Google Analytics is a free data analysis tool that allows you to monitor traffic and events on your website. It is a valuable tool that allows you to analyse statistics and make informed decisions about your shop activities.

People who use Google Analytics often notice differences between the dashboards in edrone and the results available in Google Analytics.

To begin with, remember that the differences between the results in Google Analytics and edrone are due to the different attribution models that the two tools use. edrone attributes conversions both after a click and after a message is opened, allowing for a more comprehensive analysis of the impact of campaigns on user actions. Google Analytics, on the other hand, counts conversions only for ad clicks, omitting other interactions such as clicking on an image or logo. In practice, this means that edrone can attribute a conversion when a user opens a message and then makes a purchase as a result of a Google search. For Google Analytics, however, such a conversion would be considered a direct visit to the website or a click on a link in the search results.

Edrone also counts conversions within 30 days of a click or email display, whereas Google Analytics is limited to conversions directly related to ad clicks only. The results differ between these tools because each looks at the effects of a campaign from a different perspective and takes into account different types of user interaction. What this means in practice is that if a user opens your message and then searches for your shop or a product they saw in a Google search and then makes a purchase, edrone will count such a conversion as having been gained through your ad, whereas for Google Analytics the source of the conversion will be a direct visit to your website, or a click on a link in a search engine, whereas in fact, it was the ad on edrone that triggered the customer's desire to buy.

For Google Analytics, a conversion gained through edrone will be a purchase made immediately after clicking on the ad, and for edrone it will be conversions occurring up to 30 days after clicking or viewing the email

Let's look at an example that illustrates the complex process of a user's purchasing decision:

A user saw an ad for a handbag from your shop in a newsletter and clicked on it. After looking at the offer, he did not immediately make a purchase decision. A few days later, when he decided he needed the handbag, he typed a query into Google. In the search results, he saw an ad with a link to your website. He clicked on the link again to view the same handbag, but decided to consult his sister before making the purchase. In the evening, he again searched for the handbag in the search engine, this time choosing the organic result, and then bought the handbag.

The question now is which interaction should be attributed to this purchase. Was it the first contact with the offer via the edrone newsletter that was the key factor that convinced him to buy? But maybe the user no longer remembered the ad from the newsletter when he searched for the handbag in the search engine, and it was the sponsored link that directed him to your shop, where he eventually made the purchase. But on the other hand, maybe the user did not initially plan to buy the handbag, and it was only the edrone newsletter that aroused a need in him that prompted him to buy.

Such questions arise all the time, and a clear answer is not easy to find. The buying decision process of users is complex and involves many different interactions at different times. Often it is not possible to clearly attribute a conversion to just one interaction, as different marketing channels and touchpoints can influence each other to create a complex purchase path.

In such cases, it is useful to use advanced analytical tools such as attribution modelling, which allows you to assign the appropriate weight to each interaction, taking into account which channels and stages of the purchase path contribute most to conversion. This allows you to better understand which marketing activities are most effective and impact sales success.

We recommend integrating edrone with Google Analytics, which will allow you to extend your data analysis capabilities with email opens. With this integration, edrone will attempt to send information about email opens to your Google Analytics account. The integration between edrone and GA Universal is based on a user identifier (user_id), which must be assigned to a user and appear in our database before they open an email. As a result, you will be able to better track and analyse user interactions with your emails, and you will gain more comprehensive data to analyse customer behaviour on your website. This integration will help you get a better picture of the effectiveness of your email campaigns and understand which actions generate better results.It is worth understanding that the integration between edrone and Google Analytics has its technical limitations (no user_id identifier) . Due to the specification of this integration, we only send about 5-15% of email open actions to your Google Analytics account, which will be visible in the statistics in your Analytics account.

If a user clicks on a Facebook Ad and makes a conversion on the page (e.g. a purchase or other goal) within 7 days of that click, Facebook Ads will attribute that conversion to their ad (provided we have configured the Facebook pixel correctly). The same will happen if the user reaches their goal within one day of being shown a Facebook Ad. This is currently the default attribution model in this channel, which may raise some objections, but it has its justification.

Facebook is not a purely sales channel; its function is primarily to awaken users' desire to purchase and increase brand awareness. Even if a particular Facebook ad has not directly contributed to a purchase, it can play an important role in implanting thoughts about a particular product or service in the user's mind. If this planted a seed that later germinated and led to a purchase, the Facebook ad can be considered to have contributed to success.

The recipient may also want to compare prices in different shops or find reviews of the product presented before making a purchase. However, he ended up on the company's website via a Facebook ad, so the system rightly attributes this conversion to the Facebook ad. Facebook is not able to track whether the user was later exposed to ads from other sources, so assuming that the Facebook Ads campaign influenced the viewer's decision is the best way to count conversions in this channel.

The edrone system attributes revenue from the email channel to email opens and clicks within a time window of 30 days.
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To make this possible, edrone uses a hidden tracking pixel in the emails and a cookie-based session linking mechanism. This way, if a user opens an email, copies a discount code from it, for example, and then accesses your website directly from their browser, the revenue will be attributed to the email as it falls within the 30-day attribution window.

However, bear in mind that some customers may open the email and only decide to make a purchase after some time. If a customer made a purchase on, say, day 31 after opening the email, the attribution of that purchase to the original email will not occur. The attribution window is limited to 30 days, so transactions made after this time will not be included in the attribution to the email.

It is an extremely difficult task to get exactly the same data in both analytics tools. Using attribution model settings, we can approximate the results, but unfortunately we cannot completely eliminate differences in the number of conversions reported. Ultimately, the differences may be due to different ways of measuring and analysing the data in each tool.
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Google Analytics is a free data analysis tool that allows monitoring website traffic and events. It is a valuable tool for analyzing statistics and making informed decisions regarding actions in a store.
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