How to override Google Analytics “last click wins” behaviour

by Patrick Altoft on August 5, 2009

Recently we talked about how to carry out funnel analysis with Google Analytics to avoid the last click taking credit for your sales.

Today I want to share an interesting tip which allows you to turn off the “last click” behaviour of Google Analytics and ensure that the first campaign gets credit for the sale. For example if somebody finds your site using a long tail keyword and decides the next day to return and make a purchase they may search directly for your brand and click on a PPC advert. This means all the credit goes to the brand PPC advert and not to the SEO campaign.

This situation can be solved by adding a simple parameter to the end of your branded PPC ad URL’s and also (if you are clever) to the end of your homepage URL if the referrer keyword matches a brand driven search.

If a visitor clicks on ads from multiple campaigns before converting for a goal, which campaign gets credit for the conversion?

Google Analytics will attribute the most recent campaign information to a conversion. For example, a visitor may initially reach your site through a CPC ad and not make a purchase. Later, this visitor may return to your site via a tagged link in an email to make their purchase. In this case, Google Analytics will attribute the more recent campaign information to the resulting sale – the tagged link in the email.

This behavior can be modified by adding the following to the end of all of your tagged links:

&utm_nooverride=1

When Google Analytics detects this variable, it will retain the first campaign’s information, regardless of which links the user later followed to arrive at the conversion. In the example above, the conversion would be credited to the CPC campaign, if both links were tagged with the nooverride variable.

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

Patrick Altoft 05 Aug 2009 at 12:12 pm
Find me on Twitter: I should point out that it’s not a good idea to turn this off for ever, just for a month perhaps to get an idea of how much of your brand sales are actually non-brand sales.
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jmorell 05 Aug 2009 at 12:29 pm
Find me on Facebook | Twitter: Patrick, have you seen this: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2008/04/17/stuff-more-than-one-value-in-gas-user-defined-segment/ from John at Lunametrics? It looks like it links in quite nicely to both this post and the one previous about funnels.

Basically you can track more than one ‘touchpoint’ using Google analytics, so you can see both the organic search and the PPC brand ad click from a site visitor. I’ve not tried it personally, but it’s on my list…
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vasanth 06 Aug 2009 at 2:50 pm: thanks for the information
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lifeatabhi 11 Aug 2009 at 4:33 am
Find me on Twitter: This was really interesting.
I will try applying this.
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Ruud Kok 12 Aug 2009 at 5:15 pm
Find me on Twitter: Great post, easy to implement for our PPC campaign. And will need to look into conditional redirects in order to apply this for organic searches as well.
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tag44 14 Aug 2009 at 11:59 am
Find me on Digg | Facebook | Reddit | StumbleUpon | Twitter: Thanks Patrick for the lovely post and for sharing the Google analytic secrets.
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