The Attribution Path really shines here. It shows you which channels are most effective at sending you traffic that actually converts. 

These channels essentially serve as key touchpoints for effective marketing. When you know those channels, you can allocate more of your marketing budget to them.

2. Paid marketing optimisation

The Attribution Path can help you assess the efficacy of your paid ads when set at different points in the customer journey. 

For example, you can learn if an ad is most effective when it’s the first touch, middle touch, or even last touch of the customer’s path. You can then optimise your ad strategy accordingly.

3. Improving nurturing cycles 

If you have long conversion cycles, this can be hugely helpful. The GA4 Attribution Path offers insight into information that helps you design nurturing campaigns, after all. These can be based on typical journey length and touchpoints.

By accounting for such things ahead of time, you can more effectively guide your customers. You can even develop your customer journey to ensure people are engaged at more times in it.

4. Channel monitoring and evaluation

One thing marketers learn quickly is to monitor their work to see if their strategy still makes sense. Channels that seem effective at first may fizzle out later. Seemingly insignificant ones may end up being key touchpoints. 

The GA4 Attribution Path helps you identify such channels. You can better assess them and see which ones actually make key contributions at different stages. This way, you can adjust your strategies as needed.

How to set up and access the Attribution Path in GA4

Now that you know why the GA4 Attribution Path is so valuable for a smart marketer, let’s move on to how you can actually use it! We’ve broken down the process of finding and setting up this feature on the tool.

Where to find the GA4 Attribution Path function

1. Log into your GA4 property.

2. In the left-hand menu, select “Advertising”.

3. Select “Attribution”.

4. Select “Attribution paths” in the submenu.

How to set up the GA4 Attribution Path function

1. In the Attribution paths report, look for the graph that shows the paths to conversion.

2. Choose your desired time frame by using the date range selector provided at the top of the page.

3. Customise your view with the options below the graph, which include these:

   1. Select specific conversion events for detailed analysis.

   2. Select dimensions shown in the path, like Default Channel Grouping, Source, etc.

   3. Adjust the lookback window from the default of 30 days.

4. Scroll down the page to find the detailed path analysis data, which includes these:

   1. The average time to conversion

   2. The number of conversions for each path

5. Click on any specific path to get more details on it, including these:

   1. The individual touchpoints on that path

   2. The timing of the touchpoints on that path

Pro-tips to help you make better use of the Attribution Path

While you will undoubtedly find ways to use the feature for yourself, here are some ideas to get you started on extracting value from this GA4 utility:

• Segment your data, whether by user type, geography, or something else. It’s an excellent way to start drilling down into patterns. 

• Try using the “path length” filter if you think your customer journeys are a little more complex than the average brand’s. This filter can reveal some insights that will let you further optimise your strategies.

• Don’t be afraid to start at the most obviously valuable data, i.e. the data for your most valuable conversion events (like purchases!).

• Try comparing data from different date ranges. You may discover seasonal trends this way.

(In)Accuracies of Attribution Path?

Attribution paths in GA4 are generally accurate for tracking users who interact with your website across multiple channels, but they can be affected by several factors such as ad blockers, privacy blockers, and cross-device usage, which can impact the comprehensiveness of the data collected.

Ad blockers can prevent GA4 tracking scripts (such as Google Analytics tags) from loading, which means that any interactions from users who have ad blockers enabled might not be captured. This can lead to underreporting of traffic and potentially missed attribution data for those users.

Privacy features like Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari, or Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) in Firefox, limit the ability of GA4 to track users across sessions or between different websites. These blockers reduce cookie lifespans and can disrupt user identification, making multi-session attribution less reliable. Cross-device attribution remains challenging. Unless users are logged into a shared account (such as Google), GA4 relies on cookies and local storage to track sessions. This means if a user interacts with your site on multiple devices (e.g., mobile, desktop), GA4 might treat them as two separate users, leading to fragmented attribution paths.

Get help understanding your business’s Attribution Path data

Despite the inaccuracies, its a highly useful tool for marketers trying to understand customer journeys. Its key value lies in enabling you to synthesis data-driven decisions together with your knowledge of your target customers and implement and unlock profitable flows as part of your marketing strategy. 

If you find that you need more help making effective use of this tool, reach out to us. We use it regularly when working with the brands in cour care and can show you how to use it for optimising your marketing. Contact us at ROMI for a chat about your digital marketing needs.