Marketing attribution features in Google Analytics will likely help marketers assess the effectiveness of various elements of their new media marketing campaigns.

New media marketing campaigns have helped businesses improve their presence on the web and appeal to both consumers and B2B buyers. However, prospect interaction on so many different channels often results in businesses attributing sales to the wrong campaigns or to just one when several different channels contribute to conversions. Google hopes its related Analytics tools will help businesses make better marketing decisions, and 72 percent of marketers agree that marketing attribution leads to better budget allocations and increased returns on investment.

Google hopes to solve the problem of ineffective attribution and give businesses greater insights into their web marketing campaigns with mutlichannel funnels in its Analytics Suite. The tools allow marketers to analyze the behavior of prospects who converted as a result of multiple interactions with a site. For example, if a website visitor lands on a website through a social media marketing campaign and comes back to the site through organic search a week later and converts, both channels will receive attribution for the conversion.

More than half of businesses rely on last-click attribution, which gives credit solely to the channel resulting in the final visit before a conversion. Brafton recently reported that new media marketing channels are undervalued by more than 70 percent. This practice is the primary cause of this misinterpretation.

Directing users through a conversion funnel by encouraging frequent site visits and interaction on social, email and other channels is an effective way to reach prospects in a less overt manner, but attribution models must account for multiple touch points. Using various attribution methods has helped marketers create more effective budgets. According to Google, 83 percent of companies it polled have only been using digital attribution for two years or fewer, but nearly three-quarters have made smarter marketing investments as a result. Moreover, 63 percent say better marketing attribution has given them a better understanding of how their integrated marketing efforts enhance each other, and 58 percent have gleaned useful audience behavior insights.

In its related blog post, Google encourages more marketers to use its mutlichannel funnels to inform their budgets. No longer will each web conversion be considered a result of just social or just organic search. As users return to websites from several different paths, marketers can assess common conversion paths to shift their strategies accordingly.

As the web evolves, internet marketing does as well. Tools designed to inform these strategies must be similarly dynamic. Internet marketers have long looked for tools capable of properly assessing their success with various forms of web marketing. Google’s multichannel attribution capability will likely satisfy this desire for some.

Brafton reported in December that one of the most frequently discussed marketing plans for 2012 was a greater use of analytics tools and other metrics. However, many of marketers did not have access to such features, which could soon become a thing of the past with the adoption of Google Analytics or other paid tools.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.