Assisted Conversions: Understanding the Value of Your Content

At Ten Speed, we're pretty bullish on how important assisted conversion data is to unlocking organic growth for companies. 

The majority of companies don't have flawless multi-touch attribution or anything close to clear data on the revenue impact of organic blog traffic by URL. 

So, the assisted conversion numbers offer a very broad and effective way of understanding how organic blog traffic is influencing the buyer journey and ultimately driving conversions and revenue. 

In this post, I cover the following aspects of assisted conversion data to help you understand why they matter and what to do with the insights. 

• How we explain assisted conversions
• Why assisted conversions matter for blog content
• How assisted conversions impact strategy by vertical
• How to find assisted conversions in Google Analytics
  

Assisted conversions are a metric provided in Google Analytics. Within the platform, they are described as: 

"The number of conversions for which this channel appeared on the conversion path, but was not the final conversion interaction."

In other words, this channel helped a visitor convert but it wouldn’t get any of the credit in the typical last-click attribution model because the visitor’s last interaction happened through another channel like paid search, direct traffic, or referral. 

Another interesting detail about the assisted conversions metric is that it isn't limited to the first-click attribution either. Whether someone visited your site 3 times or 300 before converting, if the channel contributed at any point along that conversion path, it will be included. 

If you are creating content with the intention of it helping with lead generation, store purchases, or other critical conversions, you need to be factoring in assisted conversions and assisted conversion value. 

If the primary goal of your blog content is to attract new visitors to your site and educate them along their buyer journey, then assisted conversions are the #1 way to impact how well your blog content is doing at accomplishing that goal. 

Here are the three reasons why assisted conversions matter for blog content.

Blogs don't usually convert directly

Most blog content serves as a way to reach new prospects and introduce them to your products or services. It is often educational and targets the middle and bottom of the funnel. 

Because of this, organic visitors to those blog posts are often still early in the process of learning and evaluating, so they aren't likely to convert directly from the blog post.

Far too many companies dismiss blog content as "ineffective" because they are only evaluating it by last-click conversions.

Content optimization

As your website and library of content grow, there becomes a need to prune or consolidate content as part of a regular, ongoing content optimization process.

If you only base your pruning and consolidation decisions on traffic and direct conversions, you may be deleting content that has a high impact on conversions. 

To ensure that the content you delete is not contributing to your goals, you have to also take assisted conversions into consideration.‍‍

Recommended Reading: Content Consolidation: How to Reduce The Number of Articles on Site To Grow Organic Traffic

Future SEO & content strategy

Analyzing your current content to understand which blog posts drive the most assisted conversions is an excellent way to avoid the traffic trap and focus on the topics that you know bring in the right visitors. 

Look for patterns in the topics that drive more assisted conversions than direct conversions to understand which topics you can continue to build around to grow assisted conversion numbers.

The type of content that drives the most assisted conversions will depend on the type of business you are. 

As you continue to build out your campaigns to span several different marketing channels, it becomes important to understand what your top conversion paths are and the role that each piece of content or content type plays.

Assisted conversions for SaaS companies

The majority of SaaS companies are trying to get prospects to create an account (freemium), start a free trial, or request a demo of the product. 

So, the type of content that often contributes the most assisted conversions for those goals is a combination of the following:

• Long-form, educational content on solution-based topics
• Comparison content (vs. and alternative pages)
• Strategy and playbook content with product tie-ins
  

Assisted conversions for e-commerce companies

D2C e-commerce is typically straightforward with the primary goal being transactions. 

However, some D2C companies offer options to subscribe instead of a one-time purchase, offer subscription products only, or in some cases, offer a free trial of their product.

For D2C e-commerce companies, the content contributing the most assisted conversions is a combination of the following:

• Buyer guide content 
• Comparison content (vs. and alternative pages)
• Use case and lifestyle content
  

Here are the step-by-step instructions to pull your own assisted conversions report in Google Analytics, as well as how to filter down to see the data for organic blog traffic specifically.

1. In the left-hand menu, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions

2. Choose the conversion goal(s) that you want to analyze as well as how far back you want to include touchpoints prior to conversion

3. Select the date range you wish to analyze

From here, this gives you the default Assisted Conversions Report, which is grouped by MCF Channel Groupings, but you can easily change it to Source / Medium or several others. 

Organic blog traffic assisted conversions

To look at how organic blog traffic specifically drove assisted conversions, complete the following steps. 

1. Select the MCF Channel Grouping 'Organic Search'

2. For the secondary dimension, add 'Landing Page'

3. Then add an advanced filter with Landing Page containing '/blog' or whatever prefix you have in your blog URLs

At this point, you should have a report that looks something like the one below, showing assisted and last click conversions and values for individual blog URLs. 

Getting started with assisted conversion data

As you pull the assisted conversion data for your blog content, you will start to uncover insights and opportunities for your site that you didn’t have before.

We recommend that you look at this data on a monthly basis, and at the very least, once per quarter. This will help you to continue refining your strategy, inform your content strategy, and help you continue to secure more investment into your content program. 

If you have any questions or would like help pulling this data for your content, let us know!