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KASKUS doubles CTR and triples CPM with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360

Adam Singer — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:35:00 +0000

Want to review a new digital camera, get gift ideas, or buy tickets to the next Morrissey concert? If you're in Indonesia, KASKUS is your place. 28 million unique users buy, sell, talk and share information on the site each month, making it the country's largest user-generated content publisher.

With so many users, KASKUS recently faced a growing challenge: how to serve ads that are relevant to users’ age, gender and interests?

“As KASKUS is the leading digital community and social commerce platform, our vision is to drive data-driven monetization by making our first-party audience data actionable, we want to give advertisers ways to perform better in our sites and increase the effectiveness of our impression-based ads." Ronny W. Sugiadha, Chief Marketing Officer for KASKUS

Sugiadha and his team wanted to create an audience segment that had a high demand among advertisers: users who had shown interest in mobile devices and were more likely to purchase them.

KASKUS turned to Sparkline, a Google Analytics 360 Services and Sales Partner, who worked with them to approach the challenge to serve the most relevant ads. The process went from an advanced Google Analytics 360 implementation, to segmentation analysis and audience sharing with Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP).

Below is a screenshot of the actual segment shared between Google Analytics 360 and DFP. To learn more about the process, read the full case study.

How well did the new audience work compared to its old open-auction inventory in the Doubleclick Ad Exchange (AdX)?

"Using the Google Analytics 360 Audience Segment sharing feature in DFP and AdX, we doubled our CTR and saw a 3.3X CPM uplift on this audience-targeted AdX inventory," reports Ronny Sugiadha. "We are looking forward to even more positive impact moving forward."

To learn more about how KASKUS achieved those results read the full case study.

Posted by Catherine Candano and Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

googleAnalyticsR: A new R package for the Analytics Reporting API V4

Adam Singer — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 21:44:00 +0000

Hello, I'm Mark Edmondson and I have the honour of being a Google Developer Expert for Google Analytics, a role that looks to help developers get the most out of Google Analytics. My specialities include Google APIs and data programming, which has prompted the creation of googleAnalyticsR, a new R package to interact with the recently released Google Analytics Reporting API V4.

R is increasingly popular with web analysts due to its powerful data processing, statistics and visualisation capabilities. A large part of R’s strength in data analysis comes from its ever increasing range of open source packages. googleAnalyticsR allows you to download your Google Analytics data straight into an R session, which you could then use with other R packages to create insight and action from your data.

As well as v3 API capabilities, googleAnalyticsR also includes features unique to v4:

On the fly calculated metrics
Pivot reports
Histogram data
Multiple and more advanced segments
Multi-date requests
Cohorts
Batched reports

The library will also take advantage of any new aspects of the V4 API as it develops.

Getting started

To start using googleAnalyticsR, make sure you have the latest versions of R and (optionally) the R IDE, RStudio

Start up RStudio, and install the package via:

install.packages("googleAnalyticsR")

This will install the package on your computer plus any dependencies.

After successful installation, you can load the library via library(googleAnalyticsR), and read the documentation within R via ?googleAnalyticsR, or on the package website.

An example API call — calculated metrics

Once installed, you can get your Google Analytics data similarly to the example below, which fetches an on-the-fly calculated metric:

library(googleAnalyticsR)

# authenticate with your Google Analytics login
ga_auth()

# call google analytics v4
ga4 <- google_analytics_4(viewId = 123456,
                         date_range = c("2016-01-01",
                                       "2016-06-01"),
                         metrics = c(calc1='ga:sessions /
                                            ga:users'),
                         dimensions = 'medium')

See more examples on the v4 help page.

Segment Builder RStudio Addin

One of the powerful new features of the v4 API is enhanced segmentation, however they can be complicated to configure. To help with this, an RStudio Addin has been added which gives you a UI within RStudio to configure the segment object. To use, install the library in RStudio then select the segment builder from the Addin menu.

Create your own Google Analytics

Dashboards googleAnalyticsR has been built to be compatible with Shiny, a web application framework for R. It includes functions to make Google Analytics dashboards as easy as possible, along with login functions for your end users.

Example code for you to create your own Shiny dashboards is on the website.

BigQuery Google Analytics 360 exports

In addition to the v4 and v3 API functions, BigQuery exports from Google Analytics 360 can also be directly queried, letting you download millions of rows of unsampled data.

Aimed at analysts familiar with Google Analytics but not SQL, it creates the SQL for you to query common standard metrics and dimensions, using a similar interface as the API calls. See the BigQuery section on the website for more details.

Anti-sampling

To more easily fetch non-sampled data, googleAnalyticsR also features an anti-sampling flag which splits the API calls into self-adjusting time windows that are under the session sampling limit. The approach used is described in more detail here.

Get involved

If you have any suggestions, bug reports or have any ideas you would like to contribute, then you are very welcome to raise an issue or submit a pull request at the googleAnalyticsR Github repository, or ping me on Twitter at @HoloMarkeD.

Posted by Mark Edmondson, Google Developer Expert

Using Surveys to Better Understand the Customer Journey

Adam Singer — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 16:00:00 +0000

Your organization has plenty of data about customer behavior that tells you what different customers do where and when. You can see when they visit you online, how long they search, and how much they spend.

But too often the “why" behind their actions remains elusive. With the mountains of information you collect, the insights are often difficult to find, take too much time to discern, or require additional data. All this means it takes marketers too long to get important information that could make a real difference to the customer experience — and the bottom line.

“If you want to have a major impact, you need an integrated approach to see what is happening at all customer touch points and understand how effective you are,” says Joerg Niessing, a marketing professor at INSEAD.

The number of sources of marketing and customer data that a company integrates correlates strongly to performance vis-à-vis competitors, according to a recent study published by INSEAD. The study focused on customer and marketing data, including:

Digital analytics, such as optimizing email campaigns, testing content, and analyzing digital pathways to optimize website use and experience.
Customer analytics, including lifetime value and loyalty calculations, response and purchase propensity modeling, and micro segmentation.
Marketing analytics, such as demand forecasting, marketing attribution models, market mix modeling, and media budget optimization.
Sales analytics, including pricing elasticity modeling, assortment planning, and sales territory design.
Consumer analytics, including surveys/questionnaires, customer experience research, and customer satisfaction/advocacy modeling.

The study found that those companies that leverage multiple sources and focus diligently on demand generation have significantly stronger business performance, especially total shareholder return.

Straight to the source

But insights uncovered from many data sources often beg the question, “Why?” To answer that, modern marketers go directly to the source: consumers.

Traditionally, companies that use surveys and field research to try to get at the “why” behind the “what” pay a lot of money for information that is often too complex to understand and too slow to arrive. When it does come in, it is sometimes no longer relevant and leaves organizations trying to solve last month’s or last year’s problem at the expense of current ones. Attempting to get speedier or less costly results risks compromising accuracy.

But innovations in market research are changing the game. Easy-to-use survey tools like Google Surveys help marketers fill out their knowledge of customer behavior much faster than traditional surveying methods.

Companies that make use of these fast, convenient survey solutions gain insight not only into what people actually do, but also what they say they will do — and in that gap there could be opportunities. “Marrying digital and marketing analytics with consumer research from surveys gives marketers deeper insights and opens up the number of hypotheses a company can test,” says Suzanne Mumford, Head of Marketing for the Google Analytics 360 Suite. “Marketing today is in near real time and your data should be, too.”

“Marrying digital and marketing analytics with consumer research from surveys gives marketers deeper insights and opens up the number of hypotheses a company can test.”
—Suzanne Mumford, Head of Marketing, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Say your website analytics reveal that one segment of your visitors are highly engaged with your site content, but their visits aren’t converting into sales. “You can ask them directly why they keep coming back but don’t end up buying. Surveys let you take your data one step further and round out the picture of the customer so you can make informed business decisions and tailor your customer experiences,” says Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager for Google Surveys.

Supporting business decisions with surveys

Surveys are also useful if marketers find themselves in an internal debate about two campaign concepts. Before making a large investment based on subjective opinion, marketing leaders can validate messaging by asking the target audience about their preference.

For modern marketers, surveys have become an essential element in an integrated marketing approach — they produce insights that complement those uncovered by other data sources. “I want to make sure that the customer voice is front and center but that we also surround it with other data — that we can make really good, holistic business decisions,” says Stacey Symonds, Senior Director for Consumer Insights at Orbitz.

So think about what you’d most like to ask your customers — or those who visit your site but don’t buy. Survey solutions like Google Surveys allow businesses to get sophisticated, accurate data in a matter of days, not months. Because these methods are more affordable and quick, they allow businesses to continually iterate to meet customers’ needs.

“Surveys empower organizations to get answers when they matter,” Fields says. “And getting those insights quickly helps marketing stay nimble.”

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” an online Insight Center Collection of articles from Harvard Business Review, to learn how organizations are using market research to gain more consumer insights.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Google Surveys team

Does Your Company Have a Data Science Strategy to Create Customer Value?

Adam Singer — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 16:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest challenges for marketing leaders today is not finding or hiring analytic talent, according to new research cited in a Harvard Business Review report, but rather it is finding the right ways to move the mountains of data into insights and then into action.

The study concluded that marketing organizations need analytics professionals who understand data and the technologies that collect, house, and integrate it.¹ That’s a given. But beyond that, experts say, executives need to place more emphasis on data science than on data scientists. Put another way: They should pay more attention to analyzing and acting on what they have now because analysis paralysis doesn’t create customer value.

“Data scientists are technicians who are very good at managing and manipulating data,” says Peter Fader, the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage. “But data science is about looking for patterns, coming up with hypotheses, testing them, and acting on the results.”

Machine Learning

That’s where machine learning can speed analysis and augment your analytics team’s work — by crunching massive amounts of data to identify patterns and anomalies.

A type of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms that iteratively learn from data, machine learning can surface insights without being explicitly programmed where to look for them. It makes it more efficient to crunch massive amounts of data, calling out issues before you see them and providing answers to questions you may not have even thought to ask. This speed to insight allows marketers and analysts to do more with the data that comes in and see the whole picture of the customer journey.

Accenture Managing Partner Conor McGovern says, “If you can’t make the rubber hit the road with a disciplined approach to analytics, you will end up with customer experiences that aren’t as effective or engaging as they could be. As with any source of information, you need to embed and ingrain analytics into decision-making processes to obtain the desired results.”

“If you can’t make the rubber hit the road with a disciplined approach to analytics, you will end up with customer experiences that aren’t as effective or engaging as they could be.” —Conor McGovern, Managing Partner, Accenture

How Lenovo Harnessed Data to Create Customer Value

That targeted data science approach can give companies of any size a competitive advantage. Lenovo is a prime example of a marketing team that mastered the use of advanced technology and analytics tools, driving the company to create better value for its customers.

Ajit Sivadasan, Vice President and General Manager of Global E-commerce, realized that customer data was burgeoning and Lenovo needed to harness it. He began by establishing an analytics team in his e-commerce unit that today integrates and analyzes customer and marketing data from more than 60 sources worldwide. By integrating and analyzing Lenovo’s data, Sivadasan found that there are three main drivers of customer satisfaction that correlate to loyalty:

Quality of the online experience. Sivadasan’s team tracks important variables such as how easy it is to find product information and whether Lenovo provides sufficient follow-up on the status of an order.
Meeting commitments. This second driver includes how often the company misses promised ship dates.
Experience with the product itself. By analyzing social media and direct customer feedback, Lenovo’s ecommerce team helps the company improve its products.

Competing on Analytics

In order to pursue an effective analytics strategy, executives have to clearly define business problems and what the questions are that analytics can answer. If executives don’t do this, they risk getting back data that sends the organization in the wrong direction.

For example, companies frequently find themselves puzzling over a dip in conversions among a desired demographic. Organizations need to be able to study the data, ask customers and potential customers the right questions, and experiment with offering different solutions to optimize the customer experience. Answers need to come in quickly so the organization can act quickly — ahead of the competition.

The speed to insight that machine learning offers can help companies act strategically on the data they have, homing in on the insights with impact, allowing executives to make informed decisions.

Says Joerg Niessing, Marketing Professor at INSEAD: “Executives still have to make the same strategic decisions that they have always made. They need to understand market dynamics and what competitors are doing — and then determine how the company should react. The only difference is that we now have a great deal more data and analytics to help make these decisions.”

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights: Turning Data Into Action,” an online Insight Center Collection of articles from Harvard Business Review, to learn more about using analytics to create customer value.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, "Marketing in the Driver's Seat: Using Analytics to Create Customer Value," 2015.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Marketing Analytics Can Improve the Customer Experience

Adam Singer — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 16:00:00 +0000

Almost every organization today is putting customer experience (CX) at the core of its strategy, aiming to provide products and services that meet customers at every touch point. In a crowded, multichannel marketplace, companies realize that a great customer experience — consistently delivering what customers want, when they want it — can be a powerful differentiator.

But many companies fail to deliver, according to research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS). Although half of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business, just half of them said they perform well in it.

Although half of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business, just half of them said they perform well in it.¹

The problem isn’t access to data; most businesses said they collect mountains of information on their customers. The real obstacle to better customer experience, the research has found, is built into the way organizations share that data, analyze it, and work together.

Improving the customer experience is the end game, but getting there requires more than data. It requires the right data, from multiple channels, integrated to give a holistic picture of the customer journey. And that is where many companies struggle. HBR-AS found that fewer than a quarter of companies integrate customer data across channels to provide a single customer view.

Integrating data for customer value requires getting around organizational silos, which HBR-AS research has identified as the number one problem for companies struggling to improve their total customer experience. These silos prevent organizations from understanding the customers’ expectations at critical moments, and cultural resistance makes it tough to get the collaboration needed to solve the problem. As a result, respondents said the business doesn’t develop the right insights, get the information to the right people, or make the moves that could add real value.

Data-Driven Insight

By contrast, the study found that “best-in-class companies” — those with strong financial performance and competitive customer experiences — are more likely to have broken down those silos than are other organizations. And they use sophisticated analytics in a way that provides insights that open up the customer experience to the whole organization.

For example, at Progressive Insurance, the marketing team collected data on how mobile app users were behaving. These consumers, they discovered, wanted more than just helpful insurance quotes in the mobile app; they wanted to buy insurance on the spot. Progressive responded by giving them exactly what they wanted — the option to buy insurance — which vastly improved the customer experience and delivered a big win for the company. When a company creates customer value, the business benefits naturally follow.

Marketing Takes the Lead

But who is going to break down silos, connect the dots of the customer experience, and drive its improvement?

Today, marketing leaders need to make the case to the company that optimizing the customer experience requires breaking down silos and opening up collaboration, and shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach, says Erich Joachimsthaler, author of Brand Leadership: Building Assets in an Information Economy. For example, a European beverage company assigns marketing groups to consumption moments, such as a night out, instead of brands and channels. The goal is to embed marketers deeply into a particular customer experience and focus them on each step of the customer journey.

“Marketing needs to connect the dots across all customer-facing functions of a company, including partners, in order to deliver real value instead of just communicating the brand,” says Joachimsthaler.

Robust analytics and insights have given marketing teams insight into how customers interact with brands, highlighting product preferences, purchase sequences, and so forth. And they reveal how top of the funnel marketing activities — such as an online display ad or TV commercial — tie in to in-store sales or an online website conversion. Measurement and analytics allow brand marketing and performance marketing to complement each other for the customers’ benefit.

Clearly the stakes are high, and marketing leaders and their teams are challenged to think in new ways. They don’t need more data; they need to find ways to identify and supply their organization with useful insights from that data.

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review Insight Center articles, to learn how companies are using data and marketing analytics to improve customer experience.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Source: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, "Marketing in the Driver's Seat: Using Analytics to Create Customer Value," 2015.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Data Studio: DoubleClick Campaign Manager Connector

Adam Singer — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 16:21:00 +0000

Google Data Studio (beta) allows users to connect, transform, visualize, and share data no matter where it lives. Today we are happy to announce that DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) customers can pull their data into Data Studio dashboards instantly!

With this new connector, DCM customers no longer need to import data into spreadsheets. Users can now quickly create dashboards with over 50 DCM metrics and dimensions. These dashboards are an effective way to track and optimize campaign performance and share reports with client and agency stakeholders.

Creating a new report with DCM data
Ready to get started? The first step is to connect to your DCM network or advertiser through the Data Sources page.

Next you can create a new report from scratch or use our DCM template. With just a few clicks, the dashboard is populated with your data.

Want to learn more? Looking for a new connector in Data Studio?

To learn more about the new DCM connector, please visit our Help Center or post your questions in the Data Studio community forums.

Is there a specific data service you wish to be able to access and visualize through Data Studio? We welcome your feedback via the connector feedback form — we read all responses and use them to prioritize new connectors.

Happy reporting!

The Data Studio team

Posted by Alon Gotesman, Google Data Studio team

Rethinking Marketing Measurement from the Ground Up

Adam Singer — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 16:00:00 +0000

From the moment smartphones touched human hands, they began to change how people interact with brands. It happened slowly at first … but today 91 percent of smartphone users turn to their phone for ideas while doing a task.¹

Consumers expect more of marketers now. They expect brands to answer their questions and deliver the exact experiences they want at the moments they need to know, go, do, or buy things. They expect this across all screens and all touch points, over hundreds of interactions on their journeys.

This means there are three questions marketers should be asking:

Is our brand useful to consumers at every touch point?
How can we measure our usefulness?
How can we be even more useful tomorrow?

To deliver, enterprise marketers need a new approach to measurement that shows them the entire customer journey and lets them see what’s working at each step along the way. The problem is that many of our measurement tools and metrics were created for a desktop world at a time when marketing focused on channel performance.

Today we need an understanding of our audiences across devices and channels. That means taking into account the impact of mobile online and offline, quickly spotting insights, and trying new ways to provide better customer experiences.

Breaking Down the Data Silos

A car shopper today can have hundreds of digital interactions — or in this case 900-plus interactions — before buying. Each one of those moments is an opportunity for a brand to be useful. And each one leaves its own data trail.

But companies that look at data channel by channel, in a silo, can miss the forest for the trees. We need to break down measurement and strategy silos and create an integrated view of the consumer’s journey. It’s likely you have found yourself in a debate with colleagues about metrics and campaign results and thought, “It’s not about what matters to channel X — we need to zoom out to see the whole picture and do what’s best for our customers.”

The truth is that the future of enterprise measurement depends on people and departments, tools and systems, all talking to each other and sharing insights in real time about what customers want most.

From Silos to Synthesis

So if we know that one session and one click doesn’t tell the full story … and if we want to connect consumer behavior dots over time … where do we start? The best place is with the classic question “What outcomes are we trying to achieve?” But then instead of saying “How do we reach our goals?” let’s ask: “How do we measure success?”

Key performance indicators (KPIs) have to reflect the new objectives of the mobile-first world. Marketers who link their metrics to business results are three times more likely to hit revenue goals than those who don’t, according to a Forrester report.²

And while more data is always great, what marketers really need are more insights. That’s why the question “What’s working?” is so crucial. If that car buyer sees a TV commercial for a small sedan or pickup truck and searches for reviews and mileage ratings on his or her mobile phone, watches videos about special features, visits a dealer for a test-drive, and then finally buys a month later, marketers must find a way to bridge the gaps between TV airings and search lift, and display ads and video views, to see where the real influence happened.

How much credit should mobile get? How many touch points were there? Marketers need to know. And if the gaps can’t be filled perfectly, we should get comfortable with new proxies that will give us a sturdy estimate instead.

Marketers, Mobile, and Tomorrow

Evolution is a good thing, even if measuring in new ways can be awkward at first. Measurement and marketing go hand in hand — both have to keep pace with the vastly rising expectations of mobile-first consumers. Discomfort means you’re working to stay ahead.

So, take stock of what you measure and how you measure. Ask if those KPIs account for all the ways consumers may engage with your brand. If not, ask yourself why you’re measuring them in the first place. Focus on the outcomes you want and map your new metrics back to your strategy.

Smartphones have already changed how people interact with brands, and they’ll surely alter those interactions even more in years to come. We can’t predict how. But we can say that the brands that measure the results of those changes first will have a major edge over those that don’t. Measurement isn’t what happens at the end; it’s where the smarter and more successful future begins.

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review Insight Center articles, to read more about best practices and case studies on enterprise marketing and analytics.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Source: Google/Ipsos, “Consumers in the Micro-Moment” study, March 2015.

²Source: Forrester, “Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Performance,” March 2016

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director of Marketing, Performance Ads at Google

Falling in Love With Measurement

Adam Singer — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Why aren't more marketers measuring their campaigns?

If Marketing and Measurement had a relationship status in today’s mobile-first world, it would be: "It's complicated." They've been sitting at the same table at lunch, there's been some small talk in the hall … but they haven't really gotten comfortable together.

Which is a shame, because these two are perfect for each other.

Connecting the dots

Consumers often have dozens or even hundreds of digital interactions before they buy something today. The sheer amount of data created is staggering. There are more than enough dots to be connected for full visibility into the customer journey.

But, as much data as marketers collect today, the truth is many still struggle to make sense of it all. In some companies, you could say Marketing and Measurement find themselves sitting at opposite ends of the couch.

Only 5 out of 10 marketers said they think about measurement while developing campaign strategy, a recent survey of marketing decision-makers shows.¹ If you don't define your measurement goals from the beginning, you may not collect the right data — and understand what's working and what isn't.

Marketing and Measurement should get cozier sooner: at the front-end of the campaign process, while developing strategy. Yet, too many marketers said they think about measurement while building materials and assets (nearly 16%), after the campaign has deployed (9%), or even after the campaign has finished (nearly 6%). What’s more, 16% of the survey respondents said they don’t measure their campaigns at all.²

Clearly, it's time for a relationship makeover. If you're ready to play matchmaker in your own organization, try starting a strategic conversation between Marketing and Measurement with these three questions:

Are we measuring the consumer interactions that really matter?
How quickly can we spot the key insights hidden in this data?
How do we turn those insights into better customer experiences?

When we close the gap between Measurement and Marketing, we can not only answer the question “How are we doing?” but also the more important question, “How can we do better?”

Going steady

It doesn't have to be complicated. When Marketing and Measurement go hand-in-hand throughout the customer journey, it can lead to more useful insights, higher revenues, and better experiences for everybody.

As Matt Lawson, Google's Managing Director of Ads Marketing, says, “Measurement isn’t what happens at the end; it’s where the smarter and more successful future begins.”³

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review articles offering best practices and insights on measurement, analytics, and how to turn data into action.

^1-2Source: Google Surveys, "Measurement in Campaign Timeline", Base: 1,092 marketing executives, U.S., August 2016.
³Harvard Business Review, “Rethink Measurement From the Ground Up,” sponsor content from Google Analytics 360 Suite, August 2016.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Introducing the Firebase Demo Project

Adam Singer — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 19:45:00 +0000

"All genuine learning comes from experience" - John Dewey

Earlier this year we introduced Firebase: a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It includes tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. There are many resources available to learn Firebase, from documentation, guides and free training courses (Android and iOS) we created, to advice from the Firebase community. However, there is nothing quite like learning through practical experience. To address this we’ve launched a fully functional Firebase Demo Project, available to everyone from today (get access here).

The Demo Project includes data from Flood It! (Android and iOS), a real puzzle game in which you have to flood the whole game board with one color in less than the allowed steps. Therefore, the data in the Firebase demo project is typical of what you might see for a gaming app with in-app purchases. It includes the following kinds of information:

Analytics: Attribution data, key events, cohorts and funnel reporting. This includes data about first opens (think of these like installs), in-app purchases, and more.
Remote Config: The parameters that control the app experience as well as the conditions which define which users receive which parameter values.
Test Lab: The automated test results from running the app on numerous device/OS combinations for quality assurance purposes.
Crash: Details on various crashes which have occurred in the app, including callstacks and device information.
Notifications: The notification campaigns that were sent to users to re-engage them. This includes data about the number of messages sent, opened and the number of conversions attributed to each campaign.

Firebase Demo Project: Analytics Dashboard

"Since the launch of Firebase we have been excited to continually build hands-on experience with its many features. Especially with the freely included and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps, Firebase Analytics. The Firebase Demo Project has helped our team do just that and similar to what we've done with the Google Analytics Demo Account, we've incorporated the Firebase Demo Project within our training programs. This plays a critical part in helping our clients maximise their familiarity with Firebase." - Ben Gott, Analytics Director, Periscopix

Self-Learning

The Demo Project is useful for exploring Firebase features and reports. Here are a few things you can do with it:

View all standard Analytics reports populated with real data from the Flood It! app
Dissect Analytics reports by applying a variety of filters
See which ad campaigns are driving the most valuable users to the app
Track crashes and their impact on end users, and understand the steps that led to them
See the full notifications funnel for notifications sent from the Firebase Console
View Remote Config parameters to see how values are varied based on targeting parameters, especially feature flags and percent targeting for staging and Analytics audience targeting for customization
See test results from testing the app on real physical and virtual devices in the Firebase Test Lab

Education Programs
If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Firebase then we encourage you to use the Demo Project within your course. For example, you can create practical exercises that students can complete using the Demo Project.

Access the Demo Project
You can get access to the Demo Project and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help, or have ideas to make the Demo Project more useful, please share it with the Google Analytics Community. We hope the Demo Project gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Firebase.

Happy analyzing!
Posted by Deepak Aujla & Steve Ganem, Google Analytics team

Why Building a Culture of Optimization Improves the Customer Experience

Adam Singer — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 15:30:00 +0000

How can we be more useful to our customers today?

That's the simple question that drives any marketing organization focused on testing, improvement, and growth.

But answering the question is not always so simple in our data-rich world. The old challenge of gathering enough data has been replaced by a new one: gleaning insights from the mountains of data we’ve collected — and taking action.

In response to this flood of data, many of today's most successful businesses have turned to a new approach: building what's called a culture of growth and optimization.

This growth-minded culture is one where everyone is ready to:

Test everything
Value data over opinion
Keep testing and learning, even from failures

Most companies have a few people who are optimizers by nature, interest, or experience. Some may even have a “growth team.” But what really moves the dial is when everyone in the company is on board and embraces the importance of testing, measuring, and improving the customer experience across all touchpoints.

"We refuse to believe that our customers’ experiences should be limited by our resources." - Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics, APMEX

Why should marketers care?
Because they'll be leading the revolution. 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020, according to a recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit.¹ And a culture of growth and optimization offers an excellent path to major gains in those experiences.

As testing and optimization proves itself, it tends to generate higher-level investments of support, talent, and resources. The payoff arrives in the form of more visitors, more sales, happier customers and a healthier bottom line.

If you're curious about building a culture of optimization in your marketing organization, register for our Nov. 10 webinar, Get Better Every Day: Build a Marketing Culture of Testing and Optimization.

This webinar will cover:

The critical elements of a culture of optimization
Tips for building that culture in your own company
A case study discussion with Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics at APMEX, a retailer that boosted revenues with continuous testing and optimization

This kind of culture doesn't happen by command, but it’s also simple to start building.

We look forward to sharing tips on how you can get started. Happy optimizing!

The Economist Intelligence Unit, "The Path to 2020: Marketers Seize the Customer Experience." Survey and a series of in-depth interviews with senior executives. Survey base: 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, global, 2016.

Posted by Jon Mesh, Product Manager, Google Optimize and Google Optimize 360

Google Tag Manager: Giving Mobile Tagging a Little Extra Love

Adam Singer — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 18:00:00 +0000

Over the last several months, we have talked about Google Tag Manager’s improvements to enterprise workflows, enhanced our security features, and made great strides to bring more partners into our Vendor Tag Template Program. Tag Manager also launched a new mobile SDK at Google I/O in May that builds on the power of Firebase, Google’s mobile app developer platform. Today, we’re excited to announce our latest efforts to make mobile tagging easier than ever with Google Tag Manager.

Welcoming AMP to the Tag Manager family

We are excited to launch support for ⚡ Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google Tag Manager! AMP is an open-sourced initiative to make the mobile experience better for everyone. Early data shows that AMP pages load 4x faster and use 10x less data than equivalent non AMP pages. Starting today, you can start using Google Tag Manager to simplify your tag deployment on AMP sites.

While implementing measurement solutions on AMP pages has already been possible, it can be confusing and cumbersome for folks who are new to AMP or who have tagging needs beyond tracking a basic page view. That’s why, in addition to Google Analytics, AMP containers in Tag Manager provide support across Google’s ad platforms including AdWords and DoubleClick. You will find more than 20 tag types available out of the box including a variety of 3rd party vendor tags. We also made sure that firing your tags is a breeze with great coverage of AMP’s triggers as readily available built-in Tag Manager triggers:

When setting up tags, it’s common to want to collect additional values such as how far the user has scrolled down the page or the page’s title. AMP Analytics’ variables serve this purpose and are available in Google Tag Manager as built-in variables ready to be integrated into your tags. You can head over to our support pages for a full list of supported tags and information on how to use built-in variables.

Getting started is as easy as it sounds:

Create a new container for your AMP site
Drop the Tag Manager snippet on your AMP pages
Create your first tags
Preview & Publish

AMP containers are built with the familiarity and flexibility that existing Google Tag Manager users already depend on. As with our other solutions in Tag Manager, AMP containers “just work” out of the box.

Improving Tag Manager for mobile apps

When we announced Google Tag Manager’s new SDK at Google I/O, we brought an integration method to Android and iOS apps that builds on the power of Firebase. This integration makes it easier than ever for developers and marketers to manage where their app data is sent, both within Google and to our supported Tag Template Vendors.

New triggers for events Firebase automatically detects

Today, we are making our mobile app containers even more intuitive and easy to use by tapping into the events that Firebase detects automatically. Now, when you are in a Firebase mobile container, you will see several new options when setting up triggers. Whether your container targets Android or iOS, you will see a new section called “Firebase Automatic Events” which contains the supported automatically detected events for the respective platforms. You can also find built-in variables for each of those events’ parameters, so setting up your tags should be a cinch.

Find parameters when you need them

In addition to the events Firebase can detect automatically, developers are encouraged to implement general events for all apps as well as suggested events by app type to help them fully take advantage of Firebase features. Once implemented, you’re able to use the parameters from these events in your tags: just create a new user-defined variable and select “Event Parameter.” With this new feature, you no longer have to remember which parameters are available for which events. Select the event you’re working with, and you get a list of available parameters.

We are dedicated to providing you with best-in-class tag management. As consumers shift to mobile, our priorities include developing simple, easy-to-use solutions for the latest mobile technologies.

Whether you are building mobile apps or adopting the AMP platform, we’ve got you covered.

Posted by Ben Gram, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

How to Apply Holiday Shopping Insights to Your Analytics Strategies

Adam Singer — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:00:00 +0000

The Year of the Supershopper
We all have that friend — the one who somehow knows the latest brands, the season’s must-have products, and where to find the best deals at the snap of a finger. In years past, this friend was an enigma, making us wonder how does he or she do it?

Today, we can all be that friend. With the ability to instantly discover, research, and purchase, shoppers around the world are more informed and more efficient than ever before - they’ve transformed into supershoppers seemingly overnight.

But what defines supershoppers? And what does this mean for retailers trying to win them over this holiday season? Let’s find out.

They Keep Their Options Open
Last year, more than 50% of holiday shoppers said they were open to purchasing from new retailers¹. This is especially true online. More than three-quarters of smartphone shoppers who usually go to the same physical stores when they shop for products are very open to new retailers and brands online². Why? Mobile makes it easy to explore all of your options no matter when or where you’re shopping. In fact, after searching on Google, 76% of mobile shoppers have changed their mind about which retailer or brand to purchase³.

Mobile is Their Muse
It used to be that shoppers would thumb through catalogues or stare longingly at the holiday window displays, but mobile is now the super shopper’s go-to source for inspiration. Sixty-four percent of smartphone shoppers turn to mobile search for ideas about what to buy before heading into a store⁴. And 1 in 4 mobile video viewers in the U.S. have visited YouTube for help with a purchase decision while they were at a store or visiting a store's website⁵.

But shoppers aren’t only making purchase decisions, they’re discovering new brands and products along the way: more than half of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their phones⁶.

They Want the Best - Not the Cheapest
In July we learned that shoppers are on the quest for the best — and this still rings true more than ever today. Last holiday, mobile searches related to “best gift” grew 70% year over year while mobile searches related to cheap or inexpensive gifts grew about 35%⁷. They’re also willing to do the research to the make the best decision: on YouTube, mobile watch time for product review videos has grown 60% year over year⁸.

But supershoppers don’t only want the best - they want personalized, unique, cool gifts. Mobile searches related to “unique gifts” grew more than 65% while mobile searches related to “cool gifts” grew a whopping 80%⁹.

Mobile is Their Door to the Store
Although more and more people are willing to buy on mobile, we know that mobile is still used predominantly as a door to the store. In fact, 76% of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase¹⁰.

Once they’re inside your store, they expect the experience to be a seamless one: more than 40% of smartphone shoppers want retailers to automatically surface relevant information such as the location of the item in the store, a special deal or related products¹¹.

They Shop ‘Til they Drop
Supershoppers live up to their name as the holiday season progresses. From November through mid-December we see online conversion rates increase across devices. Last year, on mobile alone, they jumped 30% on Black Friday and 50% on Cyber Monday when compared to November 1¹².

Tips to Using Analytics to Reach Today’s Shopper
Analytics is a critical marketing tool all year long. But that importance is amplified during the holiday season. Here are five ideas on how you can use analytics to get the most out of the holiday shopping season.

1. Understand which days drive the most sales — be there. In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft strategy — across mobile, desktop, and tablet — that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.
For example, adjust bids for auction-based media and use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier. Use Smart Bidding in AdWords or DoubleClick Search to maximize your performance.

2. Get personal when engaging with window shoppers. The great thing about the holidays is that you can start shopping at any time — and then wait for discounts. Many consumers may already be browsing your site looking for gift ideas. This is an audience that may convert at a higher rate. Use Google Analytics to create remarketing lists including these shoppers, and then customize your marketing campaigns to better suit their needs.

But don’t stop there: Remember, supershoppers crave personalization. Test different variations of your website with this same audience to offer more customized experiences. Try Google Optimize, our free site testing and personalization tool, to get started.

3. Act fast: Create a culture of optimization. Your holiday marketing plans are set long before the holiday season starts. It’s very important to monitor your activities to ensure they’re driving business growth. And if they’re not you need to take action by immediately identifying areas of opportunity and improvement.

Google Analytics offers a number of ways to help simplify reporting, sift through data, and spotlight insights for you. Custom reports, dashboards and shortcuts all let you customize reporting so you spend less time looking for data and more time analyzing important information. Or better yet, try Google Data Studio and create a holiday shopping dashboard for different teams in your organization.

4. Analyze your performance against your competitors. Benchmarking your business against your competitors helps you see the big picture. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking reports. The benefit of using those reports is that they will provide you a comparison between your data and your competitors, using characteristics such as website traffic, country and detailed vertical information.

5. Start developing your New Year marketing strategy. With so many new shoppers entering your stores, sites, and apps, data and analytics are critical to helping you convert first-time shoppers into long-term, loyal customers. Use your website data to create lists of first-time customers during the holidays, and deliver personalized communication across channels to build relationships. With Google Analytics you can create remarketing lists and easily connect with this audience.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Julie Krueger, Retail Managing Director, Google and Casey Carey, Director of Analytics Marketing, Google

Google/ Ipsos, Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study - Total Shoppers Report, Jan 2016, Base: US Holiday Shoppers, n=1,500

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000, Same store shoppers = 801

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google-commissioned Ipsos Brand Building on Mobile Survey, U.S., December 2015 n=1000, 18-54 year olds

Google/Ipsos, "Consumers in the Micro-Moment," Wave 3, U.S., n=1291 online smartphone users 18+, August 2015

Source: Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

YouTube data, U.S., Classification as a “Product Review" video was based on public data such as headlines and tags, and may not account for every such video available on YouTube, Nov - Dec 2014 and Nov - Dec 2015

Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

Google/Purchased Digital Diary: How Consumers Solve Their Needs in the Moment, May 2016, Representative sample of US Smartphone users = 1000. Local searchers = 634, Purchases = 1,140

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google Analytics Shopping category data, Nov 1, 2015–December 14, 2015, United States

Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

Adam Singer — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 14:00:00 +0000

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.

“Google Surveys empowers YouVisit to accomplish our mission by better understanding what the end customer wants in immersive experience — so we can create those experiences that emotionally engage, that are impactful, that drive a real-life action.”

– Suzanne Sanders, Senior Marketing Communications Manager, YouVisit

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

Spotlight on Google Surveys 360: Getting to “Why” is now easier and faster than ever before.

Adam Singer — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 14:00:00 +0000

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.

That’s why we introduced Surveys 360: to provide a quick, cost-effective way to ask why. The new Surveys 360 is designed to help you get more out of market research by making it easy to create online and mobile surveys that help you make more informed business decisions, faster. You ask the questions, and people browsing the web will answer them as they wait to access premium content like news articles or videos, or as they use the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app.

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.

“With Google Surveys 360, we get more timely results. Everybody seems to want to run these studies to get an understanding of how their campaigns are performing … and what things should we do to make it more impactful in the future.”
– Margo Arton, Director of Ad Effectiveness, BuzzFeed

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

Announcing: Google Surveys 360, the newest product in the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Adam Singer — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:06:00 +0000

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.”

-Harry Tannenbaum, Head of Analytics, Nest

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:

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

Digital Analytics Association Symposium in San Francisco presents ‘Stranger Things: What’s Lurking in Your Data’

Adam Singer — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 16:25:00 +0000

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!

Theme: Stranger Things: What’s Lurking in Your Data

When: November 9th, registration starts at 9:30am, program 10:00am to to 4:30pm, followed by a networking reception

Where: Galvanize San Francisco-SoMa, 44 Tehama Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

Cost: Members of the DAA: Early Bird $75 | Standard $99 | Onsite $124 Non-Members: Early Bird $99 | Standard $124 | Onsite $149 Lunch-only: $20 (includes catered box lunch and panel speakers/discussion)

Event website and registration: register here.

Space is limited so register early!

This Symposium is organized by local DAA members and volunteers. We encourage you to become a member of the DAA and join our local efforts. Become a member and reach out to one of the local chapter leaders, Krista, Charles or Prolet.

Posted by Krista Seiden, Google Analytics Advocate

Never Leave Your Data Unattended: 6 Custom Alert Areas You Shouldn’t Miss

Adam Singer — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 09:10:00 +0000

Alexander Rehnborg works as SEO Specialist at Visma Spcs, a Google Analytics 360 customer, supplying over half of all small business owners in Sweden with accounting software.

Did you ever log on to Google Analytics to casually explore statistics, only to discover you’d missed out on important changes? As marketers we cannot afford to be “too late.”

Changes to consumer behavior, website performance and traffic trends often occur quickly without much notice. Still, a lot of marketers only explore their analytics data manually during certain days of the week or even month. Imagine your important AdWords campaign or product page suddenly taking off, and you’re not in the control room to react?

With that in mind, I will discuss six vital areas you should monitor automatically with what I believe to be a the vastly underused feature in Google Analytics: “Custom Alerts.” If you didn’t read yet, check out last week’s announcement on the home of Custom Alerts.

Automated and Custom Alerts

Luckily, Google Analytics offers several features to monitor important data changes and alert you instantly. Two of the most important features are Custom Alerts and Automated Insights. The latter is a newly introduced part of the GA Assistant app for Android and iOS, using machine learning to discover critical insights among your data and alert you instantly.

In addition to the automated insights, you have the ability to set up your own custom alerts according to the KPIs you’re especially interested in, and be alerted by both email and sms. Once you receive the alerts, you may click on the link for the report to be taken straight into a dashboard, only displaying the metrics changes you’ve been alerted about.

This gives you complete focus on quickly understanding what has contributed to the change in data. You will find the Custom Alerts under the customization tab in the left sidebar of the View you want to monitor (see screenshot below).

You will find Custom Alerts under the Customization tab in the left sidebar.

6 Custom Alert Areas You Shouldn’t Miss

The scope and magnitude of the data change you’re monitoring will vary according to each business. Therefore it’s important to continuously refine the alerts guided by the common data movements you’ve seen historically for your site. Let’s start out with the six basic areas of metrics we want to monitor, inspired by LunaMetrics’ excellent guide.

1. Emergency

This is one of the main reasons you want to monitor your data in the first place – if something goes wrong, you want to know as soon as possible. Since the quickest alert you may receive is being sent daily, it’s recommended to pay extra attention to the Automated Insights function inside the Google Analytics Assistant app. Each of these alerts will be set to a daily time period.

Average Page Load time > 10 seconds Today

Be sure to set a couple of these alerts, one for the entire site and one for each page critical to your business. Slow load times not only affect engagement and conversion, it may affect your organic search ranking as well. Regular problems with load time may point to technical problems that should be addressed. Unsure of how well your site is performing today? Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

No Sessions Today

If this alert goes off, you’ll probably have some investigative work to do.

No Conversion / Goal X Today

If you’re running an e-commerce platform, this value might be a purchase, trial or demo download. For businesses offering services, no events triggered by contact forms may be the most important conversion metric. Whatever your key conversion KPIs are and depending on how often conversions normally occur, you want to monitor this daily or weekly.

2. Performance

Monitoring the performance of your site is like having a doctor constantly checking up on your health. Even though irregularities occur naturally, many sites suffer from poor server performance, cluttered or poorly written web code and other factors directly affecting your business online. These alerts you may set to weekly or monthly, depending on your traffic and needs. For every alert about an increase, you also need one for a decrease.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Page Load Time Compared to Last Month

A monthly check-up here is just what every site needs. It’s recommended to manually look for the top-5 or top-10 pages on your site with the slowest load time, and adding these under a custom alert for special monitoring.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Redirection Time Compared to Last Month

Especially larger businesses that perform redirects regularly ought to make sure these do not slow down the response time for the visitor. Some web servers don’t handle larger volumes of redirects all too well.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Server Response Time Compared to Last Month

More businesses should demand high performance from their web servers. Especially small businesses often make the mistake of purchasing web space from providers that underperform.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Page Download Time Compared to Last Month

This is a useful alert for the entire site when working with content marketing. When working in a large team of editors, it’s not unusual to discover unnecessarily large images embedded into pages, effectively prolonging the page download time.

3. Traffic

Without it, your online business dies out. Monitoring traffic is essential to develop your content marketing efforts and understand which parts of your site are really delivering as you expect. Alerts set to a weekly time period should work out fine.

> 10 Non-Domain Sessions Today

Possibly not alarming, but if you’re receiving sessions from unknown/unidentified domains, you may be target of spam. Apply the value “(not set)” with regex to Hostname.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Content Sessions Compared to Last Week

Weekly monitoring for sites focusing on content marketing, volumes might vary between businesses. If you’ve got several URL paths with content, you may use regex to define those paths, such as “content-a|content-b|content/small-business”.

> 20% More / Fewer New Sessions Compared to Last Week

This gives you insight into the nature of your traffic over time. If you ran a PR campaign the previous week, did you manage to deliver a great portion of new sessions?

> 20% Increase / Decrease in AdWords Clicks / Cost / CPC / CTR / Impressions Compared to Last Week

Your search engine marketing professional will love these automatic alerts, giving you weekly feedback on the paid search traffic and which campaigns contribute to any significant changes.

4. Engagement

Your focus here may lie entirely on classic metrics for user engagement, or you may add a mix of social media metrics to measure your efforts in those channels. Both daily and weekly alert periods make sense here.

> 5 Social Shares Today

This will vary according to your business, but following social shares of your content from your site ought to be a part of all content marketing reporting.

> 10% Increased / Decreased Bounce Rate Compared to Last Week

This debated but still interesting metric may point to engagement improvements or issues, especially if applied to specific landing pages with individual alerts.

> 20% Shorter / Longer Average Session Duration Compared to Last Week

Like with bounce rate, this may or may not point to deeper improvements or issues with user engagement. Clicking on the report link from the alert will highlight which pages contributed to the change.

5. Conversion

If you’re running a larger e-commerce website, you’ll want to measure a lot more than just a general conversion rate. You may experiment with alerts for average order value (AOV), revenue and pure number of transactions. Because metrics like AOV may change a lot depending on your product offerings online and sales trends, you may want to choose monthly alerts summarizing broader changes.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Conversion Rate Compared to Last Week

Depending on how many conversion goals you’ve got set up, this may point to an overall conversion rate, or consist of several individual alerts for all your important conversion goals.

6. Settings

Some traffic changes are simply down to how it’s attributed. Keep a watching eye on these and related metrics.

> 20% Increase in Not Set AdWords Keywords Compared to Last Week

Here you use the value “(not set)” with exact match for Keyword. If you’re alerted about this, you need to talk to your search marketing professional to make sure all campaigns are correctly set up.

> 100 Sessions Missing Campaign Parameters Last Week

Even though it may be difficult, it’s never ideal to run ad campaigns without tagging the campaign links correctly. The volume and time period will vary between businesses, but a suggestion is to apply the value “(not set)” with regex to Medium. From here on you may dive deeper to discover unattributed traffic.

Closing Thoughts

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Google Analytics professional with years of experience or a beginner currently attending the Google Analytics Academy. Automatic monitoring of your analytics data is an essential part of digital marketing today. Over time you may find that it’s more effective to be alerted about actual changes, rather than “looking” for them. With that said, when alerted you need to do what you’ve always done, which is to manually explore the data in detail and dig out the insights.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Valentina Borovaya, Google Analytics team

Improvements coming to the Google Analytics desktop UI

Adam Singer — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 15:32:00 +0000

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

Spotlight on Google Tag Manager: Open and Secure Tag Management

Adam Singer — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 15:52:00 +0000

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.

"The seamless integration of Digital Content Ratings — a key component of Nielsen's Total Audience measurement framework — into Google Tag Manager will enable easy deployment and rapid adoption of Nielsen measurement with savvy digital clients."
– David Wong, SVP of Product Leadership at Nielsen

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.

"At Hotjar we're obsessed about giving our users fast and actionable insights about how their visitors are using their site. Our top most priority is making it easy and simple to set up Hotjar. For this reason, we're extremely excited to provide 'out-of-the-box' support for Google Tag Manager."
– David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar

Some recent additions include:

(See the full list of supported tags)

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

Spotlight on Data Studio: Beautiful Reports and Collaboration Just Got Easier

Adam Singer — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 13:06:00 +0000

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

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Data Studio

An Easier Way for Everyone to Improve the Customer Experience: Meet Google Optimize

Adam Singer — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 15:00:00 +0000

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

Announcing: Smart, Fast-Acting Analytics — For Everyone

Adam Singer — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 13:00:00 +0000

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.

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.

"With Google Optimize, we’ve been able to provide more engaging content to The Next Web's readers – converting them from new readers to loyal customers."

Martijn Scheijbeler

Director of Marketing - The Next Web

How can everyone access and share powerful data?
Google Data Studio (beta), our free reporting and data visualization product, is now available globally in 21 new countries.* It enables businesses to easily spot and share insights, and collaborate to drive better decisions. Additionally, next month we’re launching report templates, making it even easier to get started. As with templates in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, businesses can create, edit, and use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes. Get started. The enterprise and free versions of Google Data Studio launched earlier this year in the U.S. These updates are also available in Data Studio 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

How can everyone get useful insights, not just more data?
Google Analytics, our free customer analytics product and measurement centerpiece, analyzes customer data from all touchpoints — and soon it’s becoming even smarter. Following the launch of our automated insight stream in the Google Analytics mobile app, we’re excited to announce Session Quality Score: A new metric that incorporates machine learning to predict the likelihood of a visitor making a transaction (purchase) on your site or app. Businesses can use session quality score to provide better customer experiences and / or remarket to their most engaged website visitors. This feature is coming soon in beta and will also be available in Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

How can everyone gain full visibility into customer journeys?
Google Tag Manager empowers marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code), and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows. And today we’re greatly expanding our openness by integrating an additional 20 tags from Quantcast, Twitter, Microsoft Bing, Nielsen, and many more. See the full list of supported tags here. These updates will roll out over the next couple weeks and are also available in Tag Manager 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

Modern measurement for everyone

Put simply, that's our goal with these new free products. As today’s businesses are shifting to compete on customer experience and personalized marketing, we want to give all businesses the tools and access to compete — and ultimately, drive better online consumer experiences.

If you’re interested in learning more, please watch our blog this week and next. We’ll dive deeper into each product announcement and show you how they work. In the meantime, check out the resources below to learn more.

Optimize: Request an invite
Data Studio: Get started for free
Session Quality: Help Center update coming soon!
Tag Manager: Visit the Help Center

As always, you can visit our website to sign-up for our free analytics products.

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

Posted by Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google

How to set up Analytics on your AMP page

Adam Singer — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 17:00:00 +0000

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 :

async custom-element="amp-analytics" src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js">

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

type="googleanalytics">

type="application/json">

{

"vars": {

"account": "UA-YYYY-Y"

"triggers": {

"defaultPageview": {

"on": "visible",

"request": "pageview",

"vars": {

"title": "Name of the Article"

}

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:

type="googleanalytics">

type="application/json">

{

"vars": {

"account": "UA-YYYY-Y"

"triggers": {

"defaultPageview": {

"on": "visible",

"request": "pageview",

"vars": {

"title": "Name of the Article"

}

"clickOnHeader": {

"on": "click",

"selector": "#header",

"request": "event",

"vars": {

"eventCategory": "examples",

"eventAction": "clicked-header"

}

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

Improving Google Analytics Events with Unique Events

Adam Singer — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 15:54:00 +0000

Unique Events is a metric that counts the number of events with distinct Event attributes (Event Category, Action, and Label) that occur within a single user session. These events can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load, giving you greater insight into actions taken within or across pages/screens. Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays are all examples of interactions you might want to track as Unique Events.

Some benefits of Unique Events include:

Understanding how many users start/complete some action on your website
Understanding the most popular media types/content consumed on your website
Having an understanding of how many users repeat actions that should only occur once
And many, many, more...

How Unique Events Work

Unique Events is a metric that counts the number of events with distinct Event attributes (Event Category, Action, and Label) that occur within a single user session.

This means that Analytics will increment the count of Unique Events by 1 for each unique combination of event category/action/label we receive the very first time we see them within a session, but will ignore future events with the same category/action/label when computing unique event counts. The metric Total Events will count each event regardless of the uniqueness of the category/action/labels therein.

Unique Events improves upon events in Google Analytics and will help make your measurement better.

Learn more in our Help Center article here.

Posted by Breen Baker, Google Analytics Team

Using Google Analytics with Leadfeeder for B2B Lead Generation

Adam Singer — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 15:53:00 +0000

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

Google Consumer Surveys Launches Weekly U.S. Election Poll in Google Data Studio

Adam Singer — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 21:59:00 +0000

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

Jackpot: APMEX Doubles New User Revenue with Google Optimize 360

Adam Singer — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 15:00:00 +0000

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.

Before

After

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

Improved Analytics Administration via Property Moving

Adam Singer — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 21:00:00 +0000

To meet our mission of providing world class digital analytics data, we’re pleased to announce the release of a feature we know many of you have been eager to use - the ability to move a Google Analytics or Analytics 360 property between accounts! It’s critical that we continually improve the core of Google Analytics, and we anticipate this will be a very helpful feature to improve users’ organization of Analytics accounts and get more power out of advanced features.

Benefits
Cleaner Accounts

With Google Analytics now over a decade old, it’s been a while since many of our customers created their first Analytics accounts. And until now, every time a property was created, it was housed permanently in its account. With the introduction of property moving, you are now able to simplify your accounts, and group properties together in a way that makes the most sense for your current business needs.

Enhancing Features like Rollup Reporting

There are many features in Google Analytics that work well across properties within a single account, but not across multiple Analytics accounts. With property moving, you can now consolidate properties in the individual accounts that make the most sense, and enjoy feature parity across all of those properties.

Roll-Up Reporting (available only in Analytics 360) lets you aggregate data from multiple properties within a single account; property moving lets you consolidate related properties within a single account. These two features combine to let you organize your data and reporting structure in the ways that are most relevant to your business.

Consolidating properties within a single account offers additional benefits:

You can apply the same set of filters to the views in all of those properties
You can easily manage users for the properties and views in a single account
You can use Change History to see all events from all properties in the same account

Ownership Transfers

Many customers may have had a third party (eg. an agency) create a property for their website inside the third party’s Analytics account. This effectively housed the property into an account that someone else owns & controls. With property moving, it’s now possible to move such a property outside of its original account and into a new one so that the property owner can have full control of their property.

How it works
No Retagging Required

We know how expensive it can be to retag a website, so we took special care to ensure moving a property does not require any retagging. Moving a property can be completed entirely within Google Analytics’ Admin section.

Moving a Property

In order to move a property from one Google Analytics account (called the “source account”) to another (called the “destination account”), you must have full access to both accounts. This means you must have Edit and Manage Users permissions for both the source and destination accounts. We have these high requirements to ensure only properly authorized users can perform this powerful action; and, in case a mistake is made, the user can move the property back to the source account. Learn More

To get started, login to your Google Analytics account, and visit the Admin section. Visit the “Property Settings” page for the property you’d like to move, and select the “Move Property” button in the top right corner. Here’s what the process looks like:

Make use of this feature whenever you need it. This is simply one example of many features we are building to constantly make Analytics work better for you, our loyal customers!

Posted by Tim Cao & Matt Matyas, Google Analytics team

Google Data Studio for Publishers

Adam Singer — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 11:00:00 +0000

As we have seen in a previous post, Google Data Studio (beta) is a great solution for visualizing Ecommerce data. But if you are a publisher and your website is supported by ads, you might be wondering if it would work well for you...wonder no more! In this post we will look at a sample report with real-world data from a publisher.

The report below was created for Online Behavior, an ad-supported content website. The ads are delivered using DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), an ad management solution that helps publishers sell, schedule, deliver, and measure their digital ad inventory. On top of that, the website uses DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX), which provides a vast global inventory in real time.

With the configurations above in mind, you will notice that the main conversion shown in the Data Studio report below is the metric Publisher Revenue - this represents all revenue coming from DFP and DFP Backfill (in this case, AdX). Please note that this metric is not available by default on Data Studio, if you have the same settings you can create this metric using a calculated field to sum DFP Revenue and DFP Backfill Revenue. In addition to this metric, the website also uses Newsletter Signups as a secondary goal. A typical publisher!

Let’s take a look at some of the elements shown in the report above:

Scorecard strip: in order to highlight the overall metrics for traffic volume (Users, Sessions, Impressions) and outcomes (CTR, Revenue, Signups) we created a grey strip in the top of the chart. They show the last 28 days values, and right below them you will see a comparison to last period (green is good, red is bad).
Line charts: while the total metric value is very important, it is also critical to keep track of the trends. The two line charts in the report will help the viewer understand if there are any sudden spikes or declines that require additional attention. In this case we chose the main volume metric (Impressions) and the main outcome metric (Revenue).
Donut charts: who doesn’t love donuts?! Those charts are used to provide an overview of the most important Channels when it comes to the two conversion metrics: Publisher Revenue and Newsletter Signups. In summary, Organic brings a lot of Revenue and Display brings a lot of Signups.
Tables: there is no chart that can beat a table when it comes to presenting detailed data. The two tables in the bottom left corner of the report show, for each article and author (author name is sent to Google Analytics through a Custom Dimension), how many impressions, the CTR, and the total Revenue. Using bar charts and heatmaps in a table greatly improves its readability.
Bar charts: in the bottom right corner two bar charts were added to add more info about new and returning users and the devices used.

If you are a Publisher, we hope this will bring some inspiration! You can check out the full report above using this link.

Please note that in order to report DFP data in Google Analytics you will need to use Google Analytics 360 integration with DFP (learn more). Happy visualizing!

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Enterprise-Class Tag Management: A look back on recent features

Adam Singer — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 15:00:00 +0000

We built Google Tag Manager with the goal of solving tagging problems for our customers: decreasing implementation time so you can focus on the things that matter most to you, reducing errors so you can have more confidence in your data, and speeding up your tags to make your users’ experiences faster, and make the web a better place.

Last week, we launched workspaces to improve collaboration and enterprise workflows in Google Tag Manager. This is just the latest in a series of improvements designed to better meet the needs of our enterprise customers. In case you haven’t been keeping up with all of our many updates, here are some things you may have missed:

Testing & Security:

Environments – Building on our strong preview and debugging capabilities, Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 now also support publishing changes to specific testing environments (e.g. Dev, Staging, QA). You can set up as many environments as you need for your organization and name them whatever makes sense for you. When you go to publish, simply choose the environment you’d like to publish your changes to. It’s never been easier to test your tags to make sure your upcoming tag changes align with your upcoming site changes, and that you get things right the first time.
Malware detection – To protect the safety and security of your users, Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 will now automatically detect when tags deployed through your containers point to sites where we’ve found malware. You’ll be notified that there’s a problem, and the culprit tags will be paused so you can track down the issue without risk to your website and your users.

Organization:

Folders – As your containers grow over time, it can become difficult to keep track of all of your tags, triggers, and variables. With folders, you can organize these items into logical groupings, making them easier to work with for yourself and your team members.
Tag sequencing – Not all tags work independently. Sometimes it’s important for your tags to fire in a specific order. With tag sequencing you can specify tags to fire immediately before or after a given tag to ensure that things happen just the way you expect.

Mobile:

Mobile app tag management – Google Tag Manager for mobile apps has been rewritten to be simpler, smaller, and faster. It is now integrated with Firebase, Google’s new mobile app developer platform, which provides end-to-end development tools and analytics.

Services & Support:

Tag Manager 360 – Launched earlier this year as part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, Tag Manager 360 includes services and support to help you get up and running faster, service level agreements (SLAs) to guarantee that you’ll be able to work on your tags as needed and that they’ll consistently fire based on your configuration, and integration with the 360 Suite for centralized account access and user management.

Interested in Google Tag Manager 360? Visit our website to learn more.
Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Explore important insights from your data — automatically

Adam Singer — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 13:55:00 +0000

For marketers, business owners, and product designers, it’s important to be connected to data at all times. However, data by itself rarely provides the insight needed to truly drive a business forward. It can take hours of analysis to come up with just one or two key insights and even longer to share and act on that new understanding. In a constantly-connected world, where customers can make purchases anywhere, anytime from their mobile devices, this lag in time-to-insight is costly.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce that we’re providing a new stream of automated insights in the Google Analytics mobile app. Available on the Assistant screen, this addition to Google Analytics lets you see in 5 minutes what might have taken hours to discover previously. Even better: it gets smarter over time as it learns about your business and your needs. It’s available now in our mobile app on Android and iOS, so you can easily grab insights on the go.

To enable this functionality, we use Google machine intelligence to find critical insights among the thousands of metric and dimension combinations that can be reported in Google Analytics. It helps make analytics data universally accessible and useful as it:

Combs through your data to give you meaningful insights and recommendations.
Offers quick tips on how to improve your Google Analytics data.
Gets smarter over time by reacting to your feedback and how you use it.
Helps you share insights so your whole team can take action.

Go beyond simple reporting to view findings and insights automatically, in language you can read: our insight stream enables faster, more informed decision-making that can have real impact on your business.

For example, the holiday season drives a huge portion of annual sales for many retailers. During this busy time of the year, retailers face questions that can be the difference between making their numbers for the year or falling short: Which products are going to be popular this season? Where should we advertise? How are our customers hearing about us and purchasing from us? Answering just one of these questions and acting on that information can take analysts and marketers hours or even days.

Data insights in Google Analytics automate the first steps of answering these questions by instantaneously surfacing opportunities and anomalies hiding in the data. For example, they can tell you which products are experiencing higher than normal sales growth, which advertising channels are driving the most conversions and the best returns, and on which devices customers engage with your brand. This moment-to-moment information gives retailers the power to make nimble, smart decisions that directly impact performance.

You can view your automated insights in the Assistant tab in the official Google Analytics mobile app on Android and iOS for all English-speaking users. We're working to bring this exciting functionality to the web version of Google Analytics and to expand availability to other languages.

We plan on improving with your feedback, so please try the app and then let us know what insights you’d like to see automated.
Posted by Ajay Nainani, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Enterprise Class Administration in the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Adam Singer — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 22:22:00 +0000

If you're in marketing or analytics, you know consumer behavior has shifted dramatically — mobile has created new opportunities for businesses to reach customers at the right moment with the right message at every step in the buyer journey. That’s why earlier this year, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers and data analysts.

Since this launch, we’re now excited to announce a series of improvements available to Suite customers. The Google Analytics 360 Suite houses vital data for marketers to understand how their marketing programs, websites, and apps are performing; carefully controlling access to this data and monitoring what happens with it is a top priority, and we’ve made solid improvements.

User management for your Organization

Managing users’ access to your data and Suite assets is critical, and must be done in the context of your organization. The first step towards controlling your data access is to let us know which accounts your organization manages. Organization administrators can do this in the new Suite Home product: http://360suite.google.com/. Administrators will see an “Admin” tab, and underneath it lies the ability to link and verify all of your accounts with the Suite’s products to your organization:

Linked accounts must be verified before user management features will apply to them.

Centralized User Auditing

Once you have linked and verified all of your accounts within Suite products, we compile a powerful user-auditing report for you. This report lists all users that have access to any of the accounts you linked across all Suite products. This is the only place where you can find a cross-product and cross-account list of users.

For each user in this report, we list rich data to help you make informed decisions about who has access to your corporate accounts. We show the user’s name and picture (when available), their Suite roles, and which products within your organization the user has access to. For all linked Google Analytics accounts, we show the last time the user accessed data from any of them.

Even more details can be loaded per user to show a summary of all the data that user has access to, such as how many properties or containers the user can access, whether the user is licensed for Data Studio, etc.

Filtering

You can use advanced filters to restrict data shown on screen; for example, you can show only users who haven’t accessed Analytics data over the last 6 months:

Remove Stale Users

Combining all of the actions above, you can complete an important task: identifying and removing stale users from your Analytics accounts (other Suite products to come in the future.) After you filter for only users who haven’t logged in recently, you can visit the details pane for those users and remove them from Analytics:

Change History

Suite Change History lets you keep track of when a change was made, who made the change, and what was changed. For example, you can easily see when someone linked a new account to your organization, added or removed users, changed the service level for an object, or changed the end date on an order. Having a record of these changes eliminates confusion over something like an increase in billing. Instead of wondering, you can search your change history to see that one of your administrators changed the service level for a property from Standard to 360, or made changes to the billing parameters. Access to change history is restricted to Owners.

Get Started: Complete your Suite Setup to Use these Features

Organization administrators can login to 360suite.google.com to complete their Suite setup and start using these features right now; contact your account manager if you’re not sure who your organization administrators are. Verify all accounts linked to your organization, then visit your Organization page in Suite Admin to enable the Suite experience today.

Put all these powerful administration features to use right now for your organization to tightly monitor & control access to your valuable data. We have many more improvements planned for the future; so stay tuned as we launch more, and truly bring an enterprise-grade experience to life in the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Magicbricks Stays Up and Running With Real-Time Monitoring From Google Analytics 360

Adam Singer — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 13:56:00 +0000

Magicbricks is India’s top high-end property portal. The website caters to a global market with its unique services and novel online features for both buyers and sellers. Given their commitment to user experience and performance across their site’s global operations, they needed a real-time solution to monitor and optimize against their key digital KPIs.

The company worked with Tatvic Analytics Private Limited, a Google Analytics 360 Certified Partner, to develop a way to reduce website downtime and promptly alert management when outages would occur. Using this real-time anomaly alerts platform, the company would clearly see variances in KPIs and move quickly to troubleshoot and fix them.

The results of this real-time monitoring solution were impressive – response time for detecting errors and unexpected behavior has improved by 70%.

“As a No.1 property portal, Magicbricks aims to provide our users with an outstanding experience to help them make confident property decisions. Google Analytics 360 helped us measure various unexpected website behaviors which were hampering user experience. The response time for detecting errors, unexpected behavior, and monitoring performance improved by 70% after we deployed this anomaly detection solution.” Sudhir Pai, CEO of Magicbricks

How did they go about building their real-time monitoring solution? First, they defined key metrics for real-time anomaly detection checks. Second, they created their real-time monitoring platform using Google Analytics 360 data processed through Real Time and Management APIs. Third, they applied an anomaly algorithm to data to calculate deviations in real time. Fourth, alerts were sent via SMS to different leaders within the company when variances in KPIs occurred. Learn more about the details in the full case study.

The automated SMS alert system has been improved to detect outages, determine severity, and provide real-time performance updates to senior and middle managers throughout Magicbricks. Today the full Magicbricks team can make the most of these real-time insights to keep the site up and running―and earning more every day.

Posted by Cathy Candano and Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team.

Google Analytics adopts Privacy Shield

Adam Singer — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 21:20:00 +0000

Today, we’re glad to announce that we have self-certified our adherence to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework.

The Privacy Shield establishes a new framework for transfers of personal data from Europe to the United States. It is a significant milestone for the protection of Europeans’ personal data, legal certainty of transatlantic businesses, and trust in the digital economy.

From now on, Google has committed to applying the Privacy Shield’s principles and safeguards to EU-U.S. transfers of personal data, by default. No action is required on our customers’ part. Google’s certificate will soon be accessible here.

UPDATE - Friday 23 September: Google's certificate is now accessible here.

Enterprise-Class Tag Management: Announcing Workspaces

Adam Singer — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 14:55:00 +0000

Companies of all sizes use Google Tag Manager, but larger organizations often have very different needs than others. That’s why, over the past year, we’ve launched Google Tag Manager 360, and have been working to build features that better address the needs of enterprise customers.

Today, we’re excited to announce one of these new features: workspaces in Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360!

Until now, all tag changes were prepared in a single container draft before being versioned and published. This sometimes led to complicated workflows and workarounds for multi-user teams and their agencies. Workspaces give you more than one space to do your work. Teammates can now easily work on tags at the same time, or make quick changes without publishing everything that’s in the works. Simply create a new workspace, make your changes, and hit publish. Tags, triggers, and variables being worked on in other workspaces will remain unaffected.

The new workspaces are essentially places to work on sets of changes that will become versions. When a workspace is versioned or published, its name, notes and list of changes will be carried over to the version, so you have a full history of what’s changed in your container and when.

What happens if tags you’re working on in one workspace are changed in another? Not to worry. Tag Manager will let you know if there are conflicts when a new version is created. Then it will guide you through merging them into your workspace with an easy-to-use conflict resolution tool!

You’ll also notice that we've made the Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 interfaces faster and easier to use. Need to enable a built-in variable while working on a tag? Sliding screens let you configure related tags, triggers, and variables without dropping out of your current editing flow. Want to know which tags a certain trigger is applied to? Trigger and variable screens now tell you exactly where they’re being used. Not sure what type of variable to use to grab a value from your site? Configuration screens are now easier to read and include more in-line guidance.

Starting today, Tag Manager 360 customers will be able to create unlimited workspaces in their containers! Having unlimited workspaces is ideal for the large organizations and complex collaboration efforts that Tag Manager 360 was designed for. If you’re a Tag Manager 360 customer, or a customer of another Google Analytics 360 Suite product, reach out to your Account Manager to learn more.

Users of the standard version of Tag Manager will also benefit. All containers will be enabled for up to three concurrent workspaces (a default workspace—similar to the container draft today—and two additional custom workspaces). The enhanced interface will also give you greater visibility into exactly what changes are being made when you hit publish.

We'll keep thinking about how to make tagging easier for you. We already have improvements planned for workspaces and other areas of Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 to make our products even more powerful and easy to use. We’ll have more to share soon!

Interested in Google Tag Manager 360? Visit our website to learn more.

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

AccuWeather delivers enhanced value to advertisers with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360

Adam Singer — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 15:00:00 +0000

The Challenge

Publishers use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to manage and serve ads across their sites and apps, and use Google Analytics 360 to understand user behavior on their sites. DFP reports on the ads and ad units on the site, while Analytics 360 reports on the pages on the site.

Each platform on its own doesn’t provide insight into the intersection of data with the other. And with two platforms speaking two different languages, it hasn't always been easy for publishers to understand how user behavior influences revenue and how ads influence user behavior.

That’s why last year we launched an integration between DFP and Analytics 360.

The Solution

Through the integration, publishers using Analytics 360 can see DFP metrics like impressions, clicks, and revenue within the Analytics 360 interface. This enables publishers to combine revenue data with user behavior insights—for example, the number of ad impressions or revenue each page of their site generates. AccuWeather is one such publisher.

AccuWeather Case Study

AccuWeather brings real-time weather news and information to more than a billion people worldwide through its website and popular suite of apps. The company knew that if it could better understand the needs of those visitors and match them with more relevant messages from advertisers, it could provide more value to advertisers and boost its own ad revenues. By linking its DFP and Analytics 360 accounts, AccuWeather could see how the behavior of its website visitors affected revenue.

With DFP metrics now in Analytics 360, AccuWeather could see that average revenue per 1,000 sessions rose by 45% on a country-level basis when two new companies began advertising on accuweather.com. This revenue increase was driven by users who were actively in-market to travel and were looking at weather in “exotic” locations such as Turks & Caicos and Barbados. With insights like these, the team has been able to create highly tailored advertising packages with high-value, unique audience segments that sales teams can sell directly or through programmatic marketplaces like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

“The integration of DoubleClick for Publishers and Analytics 360 gives AccuWeather real-time visibility to the next level of campaign performance insights and is helping us make better advertising decisions. We’re now creating new behavior-based ad products that are being very well received by our advertisers,” says Steve Mummey, Director of Ad Strategy & Audience Development, AccuWeather.

For more, read the full case study with AccuWeather.

Even More Capabilities Available for Publishers

In addition to seeing DFP metrics in Analytics 360, publishers will be able to use a consolidated reporting section, see DFP ad unit data together with Analytics 360 data, and do deeper analysis on their DFP data in Google BigQuery.

Reporting

DFP metrics are consolidated into a reporting section in Analytics 360, making it easy for publishers to understand how their online content impacts revenue.

The figures in the above image are for illustration only and do not represent actual data in AccuWeather’s DFP or Analytics 360 accounts.

Ad Units

Publishers sell their online ad inventory based on the thousands or millions of ad units they have available on their properties. Individual ad slots can be grouped together into ad units so that publishers can create a hierarchy of ad units that represents the structure of their website. Then, publishers can match each advertiser’s message with the right ad slot.

Through this integration, publishers can now see their Analytics 360 data through the lens of their ad units. DFP ad unit hierarchy is mapped to Analytics 360 along with related metrics such as impressions, clicks, and dollars.

And now that analyst and ad operations teams can speak the same language, publishers are able to analyze DFP data through the lens of demographic and interest data in Analytics 360—and they can identify things like which affinity category or user lifestyle is driving the most revenue per 1,000 sessions by ad unit.

The figures in the above image are for illustration only and do not represent actual data in AccuWeather’s DFP or Analytics 360 accounts.

Google BigQuery

Now that DFP metrics are available in Analytics 360, they can be exported to BigQuery. This means more metrics, more exports, and more data sources. Publishers can run their own revenue models and explore in more detail the intersection of revenue and user behavior.

Stay tuned for more updates from Analytics 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities!

Posted by Abhishek Aggarwal, Dan Cary, and Tiffany Siu on behalf of the Google Analytics team

Which TV Ads Made the Podium During the 2016 Olympics?

Adam Singer — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 14:37:00 +0000

Note: Now that the 2016 Games are over, we've updated the analysis from the original opening ceremonies post to look at TV ad performance for the entire Olympics.

When the 2016 Olympics kicked off almost three weeks ago, many TV advertisers were crossing their fingers that their strategy would pay off. Reaching as many as an estimated 27.9 million total viewers in the U.S., they were hoping their ads delivered relevant and compelling creative to the right audiences. To answer the pay-off question, advertisers will predominately look at three specific areas of performance:

Which ads were noticed by the audience?
Which ads drove interest, shifted perception, and increased intent?
And, which ads drove actual consumer response?

To get some insights into these questions, Google evaluated the top 12 brands totaling over 3.5 billion impressions that aired ads during the NBC broadcasts of the event. The analysis is based on a combination of consumer surveys and second-screen (mobile, desktop, and tablet) response data. Presented in a live Google Data Studio dashboard, the result is a unique view into the full-funnel performance of the ads evaluated.

See

Commercials during large, live sporting events like the Olympics are often uniquely created to leverage both the scale of the audience and the context of the event. Whether it is telling the personal story of an athlete or playing to our passions like patriotism, they are intended to strike an emotional connection, entertain us, or make us stand up and take notice.

Nike's "Unlimited" ads were the big winner with almost 35% of respondents having remembered seeing the ads when prompted. Including an ad with the first quadruple amputee to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, Nike's powerful ads outpaced typical recall rates in the 20%-25% range. Coca Cola was a close second with their "That's gold" ads which mixed Olympic competition with everyday moments. Tide, McDonald's, and Samsung rounded out the top five with respectable recall rates. On overage, ad recall rates for the top five improved 3% percentage points from the initial analysis following the opening ceremonies.

Almost 35% of respondents remembered seeing the Nike ads.

Additionally, of those respondents recalling the ad, only 37% could recall the specific product or service featured in the ad. The net is that only about 13% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement. Tide's"Small can be powerful" ad with Simone Biles had the highest product recall rate at just over 50%.

Think

Advertisers also want the ad to shift perceptions and create interest in the product or service featured. By surveying both viewers who did not see the ad (unexposed) and those who did see the ad (exposed), we are able to get insights into the impact of each ad’s messaging and creative. Overall, the results were impressive. On average, respondents who saw the ads were 27% more positive about the associated brands than those who did not. Likewise, respondents who saw the ads were 32% more likely to find out more and/or purchase the product being advertised.

Compared to the lift measured during the opening ceremonies, both favorability and intent increased significantly over the span of the Olympics increasing ten and twelve percentage points respectively.

Consumers who saw the ads, were on average, 25% more positive about the brand and were 28% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ads.

Interestingly, the baseline favorability and purchase intent for both non-sponsors and Olympic sponsors are relatively equal. However, non-sponsors saw a greater lift than sponsors with three more percentage points for favorability and seven more percentage points for intent.

Do

These commercials don’t just make us laugh or make us feel better about the brand — they also make us search and visit websites. Second-screen searching—whether it’s to re-engage with the ad or to learn more about the product — is a powerful indication of desire. By measuring incremental search queries on Google during the broadcast that are specific and modeled to be attributable to ads shown, we are now able to include responses in our analysis. During the broadcasts, TV ad driven searches were almost exclusively on mobile — 83% compared to an average of 55% for those brands when the ads were not airing. For brands, that means a presence on the TV screen isn’t complete without a strategy for small screens, as well.

"83% of searches on Google as a result of seeing the ads occurred on phones and another 10% occurred on tablets making a second screen strategy key to TV advertising."

BMW featured multiple products including a "Performance wheelchair" and garnered the top spot on the podium with a response strength index of 3.21. McDonald’s and Samsung fought it out for the silver and bronze with 2.01 and 1.57 respectively. The answer to the question “Do emotional ads work as well as product ads?” is, in this instance, “Yes.” Both emotional and product ad creatives drove 50% more searches on average. Also interestingly, ads by non-sponsors drove 17% more searches than their sponsor counterparts.

Compared to the average of the top 12 ads studied, BMW drove 3.2 times more searches.

Finally, Coca Cola was the overall winner with strong full-funnel performance placing in the top three across all three funnel stages.

Whether people are tuning into the Olympics or their favorite TV show, they use their smartphones to search for information triggered by what they’re seeing. In these micro-moments, advertisers need to be there, be useful, and be accountable. That means if you advertise on TV, you can now get a new view of performance across each stage of the funnel — using a combination of consumer surveys and digital response, all in a matter of days. Armed with these new insights, advertisers are now able to better understand and improve the performance of these investments in concert with their digital media.

Sourcing

Using Google Consumer Surveys to provide consumer ad awareness and interest research, an online survey was conducted in the United States during the period 8/19 - 8/21/16 using a validated, representative sample with a minimum of 700 respondents. Response data is based on incremental TV ad-driven search queries (Google) during the course of the broadcast that are specific to the ad shown and are modeled by Google Attribution 360 to be attributable to the airings of the commercials. Response data is normalized for total ad impressions during the broadcast for each advertiser.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Data Studio: New Google Cloud SQL and MySQL connector

Adam Singer — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 18:17:00 +0000

Our vision for Google Data Studio is to enable customers to access, visualize, and share all their data, regardless of where that data resides. Today we are adding support for the popular Google Cloud SQL and MySQL databases. This is the beginning of making your first party data available through Data Studio.

Using the new Google Cloud SQL and MySQL connector, you can now access the data in your database to create amazing reports and dashboards.

Example report accessing sales data by sales person from MySQL database

To use the connector, select one of our new connectors.

List of connectors now includes Cloud SQL and MySQL

Specify your database name, URL, username, and password, and click connect.

Configuration screen to access your SQL database

Visualizing data has never been easier! These new connectors are now available to all Data Studio users. Learn more about the connector in our MySQL Connector and Google Cloud SQL Connector help documentation.

Need a new connector in Data Studio?
Is there a specific data service you wish to be able to access and visualize through Data Studio? Let us know through this Data Studio connector feedback form so we can prioritize and make it happen!

Posted by Anand Shah and Nick Mihailovski, Product Managers

Which TV Ads Made the Podium During the 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremonies?

Adam Singer — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 16:39:00 +0000

When the 2016 Olympics kicked off last Friday, many TV advertisers were crossing their fingers that their strategy would pay off. Reaching an estimated 26.5 million total viewers in the U.S., they were hoping their ads delivered relevant and compelling creative to the right audiences. To answer the pay-off question, advertisers will predominately look at three specific areas of performance:

Which ads were noticed by the audience?
Which ads drove interest, shifted perception, and increased intent?
And, which ads drove actual consumer response?

To get some insights into these questions, Google evaluated the top 10 brands (based on total ad minutes) that aired ads during the live broadcast of the opening ceremonies. The analysis is based on a combination of consumer surveys and second-screen (mobile, desktop, and tablet) response data. Presented in a live Google Data Studio dashboard, the result is a unique view into the full-funnel performance of the ads evaluated.

Awareness

35% of respondents remembered seeing the Coca Cola ad.

Additionally, of those respondents recalling the ad, only 40% could recall the specific product or service featured in the ad. The net is that only about 8% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement. For many of the ads this was the first airing and it is reasonable to expect these numbers to improve substantially with increased exposure over the next couple of weeks.

Interest

Advertisers also want the ad to shift perceptions and create interest in the product or service featured. By surveying both viewers who saw the ad (exposed) and those who did not (unexposed), we are able to get insights into the impact of each ad’s messaging and creative. Overall, the results were impressive. On average, respondents who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the associated brands than those who did not. Likewise, respondents who saw the ads were 16% more likely to find out more and/or purchase the product being advertised.

Consumers who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the brand and were 16% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ad.

Interestingly, the baseline favorability and purchase intentions for both non-sponsors and Olympic sponsors are relatively equal. And for the most part, the ad’s impact on both factors was the same across non-sponsors and sponsors.

Desire

These commercials don’t just make us laugh or make us feel better about the brand—they also make us search and visit websites. Second-screen searching—whether it’s to re-engage with the ad or to learn more about the product—is a powerful indication of desire. By measuring incremental search queries on Google and YouTube during the broadcast that are specific and modeled to be attributable to ads shown, we are now able to include responses in our analysis. During the opening ceremonies, TV ad driven searches were almost exclusively on mobile—94% compared to an average of 56% for those brands when the ads were not airing. For brands, that means a presence on the TV screen isn’t complete without a strategy for small screens, as well.

"94% of searches on Google and YouTube as a result of seeing the ads occurred on mobile devices."

McDonald’s took the top spot on the podium with 42% more searches than the average. BMW and Samsung fought it out for second and third with 14% and 12% respectively. The answer to the question “Do emotional and inspiring ads work?” is, in this instance, “Yes.” But so do product-featured ads. Both inspiring and product ad creatives drove 10% more searches on average. Also, ads by sponsors drove 14% more searches than their non-sponsor counterparts.

Compared to the average of the top 10 ads studied, McDonald’s drove 42% more searches.

Finally, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 ad was the overall winner with strong full-funnel performance placing in the top three across all three funnel stages. Whether people are tuning into the Olympics or their favorite TV show, they use their smartphones to search for information triggered by what they’re seeing. That means if you advertise on TV, you can now get a new view of performance across each stage of the funnel—using a combination of consumer surveys and digital response, all in a matter of days. Armed with these new insights, advertisers are now able to better understand and improve the performance of these investments in concert with their digital media.

Sourcing

Using Google Consumer Surveys to provide consumer ad awareness and interest research, an online survey was conducted in the United States during the period 8/6 - 8/9/16 using a validated, representative sample with a minimum of 750 respondents. Response data is based on incremental TV ad-driven search queries (Google and YouTube) during the course of the broadcast that are specific to the ad shown and are modeled by Google Attribution 360 to be attributable to the airings of the commercials. Response data is normalized for total commercial air time during the broadcast for each advertiser and indexed to the average.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Data Exploration with Google Data Studio

Adam Singer — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 13:23:00 +0000

If you analyze and visualize data often enough, there are good chances that at some point you felt the “analyst’s block” (a less famous version of the writer’s block). We thought you might feel that way at times, so we provide here some ideas for you to explore and build great Reports in Data Studio.

In this post we will use a sample dataset from the U.S. Census Bureau. The data is about annual operating expenses of U.S. Retail, Accommodation, and Food Services between 2006 and 2014. The dataset is not complex, just 10 types of businesses and their expenses in that time period. Here is the Google Sheet data that was connected to Data Studio.

Now the important question: what should you do first when opening a blank canvas? Below is a set of three charts that will often give you some insight into the nature of data, they will help you to explore the data and build an insightful report. You will probably also have requests coming from your audience, but those can be helpful both for your own understanding and for enhancing those requests.

Below is a quick explanation of each chart and how they can bring insights into your data:

Line chart: this is extremely useful if you have time series data, it will help you quickly identify trends over time. It is recommended you use not only the time dimensions (which would aggregate all other dimensions), but also segment the data by a second dimension, to see how different groups behave over time. In this case we are using the Business Type to segment the main trend. Once you do that, you will see one line per value (see legend above the chart) - as you can see, 10 lines is a bit crowded, so you might want to use 6-8 lines only
Table: it is hard to find a better way to get a feeling for the data than tabular data! To help visualize the stats, you can also use bar charts and heatmaps inside the tables (see blue bars on second column and red heatmap on third column), they are pretty helpful visual clues especially in tables with lots of data.
Scatter chart: the scatter charts are great to understand how two metrics correlate. In the screenshot above you will also note that there is a trend line (green) in the chart; it shows that as the expense grows, the YoY Change has a lower value, meaning that it decreases quicker.

Hopefully those three charts will help you get a feeling for the data. You can also take a look at the Report at https://goo.gl/QqNFWn

Happy visualizing!

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Introducing the Google Analytics Demo Account

Adam Singer — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 17:55:00 +0000

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not - Albert Einstein

There are many resources available to learn Google Analytics, from the courses and training we offer, to advice from the community, or from the many books, guides, and articles written about Google Analytics. However, we’ve heard many of you would also like a resource so you can learn through practical experience and to apply your theoretical analytics knowledge. It can be difficult to gain practical experience since not everyone has access to a fully-implemented Google Analytics account. To fix this we’re introducing a fully functional Google Analytics Demo Account, available to everyone (get access here).

The Demo Account includes data from the Google Merchandise Store, an active Ecommerce site that sells Google branded merchandise. The ongoing Google Analytics implementation which will be completed this month already includes all the major features you would typically implement, like AdWords linking, Goals and Enhanced Ecommerce. The result is a fully functional account, with real business data.

Demo Account: Checkout Behavior Analysis Report

“Have you wondered why you've always gravitated towards people with real-world experience rather than on-paper experiences? The real-world part :) So while it hurts my feelings a bit to say that my best selling analytics books are not enough, I'm massively excited that the GA team has figured out a solution for the entire universe to get real-world experience. Get the access, download my awesome bundle of segments, dashboards and custom reports, and really start your learning experience!”
- Avinash Kaushik, Author - Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics : An Hour a Day

Self-Learning

You can use the Demo Account to learn about Google Analytics features and functionality, for example:

Access all the Standard reports to see which ones are useful to you
Get inspiration from predefined dashboards and segments imported from the Solutions Gallery to create your own
Alter reports by adding table filters and secondary dimensions, and by changing the report type
Learn how to compare audience, acquisition, behavior and conversion performance to a previous date range period
Create your own personal assets such as custom reports, annotations, shortcuts and custom alerts
Become familiar with the predefined attribution models and even create your own
Determine whether features you don't haven’t implemented could be beneficial to you e.g. AdWords and Search Console integrations
Use it as a companion when following a training course

Education Programs

If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Google Analytics then we encourage you to use the Demo Account as a tool. You can use it to create tests, quizzes, and other learning materials for your students. In fact, we’re excited to announce that some organizations are already starting to integrate it into their learning materials.

General Assembly offers courses both online and at their campuses around the world that will help you master new skills in design, marketing, technology, and data. Their Digital Marketing course includes a unit covering Marketing Analytics that utilizes the Demo Account.

Google Analytics Partners, including E-Nor and Loves Data, use the Demo Account to provide online and classroom style trainings to cater to beginners and advanced analytics users. Their specialists will provide actionable training to create and improve your analytics configuration, implementation and marketing performance.

Access the Demo account

You can get access to the Demo Account and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help please let us know within the FAQs post and share any feature requests or ideas to make the Demo Account more useful within the Feature Requests post. We hope the Demo Account gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Google Analytics.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Deepak Aujla, Program Manager, Google Analytics

Autotrack turns 1.0

Adam Singer — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 21:47:00 +0000

The following was originally posted on the Google Developers Blog.

Autotrack is a JavaScript library built for use with analytics.jsthat provides developers with a wide range of plugins to track the most common user interactions relevant to today's modern web.
The first version of autotrack for analytics.js was released on Github earlier this year, and since then the response and adoption from developers has been amazing. The project has been starred over a thousand times, and sites using autotrack are sending millions of hits to Google Analytics every single day.
Today I'm happy to announce that we've released autotrack version 1.0, which includes several new plugins, improvements to the existing plugins, and tons of new ways to customize autotrack to meet your needs.
Note: autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for Google Analytics 360 support. It is maintained by members of the Google Analytics developer platform team and is primarily intended for a developer audience.

New plugins

Based on the feedback and numerous feature requests we received from developers over the past few months, we've added the following new autotrack plugins:

Impression Tracker

The impression tracker plugin allows you to track when an element is visible within the browser viewport. This lets you much more reliably determine whether a particular advertisement or call-to-action button was seen by the user.
Impression tracking has been historically tricky to implement on the web, particularly in a way that doesn't degrade the performance of your site. This plugin leverages new browser APIs that are specifically designed to track these kinds of interactions in a highly performant way.

Clean URL Tracker

If your analytics implementation sends pageviews to Google Analytics without modifying the URL, then you've probably experienced the problem of seeing multiple different page paths in your reports that all point to the same place. Here's an example:

/contact
/contact/
/contact?hl=en
/contact/index.html

The clean URL tracker plugin avoids this problem by letting you set your preferred URL format (e.g. strip trailing slashes, remove index.html filenames, remove query parameters, etc.), and the plugin automatically updates all page URLs based on your preference before sending them to Google Analytics.
Note: setting up View Filters in your Google Analytics view settings is another way to modify the URLs sent to Google Analytics.

Page Visibility Tracker

It's becoming increasingly common for users to visit sites on the web and then leave them open in an inactive browser tab for hours or even days. And when users return to your site, they often won't reload the page, especially if your site fetches new content in the background.
If your site implements just the default javascript tracking snippet, these types of interactions will never be captured.
The page visibility tracker plugin takes a more modern approach to what should constitute a pageview. In addition to tracking when a page gets loaded, it also tracks when the visibility state of the page changes (i.e. when the tab goes into or comes out of the background). These additional interaction events give you more insight into how users behave on your site.

Updates and improvements

In addition to the new plugins added to autotrack, the existing plugins have undergone some significant improvements, most notably in the ability to customize them to your needs.
All plugins that send data to Google Analytics now give you 100% control over precisely what fieldsget sent, allowing you to set, modify, or remove anything you want. This gives advanced users the ability to set their own custom dimensions on hits or change the interaction setting to better reflect how they choose to measure bounce rate.
Users upgrading from previous versions of autotrack should refer to the upgrade guide for a complete list of changes (note: some of the changes are incompatible with previous versions).

Who should use autotrack

Perhaps the most common question we received after the initial release of autotrack is who should use it. This was especially true of Google Tag Managerusers who wanted to take advantage of some of the more advanced autotrack features.
Autotrack is a developer project intended to demonstrate and streamline some advanced tracking techniques with Google Analytics, and it's primarily intended for a developer audience. Autotrack will be a good fit for small to medium sized developer teams who already have analytics.js on their website or who prefer to manage their tracking implementation in code.
Large teams and organizations, those with more complex collaboration and testing needs, and those with tagging needs beyond just Google Analytics should instead consider using Google Tag Manager. While Google Tag Manager does not currently support custom analytics.js plugins like those that are part of autotrack, many of the same tracking techniques are easy to achieve with Tag Manager’s built-in triggers, and others may be achieved by pushing data layer events based on custom code on your site or in Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager. Read Google Analytics Events in the Google Tag Manager help center to learn more about automatic event tracking based on clicks and form submissions.

Next steps

If you're not already using autotrack but would like to, check out the installation and usage section of the documentation. If you already use autotrack and want to upgrade to the latest version, be sure to read the upgrade guide first.
To get a sense of what the data captured by autotrack looks like, the Google Analytics Demos & Tools site includes several reports displaying its own autotrack usage data. If you want to go deeper, the autotrack library is open source and can be a great learning resource. Have a read through the plugin source code to get a better understanding of how some of the advanced analytics.js features work.
Lastly, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know. You can report bugs or submit any issues on Github.

Posted by Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer

Behind the Scenes with Google Data Studio

Adam Singer — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 15:50:00 +0000

This Spring, as part of our Google Analytics 360 suite, we introduced Google Data Studio 360, to help you simply and beautifully present data from multiple data sources, including Google Analytics, Google Sheets and much more.

In May, we introduced Google Data Studio, a free version of our tool, to put it in the hands of many more of you - which has led to the design and sharing of creative reports that bring your information to life. We’ve been excited to see the rapid adoption, and initiated a series of livestreams to answer questions around our design of the product, deliver demos and highlight features.

The first recording in this series, hosted by Product Manager Nick Mihailovski and Louis Gray, is now available, and shares:

An introduction to Google Data Studio
The perspective of our product manager on Data Visualization
Walkthroughs and sample reports

Watch the first video in this series via the embed below or on YouTube here.

Posted by Louis Gray, Google Analytics Team

Google Data Studio for Ecommerce Businesses

Adam Singer — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 12:52:00 +0000

Google Data Studio is a great tool to visualize datasets from multiple sources, such as Google Sheets, BigQuery, AdWords, and others. But being part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, it is no surprise that it makes a perfect visualization tool for Google Analytics too! In the coming weeks and months we will showcase some best practices and sample reports in this blog, but we thought we would start with something you are acquainted with: Google Analytics.

With that in mind, we decided to create a sample report that may give you some inspiration on how to build your next dashboard. The example below will provide some good ideas on which charts, dimensions and metrics to use to visualize your Ecommerce data. Please note that some of this data will be available only for accounts that have Enhanced Ecommerce implemented.

Report created using Google Analytics data on Google Data Studio

Let’s go over some of the elements you see in the screenshot above.

Header: it is always helpful to provide some info and controls in the top of the report. In this case you will see the website logo, a time range control and a series of four filter controls, with which you can segment your reports by Device, Country, Source or User Type.
Trend charts: the four line charts in the top left will show how the business is performing over time (also compared to the previous period). This is important to understand drops and spikes in the data.
Scorecards: the overall stats (green background) show in a glance how the business is doing, they provide a quick and effective way to understand the bottom line.
Detailed information: tables are the best way to represent data in a detailed way. As seen in the report, the tables provide more information about the products being sold and also the traffic sources bringing the most users.
Additional info: depending on your business, you might want to add special metrics and dimensions to enrich your report (e.g. custom dimensions & metrics). In the report above you will find some additional information on the bar and pie charts in the bottom right corner.

We hope that this sample report helps you get up and running. Feel free to share your own report in the comments, we would love to learn how you are using Data Studio to report and visualize your data!

This report was created using a Google Analytics data source, check this step-by-step guide for a detailed account on how to create Data Studio reports using Google Analytics. Learn more about Data Studio in the Help Centre: https://support.google.com/datastudio/

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Data Studio: New, Simplified, AdWords Connector

Adam Singer — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 20:59:00 +0000

Google Data Studio is our new Business Intelligence product that makes it easy to connect, visualize, and share data. Today we updated the Google Data Studio AdWords connector to be more flexible and easier to use.

The AdWords connector allows AdWords customers to access their AdWords account data in Data Studio, build visually stunning reports, and share those reports to business stakeholders across their organization.

Report built with the AdWords connector in Google Data Studio

With our recent update, the new AdWords connector now unifies over 100 AdWords dimensions and metrics as a single list, making it easier select the data you want to visualize.

20 of over 100 dimensions and metrics available in the new connector

The new connector also supports many more combinations of dimensions and metrics, dramatically simplifying building reports.

Customizing a table with AdWords data in the Report Editor

Of course, when you build AdWords reports with Data Studio, all the existing Data Studio features are compatible with this data including: calculated metrics, derived fields, custom visualizations, rich styling and custom branding, simplified sharing through Google Drive and realtime collaboration.

These new changes are available today in both Data Studio 360 and Data Studio versions. To use the new connector, you must create a new Data Studio Data Source. Data Source using the previous connector will continue to work. Please read our help documentation on how to migrate to the new version.

We’re excited to see all of the new reports customers will create with this enhancement.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Data Studio team

Let us know your thoughts on Google Data Studio

Adam Singer — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 20:34:00 +0000

Are you a current or past user of Google Data Studio? We would love to hear your thoughts about your experience so far with Google Data Studio.

The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete. Your comments will help us build a better product!

Note: Your answers will be held in strict confidentiality. The results will be reported in aggregate form only, and cannot be identified individually. Thank you!

Posted by the Google Data Studio Team

Get Facebook, Bing, Twitter & more into Google Data Studio

Adam Singer — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 16:39:00 +0000

Google Data Studio is the biggest step forward in Google’s data reporting & visualization offering since the launch of Google Analytics in 2005. It lets you build great-looking, interactive dashboards that you can share in a similar manner as Google Drive files (see for example this web analytics dashboard). It's a giant leap forward from the old Google Analytics dashboards and a game changer for online marketers.

Google Data Studio provides native integration with a few Google platforms (Google Analytics, AdWords, YouTube, BigQuery, Attribution 360). Of course, most marketers, to use Google Data Studio as their primary dashboarding tool, would like to include data from many more sources, such as Facebook Ads, Bing Ads and Twitter Ads.

Fortunately, there’s a really simple method for adding many more data sources into Google Data Studio, using its Google Sheets connector. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide for doing that.

1. Create a Google Sheet with data to be imported
There are a number of ways to do this. For instance, to get Facebook Ads data, you can go to Facebook Ads Manager to do a CSV export of your data, and then upload it to Google Drive. For some data sources, you can use spreadsheet functions like IMPORTXML. Or you can build your own Google Apps Script connectors.

For a fully automated data importing workflow, I recommend you try our Supermetrics add-on for Google Sheets (available here; free for 30 days, then $49/mo). It has an easy-to-use query builder and connects to a large number of data sources, like Facebook, Bing, Twitter, MailChimp, even Adobe SiteCatalyst.

To run a simple query using Supermetrics:

Launch Supermetrics from the Add-ons menu
Log in to a data source (eg. Facebook Ads)
Pick a few metrics (eg. impressions and cost)
Split to rows by one or more dimensions (eg. country)
Click the blue Get Data to Table button

After you’ve fetched the data, your Google Sheet should look something like this (here we’re splitting by country):

If you don’t want to test Supermetrics now, you can make a copy of this sheet to try out the following steps.

2. Import the data into Google Data Studio
You can launch Google Data Studio here. If you haven’t yet used Data Studio, you can get the free version here (US only for the time being).

In DATA SOURCES, click the plus button in the lower-right corner:

From connectors, select Google Sheets and the file you just created, then click CONNECT

Next, Google shows you a list of fields imported from the Google Sheet. Click CREATE REPORT, and in the next window, ADD TO REPORT.

3. Using the data
You now have a blank report where you can start working with the data. To check everything has been imported ok, try inserting a table. You can change the columns displayed in the Table Properties sidebar.

You can then start building your report. After some trying, you’ll be able to make something great like this:

In many cases, you will want to include more than one Google Sheets data connector, to fetch data from different sources or with different metrics & dimensions. This can be done very easily, just repeat step 1 and 2. Go back to Google Sheets to fetch new data, e.g. Twitter Ads, to another sheet. Then in Data Studio, when adding a graph or table, in the properties sidebar press the arrow next to Data Source to add a connection to the new sheet.

4. Ensure your reports stay up-to-date
If you used the Supermetrics add-on to fetch data into Google Sheets, you can set the those queries to refresh automatically every day, so your Data Studio report will always have the latest data. In Google Sheets, go to Add-ons: Supermetrics: Schedule refresh & emailing, and store a daily refresh trigger.

Final thoughts
Google Data Studio is a powerful dashboarding tool for any marketer, but by default only works with Google platforms. To make the most of it, use its Google Sheets connector in combination with the Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to build cross-channel reports.

Posted by Mikael Thuneberg, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Attracting the Right Audiences with Google Analytics and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Adam Singer — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 11:26:00 +0000

This post was contributed by Andrew Garberson, Search Department Manager at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Read their full case study describing how Teach For America partnered with LunaMetrics to attract diverse and top talent using RLSA and Google Analytics.

Many website users provide details about their needs and preferences throughout the conversion process. University applicants declare an area of study, homebuyers select a price tier, analytics training attendees choose a city.

This volunteered information can be captured and stored in Google Analytics as Custom Dimensions. Using the scenarios above, that may mean:

Applicant A wants to study biology.
Buyer B wants a $200,000 home.
Attendee C wants a training in Pittsburgh.

Now apply that concept to all of the users who express interest in a business. Instead of one university applicant or one homebuyer or one training attendee, we have thousands, or hundreds of thousands. These Custom Dimensions can organize users into related Audiences.

Marketers can then use these Audiences to create campaigns that nurture users along the path toward a goal completion. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) show more personalized messaging to users in the search results, acting as a reminder to finish the process that they started.

These core concepts presented an opportunity for Teach For America. The organization recruits some of the most distinguished and desirable job applicants in the world while they are also pursued by big brands offering big salaries. Keeping these applicants engaged throughout a rigorous selection process is essential.

Teach For America and LunaMetrics partnered to stay top-of-mind with their illustrious applicants, using self-identified information to personalize messaging and better target candidates. The results were a 57% increase in conversion rate over campaigns without audience targeting and a more effective identification and targeting of applicants. Read the entire case study.

“There is no greater win as a marketer than to be certain you’re finding the right people in the right place at the right time. The results speak for themselves: The marriage between Google Analytics and RLSA insured we were able to deliver the message we wanted to the people we wanted.” —Stacey Jaffe, Senior Managing Director, Digital Acquisitions and Channel Growth, Teach For America

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate, Google Analytics team

Case Study in Online-to-Store Measurement: Petit Bateau & Google Analytics

Adam Singer — Wed, 25 May 2016 19:00:00 +0000

Knowing that many people research products online before going into a physical store to make a purchase, French clothing retailer Petit Bateau wanted to develop a better understanding of the online-to-offline (in-store) behaviour of its customer base. The brand leveraged Google Analytics and its robust features: User ID and Measurement Protocol, to reach the objectives.

Petit Bateau customers in France can shop in 153 physical stores as well as on Petit-bateau.fr. Users log into the website which makes it possible to later match the traffic of logged-in users with subsequent in-store transactions made with a loyalty card.

Petit Bateau uploaded personally non-identifiable in-store data into Google Analytics and discovered that digital played a significant role in driving in-store purchases:

44% of in-store buyers had visited the site within the seven days before making their purchases,
9% of in-store buyers had visited the site on the same day as their purchase in the physical shop.

Further analysis revealed that the online-to-store effect was particularly important on mobile. Mobile visitors converted within stores at an 11% higher rate than desktop visitors, and their in-store spend was 8% greater.

By using Google Analytics to measure online-to-offline purchase behaviour, Petit Bateau was able to better understand the impact of online marketing on in-store sales and use the data to recalculate AdWords return on ad spend – which proved to be six times higher with in-store sales incorporated. Taking in-store transactions into consideration in this way is enabling Petit Bateau to optimise the brand’s digital marketing programmes, make more informed decisions around media budget allocation and design better experiences for consumers as they move seamlessly between digital and physical shopping environments.

You can find the full case study with all the details here.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Announcing Data Studio: our free, new, Data Visualization Product

Adam Singer — Wed, 25 May 2016 16:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, as part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite announcement, we unveiled a new data visualization and reporting platform for large enterprises — Data Studio 360.

Yesterday, at the Google Performance Summit, we announced a free version of Data Studio for individuals and smaller teams. Data Studio lets you connect to all your marketing data and turn that data into beautiful, informative reports that are easy to understand, share, and fully customizable. We wanted to take a moment to give you some of the details about Data Studio.

Making it easy to share data within your organization — or with the world

One of the fundamental ideas behind Data Studio is that data should be easily accessible to anyone in an organization. We believe that as more people have access to data, better decisions will be made.

With multiple data connectors, you can now easily create dashboards from many different types of data and share with everyone in your organization - and you can mix and match data sources within a single report. For example, you can combine Google Analytics data and Google AdWords data into a single report.

Today, we’re offering multiple data connectors, so you can connect to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Sheets and many other Google services. But Data Studio offers integration with a wide variety of data sources. There’s also a connector for BigQuery and we will soon have connectors to SQL databases that will let you access first party data.

Data Studio is more that just sharing reports with other people — it’s true collaboration. We used the same infrastructure as Google Docs, so you can edit reports together, in real time. This is useful as you combine data from multiple teams and need others to add analysis and context to the report.

Visualization tools to style your reports and data

In addition to new sharing and collaboration tools, Data Studio gives you many flexible ways to present your data. Sure, there’s the usual assortment of bar charts, pie charts, and time series. But we’ve also included some new visualizations — like bullet charts that help you communicate your progress towards a business goal.

Another advanced feature is the ability to create a heatmap using tabular data. This visualization makes it easy to instantly identify outliers within a table of data.

Data Studio also has an array of other features to help you customize how you present your data. There are a number stylistic tools that enable you to design your reports to represent your specific brand. There are also interactive data controls, like a date picker and dynamic filters, that enable report editors to make reports interactive for viewers.

For example, let’s say you want to let users segment a report by country. Just add a control element to the top of your report and the user can dynamically segment the data. In the image below the check boxes will change the data in the map and data table based on what a user selects.

These are just a few of the tools that you can use to help others in your organization understand data.

Two versions for different types of organizations

The primary difference between Data Studio 360 and the free version, Data Studio, is the the number of reports you can create, which is five per account. Both versions support connecting to unlimited data sources and offer unlimited report viewing, editing and collaboration. For more information, check out our Help Center.

Getting started

If you’re ready to get started, watch this brief overview that will help you build your first reports.

Then check out the interactive walkthrough - it’s built with Data Studio. Just choose “Welcome to Data Studio (Start Here)” from the list of reports in your account.

Data Studio is currently available to users in the United States and we’ll be rolling it out to other geographic regions throughout the year. We hope it helps you share more data and make better business decisions.

Happy Dashboarding,

Posted by Nick Mihailovski & Nathan Moon, Data Studio team

Announcing: Smarter, more sharable analytics innovations

Adam Singer — Tue, 24 May 2016 16:45:00 +0000

We’re incredibly excited to share with you the new analytics product innovations announced just moments ago at the Google Performance Summit. These innovations for the Analytics 360 Suite are more integrated, more collaborative, and use built-in intelligence to handle more data than ever in our new multi-screen, cross-channel world.

Why are these innovations arriving now? Because across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, more than half of all web traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets¹. And every year, over half of the trillions of searches on Google happen on mobile².

This shift to mobile has made marketers' jobs more complex. We all have more opportunities than ever to reach consumers all day and measure their behavior in their I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do and I want-to-buy moments. But it's also harder to keep all the channels and touchpoints straight. You can’t market effectively in today’s world with products that were designed for a desktop-first world.

Two months ago we announced the Google Analytics 360 Suite, an enterprise-class modern measurement solution built from the ground up to help enterprise marketers and analytics professionals succeed in this new multi-screen world.

Today, we announced new innovations focused on three themes:

Read on to learn the analytics highlights from today’s announcements.

Enterprise analytics re-imagined for modern marketing

Google Analytics 360 Suite is beginning to roll out to current customers. This includes Google Analytics 360 (formerly known as Premium), Attribution 360 (formerly known as Adometry), Audience Center 360, and Tag Manager 360 when used as part of Analytics 360. The rollout will occur in phases over the next several months, and users will see an improved and unified product experience and a new look and feel across all Analytics 360 Suite products.

Google Optimize 360, our website testing and personalization product, is now available in paid BETA globally. The results from our closed beta have been amazing: one of our beta customers reduced the time to deploy a site experiment from three days to 10 minutes. Optimize 360’s deep integrations with Analytics 360 increase testing agility and reduce setup times. With just a few clicks, you can use the audiences and goals you’ve already created in Analytics 360 to run experiments with Optimize 360.

Google Data Studio 360, our data visualization product, will start rolling out in paid BETA in the US. This is our enterprise version with licensing starting at 200 users. Data Studio 360 allows you to connect to all your data with native integrations across many popular Google products, as well as non-Google data. Visualize your data by creating reports and dashboards. Share your data across your organization with built-in, real-time collaboration.

Google Data Studio is a completely new, free version of Data Studio 360 that we’re launching today! Starting now, anyone can use Data Studio to create up to 5 reports with unlimited sharing, editing and collaboration. We’re starting the BETA in the U.S. and rolling out to other regions throughout the year.

Succeeding together

With massive volumes of data being created across screens, channels and touchpoints, built-in intelligence has become foundational in approach to analytics product development. This means we’re doing more of the heavy lifting for you, and we’re seeing a tremendous response from businesses. For example, Smart Goals in Analytics is now enabling more than 60K advertisers to optimize their AdWords performance. You’ll continue to see exciting developments in the future related to intelligence.

As consumers blur the lines between online and offline, it’s more important than ever to build your business in new ways. Google is excited to go on this journey with you, and we're building much more for the multi-screen, cross-channel world. Visit our website to learn more about all the new products in the Analytics 360 Suite.

To see the full range of ads and analytics innovations announced this morning, watch the Google Performance Summit keynote here.

Posted by Paul Muret, VP of Analytics, Display, and Video Products at Google.

¹ Google Analytics 2016
² Google 2016

Google Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote

Adam Singer — Tue, 24 May 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the Google Performance Summit livestream! Tune in now to hear about Google’s latest mobile-first innovations, the moment they’re announced. Let us know what you think by joining the conversation at #GoogleSummit.

App-First Analytics with Firebase Analytics

Adam Singer — Fri, 20 May 2016 15:05:00 +0000

While Firebase Analytics is separate from Google Analytics for mobile apps, both solutions were built by the same team to ensure Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, the Google Analytics 360 Suite, and Firebase Analytics work together seamlessly. Below, we’ve cross-posted a deep dive into Firebase Analytics from the Firebase blog so you can learn more about the exciting app analytics capabilities available in Firebase. If you’d like to understand more about how Google Analytics products work with Firebase Analytics, check out our Analytics 360 and Google Analytics overviews.

Cross-posted from the Firebase blog by Russell Ketchum, Group Product Manager:
Welcome, current and new Firebase developers! There's a lot to discover with the Firebase platform -- more than we could possibly explain in a single blog post. So over the next several weeks, we'll be sharing posts focusing on each of the individual features of Firebase. For our first post, we wanted to let you know about Firebase Analytics -- the free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile developers.

Analytics are at the heart of successful apps, so when we expanded Firebase to help mobile developers build better apps and grow successful businesses, we thought it was important to build an analytics solution that serves the needs of all app developers, from two-person startups to large, established companies.

Meet Firebase Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics tool built from the ground up for mobile apps. Firebase Analytics is at the core of the Firebase platform, providing the insights you need to build successful apps.

All your app analytics in one place.
Firebase Analytics helps you understand what your users are doing in your app. It has all of the metrics that you’d expect in an app analytics tool (average revenue per user (ARPU), active users, retention reports, event counts, etc.) combined with user properties like device type, app version, and OS version to give you insight into how users interact with your app.

Collecting all of this data is simple and works right out of the box. When you add Firebase to your app, key events are measured automatically – including first opens (think of these like installs), in-app purchases, and more. With up to 500 distinct event types (each with up to 25 key-value pair parameters), you can measure additional suggested and custom events that are unique to your app with just a few lines of code.

Some events are more important to you than others, so with conversion tracking you can define the most important events that happen in your app (like purchasing an item, or sharing your app with others) and create funnels just for these events to discover where users drop out of the process.

But Firebase Analytics helps you analyze more than just user behavior. It also provides a rich set of data that helps describe your users – data like geographic information, demographics, and interests that can help you better tune your app and refine your marketing activities.

While standard demographic data is helpful, it’s also important to understand user properties specific to your app. Firebase Analytics lets you define custom user properties for all of your users. For example, your fitness app can record a user's favorite exercise or your music app can record your user's favorite genre. Firebase Analytics is also integrated with BigQuery, Google’s fully-managed data warehouse, so you can export your raw Firebase data and join it with custom data for additional analysis.

Smarter, more effective app marketing.
Understanding user behavior is just one important part of Firebase Analytics -- you also need to understand how your advertising and marketing activities influence those behaviors. Firebase Analytics can automatically link user behaviors within your app to a traffic source so you know where your valuable users are coming from. It works with Google AdWords and more than 20 other major ad networks without having to install any additional SDKs, making it easy to understand the ROI of your marketing and advertising spend. You can also import Firebase Analytics conversion events directly into Google AdWords, so you can bid on specific user events that happen in your app with just a few clicks.

Firebase Analytics makes all of Firebase better.
Firebase Analytics is designed to make your analytics data actionable. You can use the Audiences feature to create a segment of users based on their event data and user properties. For example, an audience of people who have added items to their cart but haven't made a purchase. Or, an audience of classical music fans who have listened to more than 200 songs.

You can then use these audiences in conjunction with other Firebase features, like Remote Config, which allows you to change the look-and-feel of your app just for a specific audience. Want to create a customized home screen for users who have subscribed to your newsletter or have reached a certain level in your fitness app? You can do that directly from the Firebase console using Remote Config and Audiences in Firebase Analytics.

Firebase Analytics Audiences also works with Notifications, allowing you to send in-app notifications to any audience that you've defined. So, if you've just added a new set of armor to your game's in-app storefront, you can notify only the users who have purchased in-game items in the past. In addition, when your Firebase account is linked to AdWords, you can use audiences to re-engage lapsed users with ad campaigns. To learn more about the app analytics capabilities in Firebase Analytics, check out our video:
While Firebase works well as a standalone tool, the true power of Firebase Analytics lies in the customer insight it brings to other Firebase capabilities - insight that helps you grow, develop, and earn with your mobile app.

Posted by Russ Ketchum, Group Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics and Firebase teams

Welcome to Firebase: Introducing the next generation of Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 for Mobile Apps

Adam Singer — Thu, 19 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Google Tag Manager is known for making it easy to deploy and manage analytics, remarketing, conversion tracking, and other types of tags across your websites and apps. And with the introduction of Firebase – Google’s new platform for mobile developers across iOS and Android – using Tag Manager or Tag Manager 360 to configure your in-app measurement has never been easier or more powerful!

Yesterday at Google I/O, we announced that we’re expanding Firebase to become a unified mobile developer platform designed to make it easier than ever to build apps using Google’s products and services – and Google Tag Manager is one of these services! The latest version of Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 for mobile apps has been designed to work with Firebase and to extend its capabilities for both developers and marketers.

Unified in-app instrumentation
At the heart of Firebase is Firebase Analytics – a free and unlimited analytics product designed specifically for mobile apps. But Firebase Analytics is more than an analytics product, it’s a unified way for developers to measure anything and everything that’s happening in an app from key business drivers to detailed user interaction. This creates a single source of truth for in-app activity that you can share with other Firebase features and Google products. For Tag Manager, this makes Firebase Analytics the new data layer, which means that anyone who is using Firebase Analytics is ready to start using Tag Manager without recoding.

To get started with Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360, simply sign-up for Firebase, sign in to Tag Manager to setup a new Firebase container, and then add both Firebase Analytics and Google Tag Manager to your app. Everything that you’re measuring with Firebase Analytics is ready for use in Tags, Triggers, and Variables in Tag Manager.

Dynamic app measurement
Firebase Analytics makes it easy to measure what’s happening in your app. But what happens if you mislabeled an event or forgot to add a critical parameter? By adding Tag Manager or Tag Manager 360 to your app, you can make changes to your measurement setup without having to wade into the app update process.

As experienced marketers know, without tag management, even the most basic tagging changes can take a lot of time and effort, require coordination between marketing and development teams, and pull resources away from other projects. With Tag Manager and Firebase, you’re able to decouple your measurement changes from your build cycles – and by doing so, streamline how your development and marketing teams work together.

One SDK, many optionsWhile Firebase aims to make it easier than ever to build apps and measure user behavior, it’s not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Developers and marketers often choose to use multiple solutions from multiple vendors in their apps. Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 can help make sense of these disparate tools.

With Firebase Analytics, it’s easy to measure what’s happening in your app – without limiting you to a single toolset. Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 let you take your data and send it to various other analytics tools both at Google – such as Google Analytics – and with other partners. We’re thrilled to announce tag vendor partnerships with several of the leading app attribution solutions including Kochava, Tune, adjust, AppsFlyer, Apsalar, and more. Google Tag Manager has long been heralded for its commitment to being vendor agnostic for web measurement and is excited to extend that same commitment to mobile apps. And our partners are excited too!

"We have always been passionate about supporting developers by making sure Kochava is always integrated with the best tools. That's why we're so excited to provide out-of-the-box support for Google Tag Manager via Firebase."
- Charles Manning, CEO of Kochava

If you don’t see the partner you’re looking for, don’t fret. We’re continually adding additional partners through our Vendor Tag Template Program.

Get started at your convenience
If you’re already using Google Tag Manager or Tag Manager 360 for mobile apps don’t worry, your existing containers and the current SDKs will continue to work just the way they are. But as with any major feature release, we recommend upgrading to the latest version of Google Tag Manager for mobile apps – and Firebase along with it – at your earliest convenience. That way, you can be sure to make the most of your mobile tag management experience.

Ready for Google Tag Manager? Learn more and get started today!

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Introducing Firebase Analytics

Adam Singer — Wed, 18 May 2016 20:30:00 +0000

We’re excited to highlight Google’s next step in mobile app development: Firebase, a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It comes with new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. The Firebase platform also comes with Firebase Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps.

Firebase Analytics is now Google’s recommended solution for mobile app analytics. It’s user and event-centric and comes with unlimited app event reporting, cross-network attribution, and postbacks. If you’re using Google Analytics for mobile app reporting today, you may want to consider adding Firebase and Firebase Analytics to your app to take advantage of some of its powerful new capabilities.

Google Analytics will continue to support our mobile app analytics functionality and we’ve built a number of ways for clients to use Firebase Analytics with Google Analytics or with Analytics 360 for best-in-class analytics capabilities. If you have both web and app properties, we recommend using Google Analytics for your web analytics and Firebase Analytics for your app analytics.

Many clients may want to keep the app analytics functionality they currently enjoy with Google Analytics in addition to implementing Firebase Analytics. This type of dual implementation is made easy with Tag Manager - allowing you to implement Firebase and then use Tag Manager to send your app data into Google Analytics.

Stay tuned for more detail on Firebase Analytics and enhancements to Google Tag Manager that make mobile app analytics faster and easier than ever.

Happy mobile app analyzing!

Posted by Russ Ketchum, Group Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics and Firebase teams

Pelican Water System Sees 130% Higher ROI with Google Analytics

Adam Singer — Mon, 16 May 2016 13:24:00 +0000

This post was contributed by Michael Loban, CMO at InfroTrust, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

For many years, Pelican Water Systems has catered to the needs of people by providing them with safer, cleaner, and improved water for their homes. Pelican Water Systems sells their water purification systems via their website and via a call center. However, the company was unable to tie online marketing channels to the offline sales placed via a call center. They lacked a complete picture of the customer journey. That’s when they turned to InfroTrust, a Google Analytics Certified Partner that specializes in the system integration and Omni-channel analytics.

Together, Pelican Water Systems and InfoTrust implemented Google Analytics to enhance the sales attribution and probe deeper into the shopping styles of customers. The main challenge that the two noticed was that some customers would see online ads and purchase online, while others would call customer service representatives to complete their orders (offline). Compared to the online campaigns, 0% of the offline sales were attributed to online marketing campaigns.

To address this, InfoTrust used the Google Analytics User ID feature. A unique User ID is carried across Google Analytics, DialogTech and Salesforce.com to identify online visitors and associate their online and offline activity. The Measurement Protocol was used to upload all offline order information (e.g. products sold, revenue, tax, etc) to Google Analytics.

With Google Analytics, Pelican Water Systems got better reports to understand which of their orders offline were being generated by marketing campaigns online. This lead to the discovery that up to 15% of overall conversions placed offline were influenced by different AdWords campaigns. With this discovery, Pelican Water Systems now has the ability to budget and plan its campaigns accurately.

“Offline transactions which had 0% visibility and were dependent solely on inaccurate or incorrect customer feedback are now fully attributable to their proper marketing channel. This allows us to make quick, smart decisions on trends across all forms of marketing, both online and offline, and how consumers jump from desktop to mobile and office computers.” — Robert Prentice, Director of Marketing & Product Development, Pelican Water Systems.

To learn more about InfoTrust and Pelican Water Systems work together to achieve these results, download the full case study or register for the webinar.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate, and Pratik Mungasuvalli, Account Manager

Efficient Campaign Tagging

Adam Singer — Fri, 13 May 2016 16:24:00 +0000

To evaluate campaigns and analyze the impact of various media channels, you need to be able to identify every source of traffic. You probably are already doing this now by connecting Google Analytics with your AdWords account and by customizing links from other purchased channels with custom campaign parameters. Google’s URL builder is often used to generate these links containing campaign parameters.

In large organizations, it is not uncommon for different parts of the organization to purchase and drive traffic to the website. One group might be responsible for paid search, another for affiliates, and a third for driving traffic from social media. This division places high demands on the structure of your data if you want to be able to compare the various media channels or see the combined effect of a campaign – no matter which channel the message was communicated in.

To set a naming convention for campaign names and decide how to name all media channels is challenging when many people within the organization must comply to the naming guidelines. Without having consistent definition of the site’s traffic sources, it is also more difficult to create attribution models, as these require good-quality data in order to be reliable.

To simplify the generation of consistent links tagged with custom campaign parameters Outfox, a GACP and Google Analytics 360 Reseller, have developed GA Campaign URL, an add-on for Google Sheets. This tool helps you to create tag sheets, where you can guide users regarding which parameters are to be used and let users select, for example, the medium, sources, and campaigns in drop-down lists. Since you can easily share the spreadsheet among various users and control (by using permissions) which users can add and change the values in drop-down lists, you can create tag sheets tailored to the needs and organization of your company.

Read more about how to use GA Campaign URL on our Help page or install it for Google Sheets!

Posted by Christoffer Luthman, Director of Analytics at Google Analytics Certified Partner Outfox

Deeper Integration of Search Console in Google Analytics

Adam Singer — Thu, 12 May 2016 16:21:00 +0000

Google Analytics helps brands optimize their websites and marketing efforts for all sources of traffic, and Search Console is where website owners manage how they appear in Google organic search results. Today, we are introducing the ability to display Search Console metrics alongside Google Analytics metrics, in the same reports, side by side - giving you a full view of how your site shows up and performs in organic search results.

For years, users of both Search Console and Google Analytics have been able to link the two properties (instructions) and see Search Console statistics in Google Analytics, in isolation. But to gain a fuller picture of your website’s performance in organic search, it’s beneficial to see how visitors reached your site and what they did once they got there.

With this update, you’ll be able to see your Search Console metrics and your Google Analytics metrics in the same reports, in parallel. By combining data from both sources at the landing page level, we’re able to show you a full range of Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion metrics for your organic search traffic. This feature out is rolling out over the coming few weeks, so not everyone will see it immediately.

 New Search Console reports combine Search Console and Google Analytics metrics

New Insights

The new reports allow you to examine your organic search data end-to-end and discover unique and actionable insights. Your Acquisition metrics from Search Console, such as impressions and average position, are now available in relation to your Behavior and Conversion metrics from Google Analytics, like bounce rate and pages per session.

Below are some new capabilities resulting from this improved integration:
• Find landing pages that are attracting many users through Google organic search (e.g., high impressions and high click through rate) but where users are not engaging with the website. In this case, you should consider improving your landing pages. 
• Find landing pages that have high site engagement but are not successfully attracting users from Google organic search (e.g., have low click through rate). In this case, you might benefit from improving titles and descriptions shown in search. 
• Learn which queries are ranking well for each organic landing page. 
• Segment organic performance by device category (desktop, tablet, mobile) in the new Devices report.   

New Landing Page report showing Search Console and Google Analytics metrics  

Additional Information

Each of these new reports will display how your organic search traffic performs. As data is joined at the landing page level, Landing Pages, Countries and Devices will show both Search Console and Google Analytics data, while the Queries report will only show Search Console data for individual queries. The same search queries will display in Google Analytics as you see in Search Console today.

As mentioned in our Search Console Help Center, some data may not be displayed, to protect user privacy. For example, Search Console may not track some infrequent queries, and will not display those that include personal or sensitive information.

Also, while the data is displayed in parallel, not all Google Analytics features are available for Search Console data - including segmentation. Any segment that is applied to the new combined reports will only apply to Google Analytics data. You may also see that clicks from Search Console may differ from total sessions in Google Analytics.

To experience the new combined reports from Search Console and Google Analytics, make sure your properties are linked, and then navigate to the new section “Search Console”, which should appear under “Acquisition” in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics.

Posted by Joan Arensman, Product Manager, and Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Move beyond last click attribution in AdWords

Adam Singer — Wed, 11 May 2016 00:01:00 +0000

People often see many ads across different devices before making a purchase, booking a flight, or signing up for an account. Because of this, advertisers know that last click attribution may not always tell the full story. In 2014, we released the Attribution Modeling Tool in AdWords to share insights about how users interact with your ads. Later this month, you’ll be able to integrate the attribution model of your choice with your conversion data and bidding.

For each conversion type, use a simple dropdown menu in Conversion settings to select one of six different attribution models last click, first click, linear, time decay, positionbased, or data driven. When you pick a new model, credit will be reassigned across the conversion path for all search or shopping ad clicks on Google.com, and your conversion stats will change moving forward. You can adjust bids based on your new way of counting conversions, and if you’re using automated bidding for search ads, your bids will be optimized automatically to reflect your new model. To learn more, visit our Help Center.

For the first time, AdWords advertisers with sufficient data will also be able to select the new data driven attribution model as a public beta, which is also available in Analytics 360, Attribution 360, and DoubleClick. Unlike rulesbased models, data driven attribution uses machine learning to evaluate all the converting and nonconverting paths across your account and identifies the proper credit for each interaction. The model considers the number of ad interactions, order of exposure, ad creative, and many other factors to determine which keywords and clicks are the most effective at driving results.

To help advertisers succeed with attribution, we’ve created a new best practices guide: “Beyond LastClick Attribution.” The guide will show you how to:

Determine how important moving beyond lastclick attribution is to your business
Choose a model that best fits your needs
Value early influencer keywords appropriately
Act on attribution
Evolve your approach to attribution as measurement gets better

We hope the new functionality and guide will help you optimize your marketing campaigns and drive stronger results, and our goal is to expand beyond search soon.

Posted by:
Joan Arensman, Product Manager
Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager

Better insight into your customer interactions with Google Analytics

Adam Singer — Thu, 05 May 2016 15:29:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, we highlighted how connecting site analytics data with digital marketing campaign data can help companies understand the full customer journey. A deep understanding of customers is essential to running a business today as customers have higher and higher expectations for personalized and relevant experiences from brands.

Site and app analytics data are key sources for developing customer understanding and segmentation as, for many companies, this is where customers interact with the brand most frequently. Analytics and Analytics 360 have existing capabilities to help our customers measure lifetime value and understand user engagement for groups of their customers, but often your data needs to go deeper to help analyze your most important customers. Today, we’d like to announce a brand new capability in user-centric analysis to help address this: User Explorer. With User Explorer, you can now analyze the actions that an anonymous individual has taken on your site or app. These insights can help improve the user experience when people interact with your business online.

For example, you might want to understand how your top 10 customers interacted with your site or apps. With User Explorer you can get insights into visitors that spent the most with you over a given time frame and analyze each of their journeys on your site over that time period. This analysis surfaces individual interactions that can uncover new opportunities for optimizing their overall experience and path to conversion. In addition, User Explorer opens up new possibilities to help inform your marketing activities. For example, User Explorer can help you identify anonymous individual customers who have not converted recently and help them re-engage with your site using existing marketing channels.

Combine User Explorer with existing user-centric capabilities to help you go deeper and make your data actionable. With the high value users you've identified using the User Explorer, create a Google Analytics "Segment" so that you can apply this group of users across all your reports and understand how this group behaves across your site. Building an audience from these segments allows your business to remarket specifically to these customers. Using our Cohort Analysis report, will also help customers understand core user engagement metrics such as retention are performing for this same segment. When were they acquired and what percentage of them came back the next day? How many purchases does this group make day by day? In our Active User report you can see the number of users in this segment that were active in the last day, the last 7 days, and more to have a clear picture of the size of your customer base and its trend across time.

We hope this feature will help you gain the insight you need to build amazing experiences for your customers. Happy exploring!

Posted by Gene Chan, Google Analytics Team