Google Data

The following is a guest post by Shiraz Asif, Analytics Solutions Architect at E-Nor, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

• What traffic channel yields the most valuable customers (not just valuable one time conversions)
• Customer life time volume based on their first bought item (or category)
• Methods for gaining and retaining customers and which groups of customers to focus on
• For content and media sites, understanding frequency, repeat visitors and content consumption after sign up or other key events
• Repeat Purchase Probability 

• From the Tableau home screen, select Connect to Data, and then pick the Google Analytics connector. After authenticating to Google Analytics, you’ll be prompted to select your Account, Property and Profile, if you have access to more than one.
• Set up the data import to get your Custom Variable key (e.g. CV1) and Date as dimensions, and Revenue as a Metric.

• Change the format from Google’s 20130113 to a Tableau DATE format. Since the date was stored in a custom variable, it was stored as a string. So that Tableau can treat this as a date, we need to convert the string to a date format. This was done by creating a new Calculated field in Tableau. We called the field “Cohort Date”. The formula below worked for our purposes but would require some tweaking for larger datasets.

• Now that we have the date in the format we want, the next step is to subtract the cohort date from the transaction date.  To do this, we created another calculated field called “Days since Signup”. The formula for this field was simply:

• Drag the Revenue measure to the rows Rows tab. Now drag the Days since Signup to the Columns tab. You should see a long graph similar to:

• Drag the Cohort date to the Filter pane, and select the cohort dates you’d like to visualize. For ease of use, I suggest, select only a few to begin with. Drag the Cohort to the color shelf to enable color coding of individual cohort dates.
• Now let’s make a couple of adjustments to make the visualization more useful. In the color shelf, click the down arrow next to Cohort Date, and change the default display from Continuous to Discrete. Then, in the same field, select Exact Date instead of Year.

Today we’re excited to announce that enhanced user-access control lists are coming to Google Analytics. Google Analytics users have long been requesting more fine-grained control over access to various parts of their accounts. We listened, and we’re delivering that control over the coming weeks.

Click for large-sized preview

A version of the following post originally appeared on from the DoubleClick Search blog.

Click here to view the full infographic

When an app crashes, it disrupts the user experience, may cause data loss, and worst of all, might even cause users to uninstall the app altogether. As developers, we do our best to minimize crashes, but no app is ever perfectly stable.

The crashes and exceptions report in Google Mobile App Analytics.

View crashes and exceptions by app version number in the Crashes & Exceptions report. In this example, version 1.1.7 has crashed 7,285 times, while the latest version 2.0.0 has only crashed 91 times in the same period. Nice work dev team!

See crashes by app version over time using advanced segments and the crash and exception report  In this example, a bug fix pushed around January 24 caused significant reduction in crashes across both versions, but crashes persist for v1.1.7 that might warrant some additional investigation.

Use custom segments to segment user experience and outcome data by crashes. This gives you some idea of what they might be costing you in users and in dollars.

See crashes by device by using a custom report. To get even more detail, add the Exception Description dimension as a secondary dimension. In this example, the high level view shows the Galaxy Note and Desire HD as device that might need additional testing before the next launch.

A caught exception is measured in Google Analytics using a custom description. In this example, a number of failed connections may indicate a backend problem and could be causing a poor user experience. Reducing the number of these caught exceptions could be a goal for the dev team in the next release.

Have you ever wanted to learn more about changes made to your Google Analytics account, wanted to refresh your memory as to when a particular profile setting was changed, or wondered who on the team made a goal change? Now, all of that is possible with the launch of Change History.

The following is a guest post contributed by Hasan Bakhshi and Juan Mateos-Garcia who work at Nesta, an independent charity based in London. Nesta’s mission is to help people and organizations bring great ideas to life by providing investments and grants, and mobilizing research, networks and skills.

We surveyed 500 of the UK’s companies that were actively online and promoting their products. We asked about the collection, analysis and use of online customer data in their decision-making, and the impact this has on their bottom line. Our research suggests that a startlingly high number of businesses in the UK’s Internet Economy would benefit from reading Michael Loban‘s post on data resolutions for 2013. Here, we revisit some of his insights backed up by our data to illustrate how big the online data gap is for many UK companies, and what they must do to bridge it.

Insight 1: ‘Address your data phobia’. 
We identified a cohort of companies in our sample with apparently no fear of data. We call them ‘datavores’. When making decisions about how to grow their sales, they rely on data and analysis over experience and intuition. They collect data comprehensively, analyze it thoroughly and use it to make decisions. But they are in the minority: only 18% of the companies we surveyed compared with 43% who make decisions on the basis of experience and intuition. These ‘gut-driven’ companies would stand to reap significant commercial benefits from their online data if they could get over their data phobia. We find that datavores are four times more likely to report substantial benefits from their online customer data.

Insight 2: Get on with social network marketing. 
Only 40% of businesses in our sample report that online data is important for designing and evaluating their social media strategy. Lacking the right data to make decisions, perhaps we shouldn’t therefore be surprised to learn that more than half of the businesses we surveyed were hesitant to dip their toes in social network marketing, despite the fact that nearly 1/2 of the UK population* uses social media actively. (* cited from UK Office for Communications)

Insight 3: Tools are great, but great analysts are awesome. 
Our survey suggests that fully harnessing the potential of online data requires up-skilling the workforce. Over three-quarters of businesses who have trained their staff to improve their data capabilities in the past two years report significant benefits from online data (compared with only 20% of those who haven’t provided training). Another of our findings leads us to add a coda to Michael’s resolution, however – while it is true that great analysts are awesome, it appears that great analysts who are empowered to act on the basis of their insights are even better. Datavores are much more likely to delegate decision-making than other firms. The implication is that making most of your data is not always painless. It may require re-organizing the business, changing its culture and rethinking the role of managers. ‘No pain, no gain’, as they say about most New Year’s Resolutions.

Insight 4: ACTION!
This brings us neatly to perhaps our most important finding: in order to benefit from online data UK businesses need to put their data to work. They need to use it to improve their website to be sure, but they also need to feed it into decision-making process in other parts of their business – such as in product development and business strategy. In fact, the ‘use of data to make decisions’ turns out to be the main factor discriminating between the datavores and the other companies we surveyed. And that, controlling for other relevant business characteristics, ‘using data’ is what really makes a difference on the impact of data on performance. To put it in stark terms, if you don’t use your data, you may as well not have collected and analyzed it.

We present the findings above (and many more) in greater detail in our Rise of the Datavores report. This is the first milestone in our program of research and action looking at the potential of online data for innovation and growth.

In the coming months, we will be matching our survey responses to financial data to measure in quantitative terms the connection between data-driven decision-making and sales growth, profitability and productivity. To get a really robust handle on the direction of causality in this relationship we are looking to run a controlled experiment to measure the impact of an Online Analytics intervention on a randomly selected group of UK businesses. In related research we plan to quantify the extent of business demand for data-savvy talent and assess the adequacy of the UK’s education system in supplying it.

Last, but not least, we will be looking through practical work to identify datavores in the public and third sectors, and work to encourage the transfer of good data practices across different parts of the UK’s economy and society.

In all these areas we will be looking for data experts to work with, to probe whether we are asking the right questions, to refine and help implement our research plans. Drop us a line if you want to hear more!

[email protected]
[email protected]

Posted by Hasan Bakhshi and Juan Mateos-Garcia at Nesta

Spring is coming right around the corner and it’s never a bad idea to get a head start on your spring cleaning! The same goes for your mobile app analytics solution. Have you switched over to our new Mobile App Analytics Platform (v2) yet? The benefits are numerous:

• We are providing a new mobile app analytics solution, solving the problem that there is currently no single repository to understand end-to-end value of mobile app users. This is supported by a more powerful mobile SDK (v2.0) that is easy to implement.

• Understanding app performance holistically through acquisition, engagement and outcome is critical to improve mobile app results, optimize user engagement and increase revenue generated. Our new reports show the entire lifecycle. 

• App developers and brands can make better, more comprehensive data-driven decisions for mobile investments with better reports. For example, marketers can optimize their mobile programs to improve ROI and app developers can improve in-app engagement.  

We’ve listened to your feedback and have heard the requests loud and clear: E-Commerce should support multiple currencies. We’re pleased to announce the launch of this feature which will be rolling out to all users over the next few weeks. 

New metrics supported in multi-currency

Currency dropdown menu

Last Tuesday, we held a webinar on the technical implementation of Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags, freeing up webmaster time while providing users with more reliable data and insights. This technical session includes a more in-depth look than our introductory webinar, illustrating how the product operates in a live environment and showing how flexible Google Tag Manager is for enterprise systems.

Watch the webinar video here for:

• Step-by-step implementation process + live product demo
• Advanced use cases, including the Data Layer API
• Best practices and common pitfalls

And don’t forget to download our handy implementation Cheat-Sheet, which outlines each of the steps involved in migrating onto Google Tag Manager.

Click here to download the Implementation Cheat-Sheet: http://goo.gl/5GJyA

And as usual, we like to provide a recap of some of the top questions we received during the webinar. Please note that this webinar is intended for technical audiences, so some of the Q&A below gets into the nitty-gritty technical details. If you’re less experienced technically, we invite you to check out our forum or reach out to one of our certified partners for implementation assistance.

Questions and Answers

Where can I find more detailed information about all of this stuff?
In addition to the walkthrough we provide in the webinar and our Cheat-Sheet, you can find a detailed description of the implementation process in the Google Developer docs, and helpful articles about how to use the Google Tag Manager user interface in our Help Center, including some notes about what to think about before you begin implementing. And as noted above, if you still have questions, check out our forum or reach out to one of our certified partners for implementation assistance.

Where can I place the GTM snippet? Can I put it in ? Does placing it in the footer have any adverse effects? Can I place the data layer in ?
The recommended location for the GTM snippet is just after the opening

tag. The only exception to this would be in the case where you want to declare page-level metadata by declaring the data layer immediately above the GTM snippet.

The GTM snippet can be deployed later in the page, like the footer, but doing so increases the time before the snippet loads. This can cause incremental amounts of data loss, since the user could navigate away before all your tags finish loading.

We do not recommend placing the GTM snippet in head, because the GTM snippet contains an

What should I do about collecting macros and tagging events if I don’t have access to my client’s site or if IT is too busy?
If you can’t access values on the page via the data layer, there are several different Macro types to help you capture data without needing a code change. These include DOM element, DOM attribute, and JS variable macros. Simply input the ID or variable names, and the macro will pull out the data for you. NOTE: If you go this route, you may want to accompany the tag being fired with an “{{event}} equals gtm.dom” rule. This makes sure the element has loaded in the page before you request it, so you don’t get an undefined macro value.

If you’re trying to add events to the page, currently this requires code changes. We’re working on a solution that doesn’t need code changes, but in the meantime we’ve heard of a couple of folks using the Custom HTML template to inject the dataLayer.push() API into relevant parts of the page. We can’t guarantee this as a solution due to the asynchronous nature of tag loading in Google Tag Manager, but we have heard some success stories.

How do I do cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager?
It’s now possible to do cross-domain tracking in GA using the custom HTML template and a new track type within the Google Analytics tag template. We’ve got some exciting things in the works here to make cross-domain tracking even easier; stay tuned for more soon.

Do you have any account and container setup best practices? What if I’m an agency? What if I have separate sites for mobile and desktop?
In general, an account should be owned by a single advertiser or publisher. Within each account, there can be multiple containers, and containers should be split according to how the site or sites are managed. For instance, if there’s a separate marketing team managing different countries and therefore probably different tag vendors, then there should be a separate container per country. If you have a mobile site and a desktop site that use the same tags across both subdomains, then you should probably only use a single container. We have found that one container per domain is pretty standard, but there are always different situations that call for a different setup.

If you’re an agency, we strongly recommend that your client creates the initial Google Tag Manager account and container, and then have your client add you to the container. Google Tag Manager includes user permissions controls as well as multi-account access to make it easier for agencies and clients to work together.

Are all tags with document.write off limits? Are there any workarounds?
Most tags that utilize document.write are just trying to construct an image pixel with dynamic parameters using JavaScript. Luckily, our Custom Image Tag allows you to construct an image pixel with dynamic parameters. Look at the tag you’re trying to add, pick out the URL, paste it into the Image URL field, and then add any dynamic variables by using the {{macro}} syntax. See the live demo in the webinar video above for an example of how to do this.

Do not add tags that contain document.write in either the initial snippet or in any linked JavaScript. Doing so will cause undesirable effects.

How do Google Analytics events differ from Google Tag Manager events?
Events in Google Tag Manager are basically an indication that this is an event where other tags could fire. It does not collect any data. GTM events are used in tag firing rules to initiate the placement of other tags.

Google Analytics events are actually data events, and can be set up in Google Tag Manager via the Google Analytics template, tracking type “Event”. This tag sends data to Google Analytics to be reported on within the Google Analytics interface.

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We hope the webinar and Q&A will help you implement Google Tag Manager smoothly and easily — many business, including GoPro, are already enjoying easier tagging. Keep watching this blog for more tips and tricks!

Posted by the Google Tag Manager team

A version of the following post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.