Google Data

Google Surveys, a new product from Google Analytics Solutions, launched on Wednesday. Google Surveys makes it easy to get fast, reliable opinions from consumers on mobile devices and across the internet. The goal, as always, is to help you make more informed business decisions, understand your marketing impact, and take the pulse of your brand.

Today we’re excited to talk with Dylan Lorimer, Lead Product Manager for Google Surveys, about how this product fits in with the rest of Google Analytics Solutions and what the future looks like.

Q: What is Google Surveys?
Lorimer: Google Surveys is a online market research tool for making fast, informed, data-driven business decisions. It gives businesses access to conduct research against a representative sample of users on the web and on our mobile app, Google Opinion Rewards. It’s the evolution of Google Consumer Surveys, a product that’s been in the market since 2012 and fields 1M surveys a week.

Q: How does Google Surveys differ from Google Surveys 360?
Lorimer: Google Surveys 360 is our enterprise research product; it’s a fully-supported research tool that is integrated into the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Users get advanced audience targeting, dedicated support and consolidated billing, all of which make it easy for big organizations to use. Google Surveys has fewer advanced targeting features, but it’s a pay-as-you-go product so that anyone can use it. Google Surveys is currently available in U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Google Surveys 360 is available in U.S. and Canada.

Q: How is Google Surveys different from other market research tools?
Lorimer: Traditional market research research often involves long, time-intensive surveys answered by individuals who have signed up to respond to surveys for compensation. The process is typically slow, costly, and out of reach for most businesses who want to make a quick and informed decision. Google Surveys aims to make high-quality research more accessible, and to bring the customer voice into the process of media performance measurement.

Q: Why is Google Surveys now part of Google Analytics Solutions?
Lorimer: Google Analytics Solutions is a set of powerful tools that helps marketers use data to understand their consumers and how they behave. Google Surveys bridges the gap between metrics-based performance measurement and the need many marketers have to get qualitative feedback from their customers on their cross-channel, cross-media marketing campaigns. Google Surveys has grown on its own over the past few years. When we saw the investment Google was making with Google Analytics Solutions to empower the marketer — something we’ve been focused on with Google Consumer Surveys for a few years now — it felt like the obvious choice to provide a missing tool in the portfolio.

Q: What are some examples of how customers are using Google Surveys?
Lorimer: YouVisit, a leading virtual reality company, just used us to find out how many of their clients were aware of virtual reality. They suspected a significant number of consumers were at least aware of the concept, and that some percentage would want to try it. But to convince clients to invest in virtual reality content, YouVisit needed hard facts. How many people wanted to try virtual reality? How many were even aware of it? YouVisit turned to Google Surveys to gather those numbers, and they were pleasantly surprised. A statistically significant sample from Google Surveys let them extrapolate that 23 million Americans had already tried virtual reality. With this data, YouVisit can confidently educate clients on virtual reality’s power to engage consumers.

Q: What does the future look like for Google Surveys?
Lorimer: The future is bright! We see immense potential and we’re excited about new ways we can help marketers and even developers reach their target audience, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure. We’re already serving surveys to over 10 million respondents, so in some ways pulling insights from that is a big data challenge for us — which is the kind of puzzle we like to solve best at Google. So there’s a lot we think we can do to be proactive about providing actionable data to our customers. Google Surveys as a research tool is just the beginning.

We hope you found this additional information useful. Ready to get started with Google Surveys? Learn more at g.co/surveys.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Marisa Currie-Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google Surveys

Yesterday, we launched Google Surveys 360, a powerful new part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Sometimes it’s enough to know what your customers are buying, where they’re going, and how they’re purchasing. But to really understand their decisions, you want to answer a harder question: Why are they doing it? To get the answer, it turns out you just have to ask.

Surveys 360 offers several advanced features that help you reach high-priority audiences, test markets, and gain a better understanding of your impact. They include:

• User list to help you measure the effectiveness of your media campaigns by surveying people exposed to your ads and videos 
•  ZIP Code targeting that delivers your surveys to high-priority or test markets 
• Custom Audience panels that take the pulse of brand perception among key consumer groups
• Occupation and industry targeting to help you do business-to-business research with hard-to-reach professional audiences 

Surveys 360 quickly analyzes your data and delivers it in easy-to-navigate graphs, demographic segmentations, and cross-tabs. That makes it easy to find fresh insights and help your business thrive.

BuzzFeed improves client campaigns with Google Surveys 360 

BuzzFeed is one company using Surveys 360 to measure campaign performance and improve its ad effectiveness.

BuzzFeed is a global news and entertainment company that creates content intended for sharing, and helps advertising clients tell brand stories with engaging video campaigns. Campaign videos are less like advertisements and more like content people want to share. As they get shared, the campaign reach is extended.

To prove the impact of this innovative ad strategy, BuzzFeed turned to Surveys 360. As BuzzFeed launches each video campaign, it also releases surveys across the Google Surveys Publisher Network and the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app. They ask people exactly what their client brands want to know: Are the campaign videos memorable and understandable? What messages mattered most and why? Did they motivate sharing? What do consumers want to know next? BuzzFeed uses the Surveys 360 user list targeting feature to automatically put the right surveys in front of the right respondents: people who have seen or interacted with campaign videos.

Low-cost, high-quality survey data from Surveys 360 lets BuzzFeed give its clients a complete picture of campaign performance, fast. It helps them prove the value of the current campaign and even suggests strategies for the next campaign.

BuzzFeed’s culture of data-driven experimentation creates success for their clients. Watch our BuzzFeed video case study for more details.

This is only the beginning! We’ll continue to iterate and offer new features for Surveys 360 in the coming months. It’s available for purchase today in the accounts of all Analytics 360 Suite users in the U.S. and Canada. Go to g.co/surveys to learn more.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Michael Cumberbatch, Product Manager, Google Surveys 360

Today we’re excited to announce a major addition to the Google Analytics 360 Suite and a big step toward bridging brand and performance marketing — the arrival of Google Surveys 360.

Now for the first time, marketers of all types can get fast, accurate market research — in combination with their marketing performance and analytics data — to help them make key business decisions at the speed of today’s digital world. Google Surveys 360 makes doing market research as easy as buying an airline ticket with your favorite app. It’s available for purchase today in the U.S and Canada as part of the Analytics 360 Suite.

“Nest uses the Google Analytics 360 Suite and recently beta tested Google Surveys 360. By using our website analytics data, we surveyed shoppers who browsed our product pages but left without purchasing. As marketers we wanted to know: why did shoppers leave our site without purchasing? And that’s exactly what we learned. This insight has given Nest an opportunity to address buyers needs — adding more in-depth product information to our site, turning browsers into buyers.” 

Why surveys? Why now? 


We launched the Analytics 360 Suite earlier this year with a big goal: to bring enterprise-class marketers the full and integrated set of data and marketing analytics products they need to compete in today’s multi-screen and hyper-speed world.

Mobile continues changing the customer journey, as 96% of us now use smartphones to get things done.¹ More devices, more channels, more choices: the shift is affecting every phase of the funnel from awareness to purchase. And that’s changing the nature of marketing itself. Marketing organizations that used to be divided into brand and performance teams — one for perceptions and trust, the other for sales and leads — are seeing those worlds come together. Marketers are realizing that brand and performance are inherently tied together, with data as the bridge.

In these conditions, market research has been slow to adapt. Companies spend a lot of money to get to the “why” behind the what, how and where, but traditional research means hiring a research firm, waiting three months or more, and then getting data that’s siloed and may not be sharable.

This is exactly why we’re integrating Google Surveys 360, previously called Google Consumer Surveys, into the suite. With a panel of 10M+ online respondents and 1M surveys fielded weekly, it offers enterprise marketers (of all types) access to a brand new layer of data and insights into what consumers are doing and thinking.

An entirely new type of consumer insight 

Whether you’re a market researcher or a digital or brand marketer, Google Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone in the organization to create a survey, find a specific audience sample, and generate statistically significant results — in just a few days. It’s flexible and powerful, with advanced features that include custom panels to survey specific audiences and the ability to measure ad effectiveness, target by geography (ZIP code), industry, and occupation.

But that’s just the beginning. Let’s take a look at an example of how integrating Google Surveys 360 into the Analytics 360 Suite drives real value for marketers: tying brand marketing to performance marketing and measuring offline and online interplay, such as consumer response to TV ads.

TV advertisers and digital marketers now have a fresh way to view performance across every stage of the funnel — all in a matter of days. Google Surveys 360 makes consumer ad awareness and interest research possible: just deploy an online survey to a validated, representative sample of respondents in the geography of your choice. Google Surveys 360 can ask questions about TV ad recall during and after broadcast, then follow up with questions on topics like intent and favorability. Combine this with data modeling and analysis by Google Attribution 360, and the result is a full-funnel view of marketing performance, from awareness to action. (See how Google executed this strategy during the 2016 Summer Olympics.)

“We put an emphasis on innovation. Collecting competitive data and industry benchmarks is critical to do this. Google Surveys 360 helps us get data on the current state of the market. The results are reliable and delivered at the speed we need so our teams can continue developing the best products without delay.” 

 – Corinna Proctor, ‎Sr. Manager, User & Design Research, Lenovo 

What’s next? 


Google Surveys 360 is a big addition to the Analytics 360 Suite family. It’s also a cousin to Google Surveys, our pay-as-you-go online market research tool — available in 12 countries. We’re excited about the ways both of these products can help businesses make fast, informed data-driven business decisions.

Marketers and developers can finally reach the target audience they want, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure, in days rather than months. There’s much more we think we can do to provide actionable data to our Analytics 360 Suite customers and integrate survey data even more with the other products in the suite.

To learn more, watch this blog for the next couple of days! We’ll dive deeper into this new product and show you how it works. Additionally, as part of this update, we’ll begin to sunset our older information hubs so check out these new resources:

• Website – g.co/surveys 
• Twitter – @googleanalytics 
• Surveys Help Center 
• Google Plus 

 Happy surveying!

¹ Google “How Mobile Has Changed the Way We Get Things Done” study, September 2016. 

Posted by Dylan Lorimer, Product Manager, Analytics Solutions and Measurement at Google

You can avoid the Demogorgon of Digital Analytics by attending the DAA SF Symposium on November 9th where you’ll get tips and tricks on personalization and how to survive Black Friday from your friendly neighborhood Digital Analytics practitioners. Join us for a full day of great topics covering the latest from the struggles to the new developments in our world and come out prepared to face the stranger things lurking in your data. You’ll meet an awful lot of awesome people (like you) who can help you avoid the Upside Down of Analytics. We won’t let you end up like Barb.

Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting awesome tips and real-world solutions to the challenges we all face everyday. Our lineup includes:

• June Dershowitz, Head of Data Governance, Twitch 
• John Wallace, Analytics Entrepreneur 
• Kevin Dalias, Director of Predictive Data, RadiumOne 
• Josephine Foucher, Product Manager, Hotwire 
• Zann Aeck, Director of Digital Marketing, Net App 
• Martijn Scheijbeler, Director of Marketing, TheNextWeb 
• John Mesh, Google Product Manager, Optimize 360 
• Caitlin Anderson, Web Optimization Analyst, American Eagle 
• Anita Fong, Analytics Manager, Clorox 
• Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google 

 For the first time, the DAA San Francisco Symposium will also be hosting a “Women in Analytics” lunch, sponsored by Google. This lunch is open to all symposium attendees and will feature a panel of esteemed women in the analytics industry who will share their thoughts on the industry, career, and the future. Questions and participation encouraged! Can’t make the whole day? Join us just for lunch!

Over the last ten years, Google Analytics has added many new features and reports. For the last few months, we’ve been working to build a simpler Google Analytics while still retaining the key functionality that people frequently use. The changes highlighted in this post are the first part in a series of improvements that you will see in the next few months.

Below is a summary of the changes that all Google Analytics users will begin to see over the next few weeks.

1. Simplified navigation

• A brand-new navigation using Google’s Material Design standards
• Removal of the “Home Customization Reporting Admin” subheader bar
• • Admin is now pinned to the bottom of the navigation
• Resizeable left navigation to allow for more space in the canvas

2. Customization, all in one place

• Previously , reporting customization items were spread out: Dashboards & Shortcuts in the left-nav; Custom Tables, Custom Reports, etc. in the Customization tab; Custom Alerts in a tab in Intelligence Events
• Now, all customization elements are contained in a “Customization” left-nav element:

3. Simplified Google Analytics View switching

• The old “Home” account/property/view picker page has been replaced by the new picker in the header, which allows you to switch views from any page in the product
• Note that for Analytics 360 users, you may need to switch organizations to see the set of accounts you are trying to get to

4. A streamlined login flow

• Logging in now automatically takes you to the last Google Analytics View you were looking at the last time you logged in

5. An adjustable default date range

• You can now change the default date range that Google Analytics reports load with. This can be changed in your Google Analytics user settings
• Setting it to shorter times (like 7 days) has several benefits. For example, many campaign changes, website experiments, etc. will have impacts hidden in a 30-day view but immediately visible on a shorter timeline
• Defaults are now set to 7 days for all standard GA users

6. Goodbye to a couple of pages:

• Intelligence Events:
• • Custom alerts have moved to the new Customization section and will continue to function as normal
  • Automatic Intelligence Events have been removed from Google Analytics, and will soon be replaced by automated insights from Google Analytics Assistant
• In-Page Analytics: The In-Page Analytics report has been removed from Google Analytics web UI. You can still access in-page analytics with the official Chrome Extension

All Google Analytics users will begin to see these changes in the next few weeks. We hope these changes improve your Google Analytics experience!
Posted by Ajay Nainani, Product Manager, Google Analytics

With Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360, we make it easy for marketers to manage tags on their sites and apps for fast, flexible implementation of new marketing technologies. Last week at SMX East, we announced that we’ve added more than 20 new tag templates to Google Tag Manager to empower marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. This is one of a couple recent changes to make Tag Manager more open and more secure.

New third-party tag templates

Google Tag Manager already includes easy-to-use tag templates for many Google and non-Google tools. And, while we support implementing all other tags using a variety of custom tag types, we’re dedicated to expanding the number of third-party tag templates available to you. Tag templates make it easy to add and maintain tags on your sites and apps without code. This means that less technical users can be more involved, errors are less likely, and your sites are ultimately more secure.

To make it easier and safer to deploy third-party tags, we’ve developed an open format that allows vendors like Microsoft, Twitter, and Nielsen to implement and maintain their own tag templates in Google Tag Manager. For companies whose products depend on tags, having a tag template in Google Tag Manager is a great way to make implementation easier than ever.

Our Vendor Tag Template Program allows tag providers to natively integrate with our tag templating system. Google performs a security review of each tag that is submitted through the program. The resulting tags are integrated into Tag Manager, and displayed with the company’s logo and an easy-to-use form to configure and deploy the tag.

Some recent additions include:

Are you a vendor who would like your tag supported? Learn more about the Vendor Tag Template Program and enroll here.

Secure container loading

At Google, we constantly look to develop products with best in class security. Google Tag Manager already has a host of security features such as user access controls, 2-step verification, malware detection, and tag blacklists. We’ve now also made some changes to the Google Tag Manager container snippet — given out in our user interface and documentation — to improve security and performance even more.

Previously, the Tag Manager container snippet loaded containers in a protocol-relative manner. That is, on pages with an https:// URL, the container would be loaded securely using HTTPS. Our new snippets will always use the secure protocol (HTTPS) by default, regardless of the protocol of the page. This helps protect containers from malicious parties and snooping, and in many cases, will also improve performance.

You’ll also notice that we’ve made a change to how we recommend Tag Manager be implemented, now with the container snippet split into two parts:

• A JavaScript snippet that should be implemented as high in the of your page as possible to ensure the best tag performance. This change is especially important if you plan to use Tag Manager to deploy Google Optimize.
• An iframe snippet that should be implemented just after the opening tag. This snippet handles firing of image pixels for users with JavaScript disabled, and also enables Google Search Console verification.

To get the best performance, it’s recommended that you implement both container snippets following the latest installation instructions.

What if you already have Google Tag Manager implemented on your site? Not to worry: These changes are optional, and your existing implementations will continue to work without a problem. To get the highest level of security and performance, you can update your implementations at your earliest convenience.

Happy tagging!

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

We launched Google Data Studio (beta) in the U.S. earlier this year, and last week, we expanded availability to 21 additional countries.* We’re excited to offer Data Studio to companies across the globe so they can easily create and share reports and dashboards, and ultimately use insights and collaboration to make better business decisions.

Organizations today collect an increasingly large amount of data. In a world of web analytics, CRM systems, and third-party sources, data-driven decisions should be easier than ever before. However, all of this data has presented a significant challenge: making it easily accessible and useful.

Having multiple data sources that live in silos within your organization compromises your ability to spot critical business opportunities and issues when they matter most. This is a widespread challenge, with 84% of marketers saying they don’t believe their data sources are well-integrated, according to a 2016 Forrester study.

Data Studio solves this problem by allowing you to easily connect your data and create beautiful, informative reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Create up to five custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing. All for free.

Get started today so you can:

• Put all your data to work. Easily access the data sources you need to understand your business and make better decisions.

• Transform your data. Quickly transform raw data into easy-to-follow reports and dashboards — no code or queries required.

• Build engaging reports and dashboards. Data Studio gives you the ability to create meaningful, shareable charts and graphs that bring your data to life.

• Leverage teamwork that works. Work together quickly, from anywhere, by sharing reports via Google Drive.

Not sure where to start? Good news: We’re releasing our first batch of templates today to remove that hurdle. Businesses can use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes.

Get started for free.

Happy reporting!
The Data Studio team

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Data Studio

Nearly 9 in 10 business leaders in a recent survey said that improving the customer experience is fundamental to their future success and brand reputation.¹

Yet less than half of business leaders say they have actually taken action around their customer experience activities.²

Today, consumers have higher expectations for businesses to deliver more personalized site experiences based on the information they’ve shared. Businesses need to be able to quickly discover useful insights from their data and act on what they’ve learned.

To help those leaders (and everyone else) take action to deliver more personalized site experiences, we’re happy to introduce Google Optimize. It’s a free version of our popular enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360, which was announced earlier this year.

Google Optimize will start rolling out globally next month. If you’d like to be one of the first to use it, visit our signup page. We’ll send you an invitation by email as soon as it is available.

Making it easy … 

Google Optimize helps any business test and deliver better website experiences. And to help guide you through the process, we’ve made it easy every step of the way:

• It’s easy to implement. Test new and engaging web experiences across your entire site in minutes. Google Optimize is built on top of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager so you can either add a single line of code to your existing Google Analytics implementation, or serve the Google Optimize tag directly using Google Tag Manager. 
• It’s easy to use. Use the Google Optimize WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor, to change just about anything on your site – text, images, layouts, and more – just click to edit! There is no need to recode your site each time you want to test a new experience. 
• It’s easy to understand and act on results. Google Optimize calculates results based on your existing Google Analytics metrics and business objectives. It’s clear to see what you should do next to drive even more impact for your business.

… And powerful 

With Google Optimize you can create and deploy a variety of experiment types: Choose from A/B, multivariate, or redirect. For any experiment, Google Optimize offers powerful capabilities:

• Native integration with Google Analytics. Test what matters to your business. Because Google Optimize is built on Google Analytics, you can more quickly and easily identify areas of your site that can be improved upon. Then in Google Optimize you can use your existing Google Analytics goals and metrics as your experiment objective. 
• Advanced statistical modeling. Google Optimize uses Bayesian statistical methods to model the real-world performance of your experiments. We’ll show you how much more effective one variant is over the others, leading to more accurate results that you can trust. 
• Sophisticated targeting tools. Google Optimize will help you deliver the right experiences to the right customers at the right moments.

Ready to deliver better site experiences? 

With Google Optimize, you’ll have all the basic capabilities you need to get started with site testing – making it perfect for any business. Google Optimize is free for anyone to use, so why not give it a try? Visit our signup page today.

And if you are part of a larger enterprise or business with more sophisticated testing and support needs, check out Google Optimize 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. With Google Optimize 360, you’ll be able to take your site experiments even further by delivering custom experiences to your Google Analytics audiences. You’ll also be able to run more experiments across your site at the same time and add additional experiment objectives — even after an experiment has started. Talk to a sales representative to learn more.

Happy testing!

¹“Two Years’ Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis.” The Storytellers, March 15, 2016. Quoted on eMarketer.com. 
²“Data Elevates the Customer Experience.” Forbes Insights / SAS, May 2, 2016. Quoted on eMarketer.com.

Posted by Jon Mesh and Dan Cary, Product Managers, Google Optimize

This past March, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products designed for the needs of enterprise-class marketers in today’s multi-screen world. 

Today we have another exciting announcement. Next month we’ll start rolling out a new product: Google Optimize — a free version of our enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360. Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

Businesses of all sizes need tools to measure and succeed 

First of all, why this free product now? Because companies big and small face the same challenge today: Consumer expectations are higher than ever in a mobile-first world. How can brands be more useful to people in their moments of need? With ever more data flooding in, marketers need access to the right data so they can uncover useful insights — and act on them quickly.

The companies that are already making this leap from data to action are transforming their businesses by becoming more useful to consumers throughout these micro-moments. How? Analytics and testing are the key. In fact, according to an Econsultancy survey of 4,000 marketers, the top two digital trends in 2020 are going to be a focus on customer experience (24%) and personalization (23%).

That’s what has led to today’s announcement. We’ve made several advancements to the free versions of our analytics products to bring modern measurement to everyone, and help them create happier customers by providing more relevant experiences. Let’s take a closer look.

1. How can every business deliver personalized customer experiences?
   Google Optimize (beta). This free web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool helps businesses improve their customer experiences and business metrics. Because it’s built on top of Google Analytics, businesses can use their existing information to experiment and personalize site experiences with minimal setup requirements. Request an invite.

In the digital world, whether you’re writing stories for your loyal readers, creating creative content that your fans love, helping the digital community, or providing items and services for your customer, understanding your audience is at the heart of it all. Key to unlocking that information is access to tools for measuring your audience and understanding their behavior. In addition to making your page load faster, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) provides multiple analytics options without compromising on performance.

You can choose to use a solution like amp-pixel that behaves like a simple tracking pixel. It uses a single URL that allows variable substitutions, so it’s very customizable. See the amp-pixel documentation for more detail.

The amp-analytics component, on the other hand, is a powerful solution that recognizes many types of event triggers to help you collect specific metrics. Since amp-analytics is supported by multiple analytics providers, this means you can use amp-analytics to configure multiple endpoints and data sets. AMP then manages all of the instrumentation to come up with the data specified and shares it with these analytics solution providers.

To use amp-analytics, include the component library in your document’s :

And then include the component as follows (for these examples, make sure to specify your own account number instead of the placeholder):

The JSON format is super flexible for describing several different types of events and it does not include any JavaScript code which could potentially lead to mistakes.

Expanding the above example, we can add another trigger, clickOnHeader:

For a detailed description of data sets you can request, as well as the complete list of analytics providers supporting amp-analytics, check out the amp-analytics documentation. You can also see more implementation examples in the Amp By Example site.

If you want to conduct a user experience experiment on your AMP pages,  such as an A/B test, you can use the amp-experiment element. Any configurations done in this element will also be exposed to amp-analytics and amp-pixel, so you can easily do a statistical analysis of your experiment.

There are still plenty of ongoing developments for AMP analytics to help you gain insights as you AMPlify the user experience on your site. Visit the AMP Project roadmap to see a summary of what the team is cooking up. If you see some features missing, please file a request on GitHub.

Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, Google AMP Specialist

Google Analytics is an important tool for marketers. It’s used to understand how people come to your website, how different content performs and how to get more conversions. All this is essential for knowing how to drive more high-quality traffic to your website.

For most B2B firms, the main purpose of their website is to generate sales leads by getting visitors to fill in some kind of contact form. But many see that just a fraction of visitors leave their contact information, and as a result, salespeople don’t get enough good quality leads from their website. So what can be done to improve this situation?

This guide will show you the 3 best ways to generate leads with Google Analytics:

1. Using Google Analytics Network report
2. Using a custom Google Analytics report template tool
3. Using Google Analytics with Leadfeeder for lead generation

One way to gain more leads from your website is identifying companies that visit, based on their IP address. With this data, you can have some information about the 98% of visitors that don’t explicitly contact you. When people visit a website using their office network, marketers can identify that someone from a certain company has visited and pinpoint what they have done there. For B2B outbound sales teams, this information can be very valuable.

If you see a company visiting your website, there’s a high probability that they’re in need of- and evaluating your product, which is the perfect time to get in touch with them.

Based on the IP address alone, it’s impossible to know exactly the name of the visitor, but in many cases this information is not needed. For example, if you sell email marketing tools and a company comes to your website and browses product pages, it’s a strong signal they are looking for a new email marketing tool. When you contact them, you want to contact the person who’s responsible for digital marketing, regardless of who visited your website.

For effective lead generation purposes, you should be able to identify real companies that have visited your website and see how they have behaved, to evaluate if they are a good lead.

1. Using Google Analytics Network Report

Using the Network report is the most common way to see which companies have been visiting your website. There have been many blog posts about this topic, for example this LunaMetrics post by Dan Wilkerson from 2012, this how-to article from Anna Lewis and a post by Traian Neacsu on uncovering hidden leads.

But these posts are all now a couple of years old and the Google Analytics interface has changed quite a lot since then. These days (2016) you can find the Network report in Google Analytics under Audience > Technology > Network.

Network report in Google Analytics

In the Network report (seen above) you will see a list of “Service Providers”. What Google Analytics means by “Service Provider” is the network where the visitor has been when they visited your website. Networks are always owned and registered by someone; typically a company, Internet Service Provider or some other organization.

One challenge in using the Network report is that many times the IP is registered by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or some other non-interesting organization. In order to see the real companies, you should filter out ISPs from the list. The easiest way of doing this is to use the advanced search button and select to exclude Service Providers that match the following RegExp (just copy/paste this to the filter):

(not set|customer|internet|broadband|isp|cable com|network|tele|dsl|subscriber|pool|telecom|cable|addresses|telefonica|routed|leased line|communication|comcast|verizon|road runner|service provider|unknown|provider|t-mobile|wifi|telkom|sprint|at-t|residential|province|vodafone|clients|china|dial-up|netblock|wimax|wireless|elisa|sonera|dna oy|at&t|assigned|sl-cgn|block|consumers|kpn|telia|bredband|google|hosting|zscaler|city of|tdc|hubspot) 

Now the list of visiting companies should look a lot cleaner. If you wish to filter the results even further, e.g. only companies from a specific country, you should create a segment out of visitors from that country and look at the report again.

By default for each company in the list you can see how many sessions they have had during the selected time interval, how many pages they have visited and other metrics. When you click on one company, you can get to a more detailed report, like this one below.

In this view, select “Page Title” or “Page” as secondary dimension to know which pages the company has visited. This way you know what they have done on your website and what they were interested in. If they were visiting relevant product pages or they spent a lot to time on your site but didn’t contact you, maybe it’s a good lead for your outbound sales team to contact.

Using Network report to see what company did on the website

If you would really like to know what each company and their employees have done on your website, you can go to the brand new User Explorer report under the Audience section in Google Analytics. This report was introduced in Google Analytics in April 2016 and in the report you can dive into individual visitors and their behavior.

To know what a company did on your website, just create a segment where the Service Provider matches the company you are interested in (see below).

Using User Explorer to see visitors from one company

By doing this Google Analytics shows you Client IDs (anonymous and unique IDs of each visitor) from that company and by clicking one client ID (one user) you can see all the behavior of that user on your website. This way you can have a good understanding about what any given person from one specific company did on your website. Pretty powerful stuff, as you can see below.

Using User Explorer to see visits of one user

2. Using a custom Google Analytics report template tool

At Leadfeeder we created a ready-to-use Google Analytics custom report that anyone can take into use for free. Just click the link below and attach it as a custom report to the Google Analytics View you typically use: 

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=zAQeJwWfT0yxlk8wfPWaGA 

When you click this link, you will be directed to Google Analytics and asked which view you want to attach it to. Remember that by default this custom report will be visible only for you. If other users want to use this report, they should also click the Add to Dashboard link above.

B2B Lead generation report by Leadfeeder

Our custom tool by default shows the most interested companies that have visited your website. To be more precise, this is a list of companies after ISP filtering (using the filter pasted above) sorted by pages / session, with the most interesting visits on top.

Typically companies that have spent a lot of time and loaded many pages are more interested than companies with many short visits. Once you click an interesting company, you can see a list of days on which they have visited. When you click even further into a specific date, you can see a breakdown of all the pages they visited. If page titles are not descriptive enough or not set, you can use “Page” as a secondary dimension to see page URLs (as shows below).

Using B2B Lead generation report by Leadfeeder

In the tool you can see several tabs that you can use (see above). The most interested companies tab is selected by default, but you can also select the second tab – companies with most visitors – that shows companies that have most visits on your website. Many times here you can find ISPs that were not filtered out along with other non-interesting companies. If you like, you can drill into details in the same way as in the first tab.

The 3rd and 4th tabs in the report are selectors that you can use to filter data. For example, if you are only interested in German companies, go to “Selector: Visitor location” tab and select Germany. After that click to the first tab to see the most interested companies from Germany. If you have a sales representative located in Germany searching for German leads, you can automatically have Google Analytics send this lead list by daily or weekly email.

Automating notifications from B2B Lead generation tool by Leadfeeder

Similarly, if your sales team’s responsibilities are divided by product, then sales reps might only be interested in leads that have visited certain product pages. Go to “Selector: Visited page” tab and select the product page each sales rep is interested in. Again, after making the selection, go to the first tab to see the list of the most interested companies visiting that product page and automate lead reports to your sales rep’s mailbox. You can also combine these selectors to create a list of companies from a specific country that have visited a specific product page.

3. Using Google Analytics with Leadfeeder for lead generation

Using the Google Analytics user interface for lead generation is possible as you can see, but not very salesperson-friendly.

 In order to better generate leads from your website for your sales department and do much much more, we created an online tool called Leadfeeder. Since Google Analytics is already collecting all the data about your website visitors, Leadfeeder fetches this data from Google Analytics API and does all the data crunching for you.

Leadfeeder lead generation main report

Once you sign up to Leadfeeder, it fetches all visitor data from your Google Analytics for the past 30 days. You don’t need to install any codes or script on your website; all you need to do is permit Leadfeeder to access your Google Analytics.

The web app filters out ISPs (a lot more than the Google Analytics filters shown in this post) handing you a clean list of companies. Once you see an interesting company and click on it, you see visit-by-visit, page-by-page what they have done on your website (as shown below). Leads are also enriched with additional company information such as company branch and size. With all this information it’s easier to determine whether the lead is interesting and whether they should be contacted.

Leadfeeder showing which pages a company has visited

Not all website visitors are interesting, so you can use custom feeds to filter out bounces and view only companies that have behaved in a way you find interesting. For example, you can define a custom feed rule to only show companies from a certain country, from a specific industry, companies that have visited a set number of pages and have visited a specific page but haven’t contacted you.

Using this kind of custom feed you can get a much more relevant list of leads for your sales team. In many companies sales responsibilities are divided by region or product so it’s good practice to make custom feeds for individual sales reps for only their areas of responsibility. Salespeople can subscribe to their personal custom feed to get daily or weekly email notifications about new companies that visit their website and match the set criteria. Understanding the online behaviour of your website visitors combined with knowing the location of the company visit gives sales reps powerful weapons for successful follow-up.

Using custom feeds in Leadfeeder to filter lead list

Seeing a qualified list of interested companies is already powerful, but this sales intelligence should fit within your existing sales process to be really useful. We know it’s the dream of many sales reps to have good leads magically appear in their CRM without the need to do anything, so that’s why at Leadfeeder we have built integrations to sync visitor data with your CRM.

The integration to Pipedrive and WebCRM are made two-way, which means that in Leadfeeder you can see CRM data for the visiting company, while in your CRM you can see all the website visits the company has made, once it’s been connected.

This makes it easier for sales reps to distinguish between new and old clients in Leadfeeder, create accounts and opportunities in their CRM with one click from Leadfeeder, and see in their CRM how prospects are interacting with their website.

Using CRM integration to sending leads from Leadfeeder to CRM

If you are not using a CRM at all, leads can also be sent to sales reps by email or you can assign leads for them to see inside Leadfeeder. It’s good practice to invite the whole sales team to use Leadfeeder with their own user profiles and it’s free to add users.

In addition, if you are using Mailchimp for email marketing, you can connect it to Leadfeeder to see in Leadfeeder what individuals do on your website when they click through from one of your MailChimp campaigns. This is possible because Mailchimp tags links uniquely for all recipients and Leadfeeder can transform these unique links into email addresses. This way you can know exactly who the visitor was on your website.

Leadfeeder offers a free 30-day trial with no credit card required, so if you are in B2B business and would like to get more sales leads, go and sign up at www.leadfeeder.com.

Conclusions

Web analytics has made marketing a lot more intelligent during the last 10 years, but similar development hasn’t transferred to sales.

Web analytics has enabled email tools to evolve into marketing automation by tracking what email clickers do on your website and triggering follow-up emails. Display marketing, similarly, has evolved into very efficient remarketing, where ads are shown to those who have completed action on your website.

In short, there are a lot of digital signals potential customers are giving all the time, but those haven’t been utilized well in sales so far. Many sales reps come to work, open their CRM and start calling through a lead list someone has given them. Meanwhile there are lots of potential customers browsing their website but sales reps aren’t aware of who they are. Our aim at Leadfeeder is to make sales more intelligent by providing salespeople actionable web analytics intelligence about potential customers, thereby making sales more effective.

Posted by Pekka Koskinen, Google Analytics Certified Partner

With the U.S. presidential election less than 50 days away, the candidates are running full force to capture as many votes as possible. Worldwide, people are waiting anxiously to see whom the American people will pick as the 45th president. Now more than ever, the media is turning to polls to make sense of all the campaign activity.

Google Consumer Surveys — named as one of the “most accurate [polling] firms” by FiveThirtyEight in the 2012 election — has recently launched its 2016 U.S. Election Poll.

The 2016 election poll surveys more than 20,000 respondents each week from across the United States, demonstrating how Google Consumer Surveys can quickly collect thousands of representative responses. (Find out more about the poll methodology on page 3 of the polling report.)

Google Consumer Surveys, an online market research solution used to gain insights to inform important business decisions, has recently grown its footprint in politics with usage from groups such as NY Times Upshot, IJ Review, and Echelon Insights. Google’s survey platform and other online polling tools have gained popularity due to their accuracy, scalability, quick results, and low costs.

The election poll results from Google Consumer Surveys are displayed in an interactive data visualization in Google Data Studio, and voter preferences are updated weekly. This customized dashboard and report allows users to filter results by state, gender, and candidate to see different cuts of the data — and the report can easily be shared.

Check out the Google Consumer Surveys U.S. Election Poll for weekly updates as the American public gets closer to choosing its next president. Whether in politics or business, surveys are a powerful tool to get the public’s opinion. And spur lively discussions.

Happy Surveying!

More on Google Consumer Surveys

Many users, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, use Google Consumer Surveys today to run studies on consumer research, brand tracking, and ad effectiveness. Google also offers an enterprise survey solution with advanced targeting features such as user list and zip code targeting. 

Respondents answer questions on 1,000+ publisher sites to gain access to premium content. The publishers make money each time someone answers a question on their site. Google Consumer Surveys also has an app, Google Opinion Rewards, where people can answer survey questions for Google Play credit. There are over 10M potential respondents available to survey everyday.

Posted by Justin Cohen, Product Marketing Manager, Google Consumer Surveys

A few months ago we shared a spotlight post on Google Optimize 360 (beta), a new testing and personalization solution in the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Today we’d like to share how one of our customers, APMEX, uses Optimize 360 to deliver an online shopping experience that matches the personal touch its customers get over the phone.

Built with full native integration for all the data that matters to your business, Optimize 360 let the APMEX team use their Analytics 360 goals and audiences to deliver better online experiences for their customers.

APMEX Case Study 

“Investments you hold” is the motto of APMEX, one of the nation’s largest precious metals retailers. From the gold Maple Leafs of the Royal Canadian Mint to the platinum bars of Credit Suisse, APMEX offers thousands of bullion and numismatic products for easy sale online.

While APMEX is a large company, its marketing resources are limited. But APMEX works hard to give its online customers a concierge-level customer experience — the same personal experience customers get over the phone. “We refuse to believe that our customers’ experiences should be limited by our resources,” says Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics at APMEX.

APMEX relies on Optimize 360 to help it bring a personal concierge-level touch to its website users. “We test everything,” says Duffle. “Creative versus non-creative, the impacts of SEO content on engagement, conversion rate optimization on low-performing pages, new user experiences, and even the price sensitivity of different products.”

“One of our goals was to capture conversions on pages that were otherwise being used as educational resources,” says Andy Mueller, Manager of Business Intelligence at APMEX. “We thought if people were checking the price of metals, they might respond to offers that really reflected their interests.” In one test, new users coming to APMEX to check silver prices were given limited-time offers on United States Silver Eagles. If they’re interested enough to check prices, the theory went, they might appreciate a chance to buy.

The results were excellent, says Mueller: “We found the sessions that included an offer resulted in a median rate of 112% more revenue per session, with a 100% probability to beat baseline.” The experiment did more than boost revenue: It also increased APMEX’s new customer counts. “We saw a 9% increase in new customer acquisition. Our customers have a long lifespan, so giving up a little margin on the first sale to the right customer is worth it to us.”

Some of APMEX’s other tests have also produced astounding results. In one, the team used Analytics 360 to build an audience of people who had put Silver Buffalo coins in their shopping cart and then abandoned the cart. Those who returned to APMEX in the next few days saw the Silver Buffalo first thing on their homepage. As a result, the conversion rate for the coin doubled with this audience. 

“With all the data that Optimize 360 puts at our fingertips, we use it daily to build and evolve our customer relationships,” says Duffle.

For more, read the full case study with APMEX.

Posted by Tiffany Siu, Product Marketing Manager, Google Optimize 360