How to Find Assisted Conversions in Google Analytics

Chances are, your analytics are lying to you about which marketing channels are actually driving sales. Most platforms default to "last-click attribution," giving 100% of the credit to the final touchpoint before a conversion, while ignoring all the hard work that came before it. This article will show you how to find assisted conversions to get the full story of your customer's journey in both Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics.

What Are Assisted Conversions?

An assisted conversion is any interaction a customer has with your brand that is part of their conversion path but isn't the final click. Think of it like a basketball assist. The player who makes the final shot gets the points, but the player who passed them the ball played an equally critical role in scoring. Last-click attribution only tracks the shooter, while looking at assisted conversions gives credit to the passer, too.

For decades, digital marketing reporting has been dominated by the last-click model. If someone clicked a Google Ad and bought a product, the ad got 100% of the credit. But what if that person first discovered your brand through a blog post, then saw a retargeting ad on Facebook a week later, and then finally searched for your brand on Google and clicked the ad? In a last-click world, the blog post and the Facebook ad get zero credit, making them look ineffective.

This is a huge problem. It leads teams to make poor decisions, like cutting the budget for top-of-funnel channels (like content marketing or social media) that are essential for introducing new customers to your brand, simply because they don't directly "close" the sale. Analyzing assisted conversions helps you assign value more accurately across the entire marketing funnel, ensuring every touchpoint gets the recognition it deserves.

Finding Attribution Reports in Google Analytics 4

One of the more jarring changes when moving from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 was the removal of the dedicated "Assisted Conversions" report. This caused a bit of panic, but don't worry - the concept and data are still very much alive in GA4, just housed in a different and more powerful reporting suite.

GA4 encourages a shift away from last-click thinking by using a "data-driven" attribution model as the default for most accounts. This model uses machine learning to analyze your specific data and distribute credit across all touchpoints in a conversion path. This means GA4 is already thinking about "assists" for you automatically. To see it in action, you’ll primarily use two reports in the Advertising section.

1. The Model Comparison Report

This is the closest modern equivalent to the old Assisted Conversions report. It allows you to directly compare how conversion credit changes when you apply different attribution models, showing you which channels gain or lose value when you move away from a last-click perspective.

Here’s how to find and use it:

• In the left-hand navigation menu of GA4, click on Advertising.
• Under the "Attribution" sub-heading, click on Model comparison.
• By default, you'll see a table with several columns. At the top of the table selector, you'll see a dropdown menu that says "Compare models." Here you can select which two models you'd like to put side-by-side. A common and useful comparison is "Last click" vs. "Data-driven".

When you set this up, you'll see a table showing your channels (e.g., Organic Search, Direct, Paid Social) with columns for "Conversions" and "Cost per Conversion" under each model. The most important column for our purposes is "% change." This column instantly shows you which channels were being undervalued by the last-click model.

For instance, if you see that under the "Data-driven" model, "Organic Social" has a +45% change in conversions compared to "Last click," that's your smoking gun. It means that "Organic Social" is a powerful assisting channel that plays a significant role early in the customer journey, even if it’s not closing many sales directly.

2. The Conversion Paths Report

While the Model Comparison report tells you which channels are assisting, the Conversion Paths report shows you how they are assisting. It visualizes the most common sequences of touchpoints users take on their way to converting.

Here’s how to get to it:

• Again, in the left navigation menu, navigate to Advertising.
• Under "Attribution," select Conversion paths.
• At the top of the report, you can use the filters to select which conversion event you want to analyze (e.g., purchase, form_submission).

This report breaks down your conversion journeys into three sections: Early touchpoints (the beginning of the journey), Mid touchpoints, and Late touchpoints (the end of the journey). It provides a rich, visual understanding of how channels work together.

You might see common paths like:

• Paid Social → Organic Search → Direct
• Display → Email → Paid Search

This view makes the concept of an "assist" tangible. You can clearly see a channel like Paid Social kicking off the journey. You can also see things like the average number of days or touchpoints it takes for a user to convert, giving you powerful insights into the length and complexity of your sales cycle.

A Quick Look Back: Assisted Conversions in Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics has been sunset, but for years it was the standard, and many marketers still think in its terms. If you have historical data or just want to understand the classic report your boss might be asking about, it's good to know where it lived.

Finding the report in UA was more straightforward:

1. On the left-hand navigation menu, click Conversions.
2. In the expanded menu, click Multi-Channel Funnels.
3. Finally, click Assisted Conversions.

This report displayed a clean table with a few key metrics:

• Assisted Conversions: The number of conversions a channel assisted with. If a channel appeared anywhere on a conversion path except as the final interaction, it got credit here.
• Last Click or Direct Conversions: The number of conversions where that channel was the final click.
• Assisted / Last Click or Direct Conversion Ratio: This was the golden number.

This ratio gave you an instant snapshot of each channel's role, making it incredibly easy to spot your hard-working "assisters."

How to Use This Data to Make Smarter Decisions

Finding these reports is just the first step. The real value comes from turning this data into action. Here are a few ways to leverage your assisted conversions insights.

1. Defend and Optimize Your Budget

The most immediate use is to justify budget for top-of-funnel channels. If your SEO content or your organic social media efforts show high assisted conversion values but low last-click conversions, you now have the data to prove their worth. Instead of cutting the budget, you can confidently argue for sustaining or increasing investment, because you know those channels are filling the top of your funnel with qualified prospects.

2. Understand Your True Customer Journey

Conversion path analysis reveals the complex, winding road your customers take. Do most conversions happen in a single day, or does the journey take weeks? Do people frequently bounce between your ads and organic content before buying? The answers help you build a marketing strategy that meets customers where they are. For example, if you notice many journeys last over 30 days, your email nurture sequences and long-term retargeting efforts become much more important.

3. Foster Better Cross-Team Collaboration

Data can often resolve internal debates. A paid search team focused only on last-click conversions may not see the value of a demand-generation campaign run by the content team. When you show both teams a conversion path report where a blog post leads to a paid search click that converts, everybody wins. It bridges the gap between different departments, encouraging them to create a more cohesive, full-funnel strategy instead of operating in silos.

By shifting your focus from the final click to the entire path, you graduate from simply reporting on what happened to understanding why it happened - empowering you to make smarter, more profitable marketing decisions.

Final Thoughts

Digging into assisted conversions means embracing the reality of a complex customer journey and giving credit where it's due. Whether you're using GA4's attribution models or referencing old UA reports, this data empowers you to optimize your budget more effectively and invest confidently in channels that build awareness and drive long-term growth.

To truly understand the entire path to purchase, you need to see beyond what happens just on your website. Platforms like Google Analytics are great, but the full journey involves data from your ad platforms, your CRM, and your e-commerce store. We built Graphed to solve this exact problem. Just connect data sources like Shopify, Google Ads, or HubSpot, and you can ask questions in plain English - like "Show me the entire journey from the first Facebook ad click to a closed CRM deal" - and get instant dashboards without ever having to manually stitch reports together.