What every person in search marketing does on the beginning of the month? They check the performance of their Google Ads for previous month since it normal to check our goals and numbers to see how are you hitting your goals. But there is a big problem with those stats. What if someone browsed the landing page, but converting happened two weeks later. So technically you spent your budget in one month but you are getting results in next month. Thanks to the new time lag report in the Google Ads Attribution tab, you can now get a better understanding of how long it takes your users to convert.

The time lag report is found under Tools & Settings > Measurement > Attribution > Path Metrics and is only one of the many useful reports available in the Attribution tab.

Path Length Report

Ever think about how many ads a user clicks on before converting? This report has a planty of information about how many ad clicks and also ad impressions normally occur before a conversion.

Assisted Conversions Report

The Assisted Conversions analysis gives you how many click-assisted conversions and last-click conversions your campaigns did. This is useful in determining which of your campaigns may have driven interactions that contributed to the final conversion but were not credited for the final conversion under a last-click model. If a campaign has a poor CPA but also has a very high click-assisted to last-click conversion ratio, that shows it is a strong influencer of conversions and good for continued investment.

Model Comparison Report

The model comparison report allows you to compare different attribution models to check the impact they would have on your data. You can choose between first-click, last-click, linear, time decay, position-based, and data-driven models. This is a great way to measure the impact of changing attribution models before you make that actual change.

Device Paths Report

To check this report, click on “Dimension” in the top paths report and select “Devices.” You can use this report to see how many users interact first on one device and then convert on a different device. For example, if you are get a poor CPA on mobile traffic but this report indicates that a large number of users start on mobile and then convert on desktop, your real mobile CPA is likely better than what you see.

Top Paths Report

After using the path length report to identify that your users are clicking on five ads before converting, you can use the Top Paths report to understand in what order campaigns, keywords, and ad groups are coming through. This can give you good insight into what your customer journey looks like and potentially where you can adjust your strategy to better suit where the users are in their path to conversion.