Google Analytics Solutions

New brand, new home: Where to find Google Marketing Platform online

2018-07-25T13:00:00.000-04:00

When we brought together DoubleClick and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under Google Marketing Platform, we knew we had to make some changes to our websites, blogs and social media channels too. Now, the resources you’ve been reading and visiting over the years have been updated to reflect our new brand, so you can find the latest news, tips and more on our advertising and analytics solutions in one spot.

First, you should know that we’ve moved our content and product information to marketingplatform.google.com. You’ll also find product sign-in links there. (Those bookmarks you have for the old DoubleClick and Google Analytics websites should automatically redirect you.)

We’ve also launched new and improved blogs, with information for our product users and enterprise customers. We’ll be regularly updating them with product news and digital marketing insights. Bookmark us.

Of course, you can also connect with Google Marketing Platform on social:

Twitter: Follow @GMktgPlatform

LinkedIn: Follow Google Marketing Platform for updates

YouTube: Subscribe for new videos

You’ll find customer stories, major product announcements, research, reports and other advertising and analytics content intended for large enterprises.

And don’t worry: We haven’t changed the Google Analytics social channels. We will continue to bring you product news and tips on Google+, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook.

We hope you like our new home. Thanks for visiting, and come back soon!

Posted by Karen Budell, Google Analytics team

Google Measurement Partners: Trusted measurement solutions for the entire customer journey

2018-07-12T12:30:00.000-04:00

We believe that measurement you can trust is critical for brands trying to understand the impact of their marketing. But as the customer journey has become more complex, measurement has become increasingly challenging. And while Google strives to build great solutions, some marketers prefer to rely on third-party measurement solutions.

That’s why we’re announcing Google Measurement Partners, a program that brings together new and existing partnerships to offer brands a variety of options to measure their advertising media.

The program is launching with 20+ verified partners across seven specializations: viewability, reach, brand safety, brand lift, sales lift, app attribution, and marketing mix modeling. Partners offer various solutions that work across Google advertising products, including Google Marketing Platform (including Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360), Google Ads, YouTube, and more. Existing partner programs like App Attribution and Marketing Mix Modeling are now included in Google Measurement Partners.

Our launch partners are recognized leaders within their focus areas and provide solutions widely used by the industry. They meet rigorous standards for accuracy and use reliable methodologies to measure KPIs that matter for marketers. And we work closely with them to ensure the solutions respect user privacy.

With trust and transparency at its foundation, Measurement Partners continues our commitment to providing both quality and choice when it comes to measuring performance and helping marketers better understand their customers. Alongside our partners, we’ll keep working to establish commonly accepted standards and advanced measurement solutions that help raise the bar for the industry.

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

Better understand and reach your customers with new Cross Device capabilities in Google Analytics

2018-07-11T14:00:00.000-04:00

Today, we’re introducing new Cross Device features to Google Analytics. Analytics will now help you understand the journey your customers are taking across their devices as they interact with your website, giving you a complete view of the impact of your marketing so you can run smarter campaigns that deliver more tailored experiences to your customers.

Piecing together a more complete picture

Cross Device reporting in Analytics takes into account people who visit your website multiple times from different devices. Now, instead of seeing metrics in Analytics that show two separate sessions (e.g., one on desktop and the other on mobile), you’ll be able to see when users visited your website from two different devices. By understanding these device interactions as part of a broader customer experience, you can make more informed product and marketing decisions.

Say you’re a marketer for a travel company. With the new Acquisition Device report, you may find that a lot of your customers first come to your website on mobile to do their initial research before booking a trip later on desktop. Based on that insight, you might choose to prioritize mobile ad campaigns to reach people as they start to plan their trip.

In addition to the Acquisition Device report, you’ll soon have access to other Cross Device reports like Device Overlap, Device Paths and Channels. Our Cross Device reports only display aggregated and anonymized data from people who have opted in to personalized advertising (as always users can opt out at any time).

Reaching the right customers along the way

Analytics will also now help you create smarter audiences based on the actions people take on various devices. That way you can deliver more relevant and useful experiences.

Let’s say you’re a shoe retailer and you want to share a special promotion with your most loyal customers. You decide this means people who have purchased more than $500 in shoes on your website in the last 12 months using any of their devices. If a group of customers buy $300 worth of shoes on their phone and another $300 on their desktop, they’re just as valuable as another group who spend $600 on a single device, right?

Analytics now understands that these two groups of customers actually spent the same amount on your website, helping you create a more accurate audience list to reach the right customers. And spend isn’t the only way to segment and build audiences. You can also create remarketing campaigns to reach audiences based on how many times they visit your website across multiple devices.

Get started

To use these new Cross Device features, start by visiting the Admin section of your Analytics account and choose the setting to activate Google signals. (If you don’t see this setting, you will soon—we’ll roll it out to all Analytics accounts over the coming weeks.) There’s no need to update your website code or get additional assistance from a developer.

With these new beta features in Analytics, we hope you’ll quickly see that by better understanding the customer journey across devices, you can create more relevant and useful experiences for your customers.

Posted by Jesse Savage, Director, Product Management, Google Analytics

Putting machine learning into the hands of every advertiser

2018-07-10T11:00:00.000-04:00

This post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords blog

The ways people get things done are constantly changing, from finding the closest coffee shop to organizing family photos. Earlier this year, we explored how machine learning is being used to improve our consumer products and help people get stuff done.

In just one hour, we’ll share how we're helping marketers unlock more opportunities for their businesses with our largest deployment of machine learning in ads. We’ll explore how this technology works in our products and why it’s key to delivering the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands.

Join us live today at 9am PT (12pm ET).

Deliver more relevance with responsive search ads

Consumers today are more curious, more demanding, and they expect to get things done faster because of mobile. As a result, they expect your ads to be helpful and personalized. Doing this isn’t easy, especially at scale. That’s why we’re introducing responsive search ads. Responsive search ads combine your creativity with the power of Google’s machine learning to help you deliver relevant, valuable ads.

Simply provide up to 15 headlines and 4 description lines, and Google will do the rest. By testing different combinations, Google learns which ad creative performs best for any search query. So people searching for the same thing might see different ads based on context.

We know this kind of optimization works: on average, advertisers who use Google’s machine learning to test multiple creative see up to 15 percent more clicks.¹ Responsive search ads will start rolling out to advertisers over the next several months.

Maximize relevance and performance on YouTube

People watch over 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day. And increasingly, they’re tuning in for inspiration and information on purchases large and small. For example, nearly 1 in 2 car buyers say they turn to YouTube for information before their purchase.² And nearly 1 in 2 millennials go there for food preparation tips before deciding what ingredients to buy.³ That means it’s critical your video ads show at the right moment to the right audience.

Machine learning helps us turn that attention into results on YouTube. In the past, we’ve helped you optimize campaigns for views and impressions. Later this year, we’re rolling out Maximize lift to help you reach people who are most likely to consider your brand after seeing a video ad. This new Smart Bidding strategy is also powered by machine learning. It automatically adjusts bids at auction time to maximize the impact your video ads have on brand perception throughout the consumer journey.

Maximize lift is available now as a beta and will roll out to advertisers globally later this year.

Drive more foot traffic with Local campaigns

Whether they start their research on YouTube or Google, people still make the majority of their purchases in physical stores. In fact, mobile searches for “near me” have grown over 3X in the past two years⁴, and almost 80 percent of shoppers will go in store when there’s an item they want immediately.⁵ For many of you, that means driving foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar locations is critical—especially during key moments in the year, like in-store events or promotions.

Today we’re introducing Local campaigns: a new campaign type designed to drive store visits exclusively. Provide a few simple things—like your business locations and ad creative—and Google automatically optimizes your ads across properties to bring more customers into your store.

Show your business locations across Google properties and networks

Local campaigns will roll out to advertisers globally over the coming months.

Get the most from your Shopping campaigns

Earlier this year, we rolled out a new Shopping campaign type that optimizes performance based on your goals. These Smart Shopping campaign help you hit your revenue goals without the need to manually manage and bid to individual products. In the coming months, we’re improving them to optimize across multiple business goals.

Beyond maximize conversion value, you’ll also be able to select store visits or new customers as goals. Machine learning factors in the likelihood that a click will result in any of these outcomes and helps adjust bids accordingly.

Machine learning is also used to optimize where your Shopping ads show—on Google.com, Image Search, YouTube and millions of sites and apps across the web—and which products are featured. It takes into account a wide range of signals, like seasonal demand and pricing. Brands like GittiGidiyor, an eBay company, are using Smart Shopping campaigns to simplify how they manage their ads and deliver better results. GittiGidiyor was able to increase return on ad spend by 28 percent and drive 4 percent more sales, while saving time managing campaigns.

We’re also adding support for leading e-commerce platforms to help simplify campaign management. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to set up and manage Smart Shopping campaigns right from Shopify, in addition to Google Ads.

Tune in to see more

This is an important moment for marketers and we’re excited to be on this journey with you. Tune in at 9am PT (12pm ET) today to see it all unfold at Google Marketing Live.

For the latest news, follow the new Google Ads blog. And check out g.co/adsannouncements for more information about product updates and announcements.

1 Internal Google data.
2 Google / Kantar TNS, Auto CB Gearshift Study, US, 2017. n=312 new car buyers who watched online video.
3 Google / Ipsos, US, November 2017.
4 Internal Google data, U.S., July–Dec. 2015 vs. July–Dec. 2017.
5 Google/Ipsos, U.S., “Shopping Tracker,” Online survey, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days, Oct.–Dec. 2017.

Posted by Jerry Dischler; VP, Product Management

Watch the Google Marketing Live keynote

2018-07-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

Get ready for the ads, analytics, and platforms innovations live stream. Watch today at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET to learn more about Google’s latest announcements.

Join the conversation at #GoogleMarketingLive.

From basecamp to summit: Achieving new heights with Google Marketing Platform Partners

2018-06-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week we announced Google Marketing Platform, which brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite into a single solution to plan, buy, measure and optimize customer experiences across channels and devices. But we all know having great technology is only part of the solution. You also need people with the expertise and knowledge to fully take advantage of everything the technology enables. It’s not unlike relying on Sherpas to help guide you from basecamp to the summit. You may be able to make the ascent on your own, but engaging a team of experts with a track record of success greatly improves your chances of making the summit. That’s why we’re excited to announce Google Marketing Platform Partners, a new program designed to ensure you have access to all the resources you need to get the most value from Google Marketing Platform.

A robust ecosystem of skilled practitioners and companies

More than just a replacement for the existing programs, Google Analytics Certified Partners and the DoubleClick Certified Marketing Partners, the new program is designed to provide a robust ecosystem of resources, no matter your needs. The foundation of the program is scaled training and capability-building across all the Google Marketing Platform products. Whether you’re looking to build skills in-house or partner with a service provider, the program helps ensure the needed skills and resources are readily available. With more than 500 companies in the program at launch, including leading interactive agencies, system integrators, and top technology, data and media companies, you’ll be able to find a partner to support multiple facets of your business.

Three unique designations

From skill-building to broader, strategic partnerships and technology reselling, the program is designed to deliver the range and quality of expertise you expect:

Certified Individuals: To help increase the talent pool available supporting the Google Marketing Platform, individuals will be able to access a growing library of self-study materials and complete individual product certifications. Successful completion signals an individual’s expertise with specific Google Marketing Platform products.
Certified Companies: Certified Companies provide consulting, training, implementation, operations and technical support services for Google Marketing Platform. These companies not only have individuals certified in one or more products, but they have a high level of knowledge, practical and industry experience, as well as stellar customer references. These strict requirements ensure they have both the expertise and a proven ability to deliver results.
Sales Partners: Sales Partners are Google Marketing Platform experts, just like Certified Companies, but partner more closely with Google in providing consulting and support services, in addition to selling the technology on our behalf.

Get started today

Whether you’re looking to add talent to your team, up-level your current talent, or complement your team with a partner company, Platform Partners offers a trusted source to help close the gaps. And we’ll continue to build out additional skill-building resources, refine our certifications and add new partners covering more countries and languages. To get started on taking your marketing to even greater heights, browse our current Partners to find a partner equipped to help you get the most from your investment in Google Marketing Platform.

Posted by Chip Hall, Managing Director, Media Platforms

Introducing Google Marketing Platform

2018-06-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

The online world was very different when DoubleClick debuted in 1996. Things we take for granted today, like texting emoji, sharing funny YouTube videos, or taking smartphone selfies were all years away.

Of course, changes in technology have meant changes for digital marketers. There’s been an explosion of channels, formats and data. Consumers are also more aware of how they’re being marketed to and how their data is being used—and they want more control.

To address these new realities, marketers need tools that make it easy to get better results from their marketing in a way that puts privacy first.

This is why we’re announcing Google Marketing Platform. Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help you plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Google Marketing Platform helps you deliver more relevant and effective marketing, while ensuring that you respect your customers’ privacy and give them control over their data. In our recent survey of global marketing organizations, we learned that the #1 priority for marketers is to better understand their customers. By offering tools that make it easy to collaborate and share insights, Google Marketing Platform helps achieve this customer-first approach to marketing.

In the U.S., adidas has started working more collaboratively across their digital teams to share insights and get a deeper understanding of their customers. Chris Murphy, Head of Digital Experience, describes their approach:

“Our adidas teams work together in one environment where we can see audience insights, what creative we’re running and where, how it’s performing, and make changes almost in real time.”
Chris Murphy, Head of Digital Experience, adidas

Better results with ads plus analytics

Google Marketing Platform builds on existing integrations between the Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick advertiser products. Marketers have seen great results when they use ads and analytics technology together. For example, BookIt used Analytics 360 to uncover insights about the types of travelers interested in their brand and used these insights to create more relevant campaigns in Display & Video 360. The result was a 20 percent increase in revenue.

Now, with Google Marketing Platform, we’re introducing ways to make our products work even better together. For example, the new Integration Center helps you discover and easily setup valuable connections between products. Google Marketing Platform also supports 100+ integrations with exchanges, measurement solutions, and other technology providers. In short, you can choose what media you buy, how you buy it, and how you measure it.

Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360

With Google Marketing Platform, we’re also making changes to some of our advertising products.

Search Ads 360 is the new name for DoubleClick Search. Search Ads 360 will continue to help you plan, buy, and measure your search campaigns on Google and other search engines.

Display & Video 360 brings together features from our display advertising products: DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center. Display & Video 360 allows you to execute ad campaigns end-to-end in one place, creating efficiency in how you work and helping your teams do more together.

Don’t worry, Campaign Manager and other DoubleClick products aren’t going anywhere right away. We’ll gradually transition customers to Display & Video 360 as additional features become available.

Looking ahead

This is just the beginning of the next chapter in our platforms story. We’re committed to building solutions that help you achieve your marketing goals while meeting consumers' high expectations for privacy, transparency and control.

We’ll be sharing more about Google Marketing Platform and Display & Video 360 at Google Marketing Live. Sign up to watch the live streamed keynote on July 10, 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET.

Posted by Brad Bender, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising

Introducing simpler brands and solutions for advertisers and publishers

2018-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

We launched AdWords nearly 18 years ago with a simple goal—to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses. A search for eco-friendly stationery, quilting supplies, or for a service like a treehouse builder gave us an opportunity to deliver valuable ads that were useful and relevant in the moment. That idea was the start of our first advertising product, and led to the ads business we have today.

A lot has changed since then. Mobile is now a huge part of our everyday lives. People quickly switch from searching for products, to watching videos, browsing content, playing games and more. As a result, marketers have more opportunities to reach consumers across channels, screens and formats. The opportunity has never been more exciting, but it’s also never been more complex. Over the years, Google ads have evolved from helping marketers connect with people on Google Search, to helping them connect at every step of the consumer journey through text, video, display and more.

That’s why today we are introducing simpler brands and solutions for our advertising products: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager. These new brands will help advertisers and publishers of all sizes choose the right solutions for their businesses, making it even easier for them to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels. As part of this change, we are releasing new solutions that help advertisers get started with Google Ads and drive greater collaboration across teams.

Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads

The new Google Ads brand represents the full range of advertising capabilities we offer today—on Google.com and across our other properties, partner sites and apps—to help marketers connect with the billions of people finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more. For small businesses specifically, we’re introducing a new campaign type in Google Ads that makes it easier than ever to get started with online advertising. It brings the machine learning technology of Google Ads to small businesses and helps them get results without any heavy lifting—so they can stay focused on running their businesses. To learn more, visit this post.

We'll introduce more new campaign types at Google Marketing Live. Sign up to watch the livestream on July 10th.

Stronger collaboration with Google Marketing Platform

We’re enabling stronger collaboration for enterprise marketing teams by unifying our DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under a single brand: Google Marketing Platform. We’ve heard from marketers that there are real benefits to using ads and analytics technology together, including a better understanding of customers and better business results. Google Marketing Platform helps marketers achieve their goals by building on existing integrations between the Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick Digital Marketing. The platform helps marketers plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. To learn more, visit the Google Marketing Platform blog.

As part of Google Marketing Platform, we’re announcing Display & Video 360. Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center to allow creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute ad campaigns end-to-end in a single place. We’ll share more details about Display & Video 360 in the coming weeks, including a demo during the keynote at Google Marketing Live.

Google Ad Manager: A unified platform

We recognize that the way publishers monetize their content has changed. With people accessing content on multiple screens, and with advertisers’ growing demand for programmatic access, publishers need to be able to manage their businesses more simply and efficiently. That’s why for the last three years, we’ve been working to bring together DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange in a complete and unified programmatic platform under a new name–Google Ad Manager. With this evolution, we’re excited to do even more for our partners—earning them more money, more efficiently, wherever people are watching videos, playing games or engaging with content, and however advertisers are looking to work with them. To learn more, visit the Google Ad Manager blog.

Transparency and controls people can trust

We know that the media and technology advertisers and publishers choose to use impacts the relationships they have with their customers. As always, our commitment is to ensure that all of our products and platforms set the industry’s highest standard in giving people transparency and choice in the ads they see. For example, we recently announced new Ads Settings and expanded Why this ad? across all of our services, and almost all websites and apps that partner with us to show ads.

You'll start to see the new Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager brands over the next month.

We’ll be sharing more about these changes—and many other new Ads, Analytics and Platforms solutions designed to help you grow your business—at Google Marketing Live. Register now to watch live on July 10, 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET.
Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Measure Matters: A New Video Series to Keep You Up to Date on Your Data

2018-06-18T15:00:00.000-04:00

Whether you’re a data analyst, marketer, or e-commerce specialist, keeping on top of your data and making informed choices can make significant impact on your business. With that in mind, the Google Analytics team has introduced a new video series on YouTube: Measure Matters. Hosted by Analytics Advocates Krista Seiden and Louis Gray, the series covers best practices on leveraging our suite of products, rounds up highlights from the larger measurement community, and reviews recent product updates - so you never miss a thing, even with your busy schedule.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel or find our Measure Matters playlist: https://tinyurl.com/measurematters.

Measure Matters kicked off in May with a deep dive into Machine Learning, where we talked about automatic insights within Google Analytics, and whether the machines were coming for our jobs. (Spoiler alert: they’re not)

Our second episode covered finding your North Star, being sure to try new approaches and take risks, but to make choices based on data, rather than hacking your way through without a clear plan.

The third episode focused on how app developers can literally change the game through mobile app analytics, leveraging Google Analytics for Firebase.

Measure Matters Episode 3: Google Analytics for Firebase

What’s Coming Next

Measure Matters is scheduled to stream live every two weeks, with most events taking place at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday. Our next event will take place on Wednesday, June 27th, with the topic of Hearts, Charts and Shopping Carts -- how you can evolve your marketing measurement with data. See our playlist for upcoming and past episodes.

How You Can Participate

Measure Matters is not a one-way broadcast. Krista and Louis regularly stream live on YouTube and answer questions taken via YouTube or on Twitter, using the hashtag #measurematters. So send us your questions, ideas, or content you think belongs on our show, and it just may make our next episode.

Happy analyzing!
Posted by Krista Seiden and Louis Gray, Analytics Advocates

Deliver more relevant experiences with Optimize and AdWords

2018-05-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

Search is one of the most important acquisition channels in a marketer’s toolkit. But it’s not enough to just optimize search ads. It’s essential to consider the entire customer journey and keep people engaged once they reach your site. That’s why we introduced an integration between Optimize and AdWords to make it easy for marketers to test and create personalized landing pages.

How Spotify boosted conversions with Optimize and AdWords

Spotify, one of the world’s leading audio streaming services, is just one example of a company that has successfully used the Optimize and AdWords integration to drive more conversions from their search campaigns. Spotify discovered that the most streamed content in Germany was actually audiobooks, not music. So they wanted to show German users that they have a wide selection of audiobooks, and also that the experience of listening to them is even better with a premium subscription.

Using the AdWords integration with Optimize 360 (the enterprise version of Optimize), Spotify ran an experiment that focused on users in Germany who had searched for "audiobooks" on Google and clicked through on their search ad. Half of these users were shown a custom landing page dedicated to audiobooks, while the other half were shown the standard page. The custom landing page increased Spotify’s premium subscriptions by 24%.

”Before, it was a fairly slow process to get all these tests done. Now, with Optimize 360, we can have 20 or more tests running at the same time. It’s important that we test a lot, so it doesn’t matter if we fail as long as we keep on testing,” said Joost de Schepper, Spotify’s Head of Conversion Optimization.

Watch Spotify's video case study to learn more.

Driving your own results

Today, we’re announcing three new updates to make it easier for all marketers to realize the benefits that Spotify saw from easily testing and creating more relevant landing pages:

1. Connect Optimize with the new AdWords experience

You can connect Optimize to AdWords in just a few steps. Follow these instructions to get started.

Not using the new AdWords experience yet? Make the switch to gain access to more actionable insights and faster access to new features.

2. Link multiple AdWords accounts at once

For advertisers that have many AdWords accounts under a manager account, individually linking each of those sub-accounts to Optimize can be time consuming.

Now, you can link your manager account directly to Optimize. This will pull in all your AdWords accounts at once, allowing you to immediately connect data from separate campaigns, ad groups, and more. To get started, switch to the new AdWords experience, and then you’ll see an option to link your manager account in your Linked accounts, learn more.

3. Gain more flexibility with your keywords

You can now run a single experiment for multiple keywords, even if they’re across different campaigns and ad groups. For example, test the same landing page for users that search for “chocolate chip cookies” in your “desserts” ad group and for users that search for “iced coffee” in your “beverages” ad group.

With the Optimize and AdWords integration, driving results through A/B testing is fast and simple. Sign-up for an Optimize account at no charge and get started today.

Happy Optimizing!

Posted by Rotimi Iziduh, Product Manager, Google Optimize

Introducing Advanced Analysis in Google Analytics 360

2018-05-17T11:00:00.000-04:00

In our conversations with marketers, we consistently hear that they are looking to gain deeper insights into the customer journey and then turn those insights into better customer experiences.

Today we’re excited to announce Advanced Analysis, a new tool in beta for Google Analytics 360 customers. Advanced Analysis offers more detailed analysis techniques and deeper exploration capabilities, so you can improve your understanding of how people interact with your site and use those insights to deliver better experiences and reach your business goals.

Our top priority is to help you discover business insights while respecting user privacy. So, as with all Analytics capabilities, data utilized in Advanced Analysis is treated confidentially and securely.

Three ways to support sophisticated analysis

Advanced Analysis offers three new powerful techniques to help surface actionable insights about how people use your site: Exploration, Funnel Analysis, and Segment Overlap. And you can build audiences using any of the techniques, making it seamless to take action on the learnings that come out of your analysis.

With the Exploration technique, deeper analysis can be done in just a few clicks. Easily drag and drop multiple variables (segments, dimensions, and metrics) into the analysis canvas and see instant visualizations of your data. Exploration allows you to view and compare multiple analysis tabs in a single view — helping you test and refine your insights as you go.

Create multiple tabs and compare your analyses.

Use the Funnel Analysis technique to understand the steps users take to complete actions on your site. For example, you can quickly see how users progress through your purchase process and identify steps where it can be improved. With the current Custom Funnels in Analytics 360, you can add up to 5 steps (e.g. Visited Site, Added Product to Cart, Started Checkout, Started Payment, Purchased), but Advanced Analysis lets you add up to 10 steps. These extra steps - along with the ability to add multiple segments and dimension breakdowns - give you a deeper look at how different groups of people interact with your site.

The Segment Overlap technique allows you to see how segments you’ve created in Analytics 360 intersect with one another. For example, suppose you ran a major display campaign last month that led to a lot of new first-time purchasers, and now you want to know if they’re sticking around to become repeat customers. Segment Overlap allows you to compare how much this group of first-time buyers overlaps with users who have made a purchase in the past month and with users who are now returning to your site.

See overlap between different audience segments.

Advanced Analysis in action

Let’s review an example of how you can use these techniques together to uncover helpful new insights and put them into action. Imagine you manage an ecommerce store that sells to people around the world. You want to know if there are opportunities to improve your site experience for international customers and drive more sales.

With Advanced Analysis, you can get those answers easily. Starting with Exploration, you organize your Analytics 360 data to show number of users and revenue by country. You realize that you have a lot of new users in India but no revenue -- so there may be an opportunity to improve the checkout process and boost conversions.

Organize data by country to determine your top countries by traffic.

From there, you investigate further with the Funnels technique to compare conversion rates at each step of your purchase funnel for US and India users. In doing so, you see there is a steep drop in completion rate on the checkout step for the India group. This confirms what you suspected, that the checkout flow can be improved for these users.

With just two clicks, you build an audience of India users who have added a product to their cart but didn’t purchase. Once the audience is created, you can use Optimize 360 to test a new checkout experience for that group. And then, with just a few more clicks in Analytics 360, you can push that audience to AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to run a remarketing campaign, taking advantage of the now optimized checkout flow.

Identify conversion rate drop off, and build a custom audience based on that segment.

For enterprises looking to better understand customer journeys, Advanced Analysis helps surface hard-to-find insights and makes it easy to put those insights into action. Advanced Analysis will be rolling out over the coming weeks as a beta to all Analytics 360 users.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Dan Stone, Product Manager, Google Analytics 360

Tune in on July 10, 2018 as we announce our latest product innovations

2018-05-16T12:45:00.000-04:00

Sign up to join the live streamed keynote at Google Marketing Live

When: Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 9 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET

Duration: 1 hour

Where: Here on the Analytics blog

It’s that time of year again! Join us as we unveil the latest Analytics, Ads and Platforms innovations at Google Marketing Live. Get a first look at new features and tools that will help you transform your business. Also gain access to the latest insights and trends that are shaping the future of the industry.

Register for the keynote live stream here. We’ll also make a recording available after the live stream for advertisers in other time zones.

Until then, subscribe to Think With Google, and follow us on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for a sneak peek of what’s coming soon.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Introducing the Data Studio Community Connector Codelab

2018-05-07T18:11:00.000-04:00

Posted by Minhaz Kazi, Developer Advocate, Google Data Studio

Data Studio is Google's free next gen business intelligence and data visualization platform. Community Connectors for Data Studio let you build connectors to any internet-accessible data source using Google Apps Script. You can build Community Connectors for commercial, enterprise, and personal use. Learn how to build Community Connectors using the Data Studio Community Connector Codelab.

Use the Community Connector Codelab

The Community Connector Codelab explains how Community Connectors work and provides a step by step tutorial for creating your first Community Connector. You can get started if you have a basic understanding of Javascript and web APIs. You should be able to build your first connector in 30 mins using the Codelab.

If you have previously imported data into Google Sheets using Apps Script, you can use this Codelab to get familiar with the Community Connectors and quickly port your code to fetch your data directly into Data Studio.

Why create your own Community Connector

Community Connectors can help you to quickly deliver an end-to-end visualization solution that is user-friendly and delivers high user value with low development efforts. Community Connectors can help you build a reporting solution for personal, public, enterprise, or commercial data, and also do explanatory visualizations.

If you provide a web based service to customers, you can create template dashboards or even let your users create their own visualization based on the users' data from your service.
Within an enterprise, you can create serverless and highly scalable reporting solutions where you have complete control over your data and sharing features.
You can create an aggregate view of all your metrics across different commercial platforms and service providers while providing drill down capabilities.
You can create connectors to public and open datasets. Sharing these connectors will enable other users to quickly gain access to these datasets and dive into analysis directly without writing any code.

By building a Community Connector, you can go from scratch to a push button customized dashboard solution for your service in a matter of hours.

The following dashboard uses Community Connectors to fetch data from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Twitter. Try using the date filter to view changes across all sources:

This dashboard uses the following Community Connectors:

You can build your own connector to any preferred service and publish it in the Community Connector gallery. The Community Connector gallery now has over 70 Partner Connectors connecting to more than 400 data sources.

Once you have completed the Codelab, view the Community Connector documentation and sample code on the Data Studio open source repository to build your own connector.

Introducing the Google Analytics Sample Dataset for BigQuery

2018-03-30T18:30:00.000-04:00

The Google Analytics 360 integration with Google BigQuery gives analysts the opportunity to glean new business insights by accessing session and hit level data and combining it with separate data sets. Organizations and developers can analyze unsampled analytics data in seconds through BigQuery, a web service that lets developers and businesses conduct interactive analysis of big data sets and tap into powerful data analytics.

To help you learn or teach practical experience with analyzing analytics data in BigQuery, we are pleased to announce the availability of a Google Analytics sample dataset. This is accessible directly through the BigQuery interface. The dataset includes data from the Google Merchandise Store, an Ecommerce site that sells Google branded merchandise. The typical Google Analytics 360 data you would expect to see such as AdWords, Goals and Enhanced Ecommerce data can be queried. You can see the fields part of the export schema that you can query here.

Google Analytics Sample Dataset for BigQuery

When it comes to helping businesses ask advanced questions on unsampled Google Analytics data, we like to use BigQuery. Its fast and scalable for big data analytics. When providing trainings on the benefits of the Google Analytics 360 and BigQuery integration, there is nothing like having a high quality dataset with sufficient volume to be meaningful. That's why we are so pleased to see the public availability of a robust Google Analytics sample dataset with marketing and ecommerce data. Everyone can experience big data analytics!
- Doug Hall, Director of Analytics, Conversion Works

Self-Learning
You can use the sample dataset to learn how granular information can be extracted from analytics data in BigQuery. We’ve created this guide to help you create queries to find answers to the following for the Google Merchandise Store:

What is the average number of transactions per purchaser?
What is the percentage of stock sold per product?
What is the average bounce rate per marketing channel segmented by purchasers?
What are the products purchased by customers who previously purchased a particular product?
What is the average number of user interactions before a purchase?

Education Programs

If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use BigQuery, then we encourage you to use the sample dataset as a tool. You can use it to create task based assessments and other learning materials for your students. We’ve started to do just that by integrating it into our education courses.

The Analytics Academy provides an introduction to BigQuery in their Getting Started with Google Analytics 360 course. The Data Insights course by the Google Cloud team provides an in-depth look at BigQuery with practical exercises.

Access the Dataset
You can learn more about the dataset including how to get access in this help article. If you need some help, please let us know through the Advertiser Community. Share any feature requests or ideas to make the dataset more useful. We hope the dataset gives you a practical way to learn about the benefits of analysing Google Analytics data in BigQuery.

Happy analyzing!
Posted by Deepak Aujla, Program Manager, Google Analytics Solutions

Is Optimize set up correctly on your site? Let us double-check for you.

2018-03-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

Google Optimize helps businesses determine which website experiences work best for their customers. With easy-to-use A/B testing capabilities, marketers can use Optimize to create and launch a test in minutes — and manage the entire process on their own.

A/B testing with tools like Optimize drives results. In a recent survey, 72% of marketers found A/B testing to be a highly valuable method for improving conversion rates.

But we’ve heard from businesses that while testing in Optimize is easy, setting it up could be easier.

Good news: We’re introducing a new feature that helps make sure Optimize is set up and working the way it’s supposed to.

Let Optimize double-check your code

With Installation Diagnostics, Optimize will automatically alert and advise you on potential issues with your Optimize code each time you create a test. At a glance, you’ll see if your Optimize setup is correct and if you’re ready to run a test.

Let’s say you create a new page on your site but forget to add the Optimize code. Later, when you are creating a test for that page, Optimize will tell you that the necessary code isn’t installed. You’ll have the opportunity to fix the issue and then launch your test. Moving forward, you can be confident that your test results won’t be disrupted by an incorrect setup.

Optimize will alert you about other issues too - including if Google Analytics code isn’t installed on a page, or if an old version of Analytics code is installed. Then you can make changes to ensure you’ll be able to measure the performance of your experiment. Learn more.

Try it yourself

Today’s top businesses are testing their way to success. They’re valuing data over opinions. They’re constantly learning — even from failures and mistakes. And they’re using their findings to improve the customer experience.

Whether your business is big, small, or somewhere in between, you can follow their lead. Try Optimize now and get ready to gain deep insights about your customers so you can enhance their web experiences like never before.

Posted by Rotimi Iziduh, Product Manager, Google Optimize

Google Surveys goes global

2018-03-28T09:03:00.000-04:00

We're excited to announce that you can now survey people in over 50 countries around the globe with Google Surveys.

When we first launched Google Surveys in 2012 (we called ourselves Google Consumer Surveys back then), our goal was to put quality market research in the hands of businesses of all sizes. Market research was costly and time-consuming in those days, and that made it hard for many companies to make decisions based on what their customers were actually thinking.

Google Surveys made it easy to keep your finger on the pulse of your customers with fast, reliable insights from real people. Since then, we've continued making improvements to the product. We also launched Surveys 360, our enterprise version, with advanced targeting, reporting, and sharing features.

And now users of both versions can reach people in more than 50 countries. Wondering if your new product line should launch in Portugal? Stop guessing and find out. Lacking competitive intel in India? Not anymore. Trying to convince your boss that your idea is better? We can help with that.

"As a global company, we're especially excited about the targeting expansion to over 50 new countries. We'll be using Google Surveys to run consumer research and brand awareness studies in markets that have historically been difficult for researchers to access."

Frank Kelly, SVP B2B, Lightspeed Research

These new targeting choices are available starting today. Hear more from our product team in this video:

To learn more about the new country options, see our help center article.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Michael Cumberbatch, Product Manager, Google Surveys team

Tag Manager 360: From Approvals to Zones

2018-03-14T16:00:00.000-04:00

Whether you’re a small business with a single site or a large enterprise with many complex sites and apps, Google Tag Manager makes it easier to implement and maintain the tags for all your marketing and measurement tools.

Over the past few years, we've continued to improve the core functionality of Tag Manager for all users while also introducing enterprise features for customers with more advanced needs.

For Tag Manager 360 customers, we recently added Approvals functionality, enabling enterprise users to involve more stakeholders in the tagging process without needing to give them full Publish access.

Submit Changes screen in Tag Manager 360 showing how users with Edit access can request approval.

Using Approvals, you can limit select users to requesting approval for tagging changes. Then you can use the built-in commenting capability to work back and forth with them to get things just right.

Today we’re excited to announce another new feature that gives you even more control over your tagging: Zones for Tag Manager 360!

With Zones, you can give users access to publish certain types of tags on certain parts of your site. Zones work by letting you link additional containers within specified page boundaries.

Zone configuration screen in Tag Manager 360 highlighting the steps of linking containers, defining zone boundaries, and optionally turning on type restrictions.

When a page loads within the zone boundaries, any containers linked within the zone will load alongside your main container. For example, you could give your marketing team and agencies Publish access to their own containers, but limit them to only your marketing pages. This gives them the flexibility to manage their tagging independently and reduces work for admins and developers.

For even more control, you can turn on Type Restrictions to choose what types of tags, triggers, and variables will work from containers within a zone.

Type Restrictions for a Zone in Tag Manager 360 highlighting how individual tag types can be allowed or restricted.

So, whether you’re making a few quick updates to who can publish which tags or building a comprehensive tagging plan for a network of global, regional, and local websites, Zones gives you more power and flexibility to set up the right tagging workflows for your organization.

If you’re already a Tag Manager 360 customer, you’ll see a new Zones section in the left sidebar of your containers starting today. Visit our help center to learn more about Zones.

Want to become a Tag Manager 360 customer? If you’re already a customer of another Google Analytics 360 Suite product, you can reach out to your Account Manager. If you’re brand new to the Analytics 360 Suite, visit our website to learn more.

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

New Analytics Academy course: Getting Started With Google Analytics 360

2018-03-14T13:00:00.000-04:00

Today, we are introducing a new course in Analytics Academy: Getting Started With Google Analytics 360.

Krista Seiden and Ashish Vij Introduce Getting Started With Google Analytics 360 (Video)

In this course, you will join instructors Ashish Vij and Krista Seiden as you learn key Google Analytics 360 features such as Roll-Up Reporting, Custom Funnels, Unsampled Reports, and Custom Tables. You'll gain insight into how you can benefit from reporting with BigQuery and native integrations with DoubleClick products, and we will provide you with real-world examples to illustrate how you can leverage Analytics 360’s features and integrations to drive performance and achieve your business goals.

By participating in the course, you’ll learn how to:

Set up Roll-Up Reporting
Analyze customer journeys with Custom Funnels
Leverage Unsampled Reports and Custom Tables
Analyze big data with BigQuery Export
Evaluate marketing performance with DoubleClick reporting integrations

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Helen Huang & The Google Analytics Education Team

More reasons to get started with Google Optimize

2018-03-01T14:19:00.001-05:00

With Google Optimize, we want to empower any sized business – big or small – to take steps to make their sites better. Since releasing Optimize last year, we’ve been able to help many businesses identify and provide better site experiences experiences to their users – for free. Today, we’re pleased to announce two new initiatives that will help businesses take even bigger steps when improving their sites.

Higher experiment limit

Many of our users have given us the feedback that the current limit of 3 simultaneous running experiments is too low. This limit forces them to make difficult tradeoffs about which tests and customer segments should be prioritized. To help address this, we will soon be increasing this limit to 5 experiments. We believe this will give you more opportunity to use Optimize across your entire site.

New “Getting started with Google Optimize” video series

For many, running website tests may appear to be a daunting task. To make things easier, for anyone completely new to testing or recently started using Optimize, we’ve created a “Getting started with Google Optimize” video series. This will help you start testing in no time. Plus, you can watch the entire series in less than 15 minutes!

Optimize Overview: Quick primer on what Optimize is and how it can help you

Set up your account: Shows you how to link to Google Analytics and get your site ready to run tests

Create your first experiment: Use the Optimize editor to change your site without writing any code

Understanding your results: See how Optimize clearly tells you which changes worked best

Once you’re done watching the video series, be sure to create an Optimize account, if you don’t already have one.

We hope you like these changes. Stay tuned, because there are more improvements coming!

Posted by Rotimi Iziduh, Product Manager, Google Optimize

Richer Google Analytics User Management

2018-02-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

Today we are introducing more powerful ways to manage access to your Analytics accounts: user groups inside Google Analytics, and enforceable user policies. These new features increase your ability to tightly manage who has access to your data, and amplify the impact of the user management features we launched last year.

User Groups

User groups can now be created from and used within Google Analytics, simplifying user management across teams of people. This is a big time saver if you find yourself repeatedly giving out similar permissions to many people, and simplifies granting permissions as individuals rotate into or out of a team.

To start with user groups, visit either Suite Home or Google Analytics, navigate to the user management section, and click the “+” button. You will then see an option to add new groups, which will walk you through creating a user group, adding people to it, and assigning permissions to the group. Here is a full list of steps to make a user group.

Google Analytics User Management page highlighting the new option to create a user group

Enforced User Policies

Google Analytics 360 Suite user policies let you define which users will have access to your Analytics accounts, and which do not. When a user violates a policy, you will be warned of this through the user management section in Google Analytics or Suite Home and have the option to remove that user from your organization.

We have enhanced these policies so you can choose to block policy-violating users from being added to your Analytics accounts. While policies aren’t enforced by default, you have the option to block violator additions. When you create or edit your organization’s user policy, you will see a toggle switch like the one below:

User policy setup showcasing the new enforced policy option

User groups and enforced user policies are supported in Google Analytics today, and support for more products is coming, as we continue to plan features that help customers better manage access to their critical business data.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Product Manager Google Analytics 360 Suite

Lessons from leaders: A data-driven approach helps deliver engaging, relevant messages

2018-02-22T18:27:00.000-05:00

As marketers, we know how important it is to understand our customers and reach them at just the right moment. We also know that consumers have more control of their digital environments than ever — and that they expect us to consistently make recommendations in line with their interests, personalities, and behaviors.¹ So how can we regularly communicate in a relevant way with all of our customers?

According to our new report on MIT Sloan Management Review, success starts with a strategy that’s backed by data. In the report, The Data-Driven Transformation, we speak with marketing leaders from Bayer, Tapestry Inc. (the parent brand for Coach, kate spade new york, and Stuart Weitzman), and Sprint. They open up with first-hand insights about transforming their teams to be more efficient, accurate, and agile. Here’s a few key insights from the research — and some words of wisdom from these top analytics pros.

Move toward a unified technology stack — and educate as you go

A recent study by the Association of National Advertisers showed that top marketing performers are the same companies that spend the most money on marketing technology.² In many ways, their investments are paying off, but for those still using separate solutions for separate channels, there’s greater potential. Unifying their tech under a single, shared system could bring fuller, more tailored consumer insights — not to mention an easier way to evaluate what’s working and what’s not.

Jeff Rasp, director of digital strategy for Bayer’s Consumer Health division, did just that, helping reimagine his team’s approach to data. He oversaw the creation of a new marketing insights platform to consolidate data under a single customer ID, and also helped build the company’s first attribution model to evaluate their success.

Assemble teams with the analytics skills to uncover actionable insights

To deliver the right messages at the right times, marketing organizations need data scientists, mobile developers, and other data professionals. For Rob Roy, chief digital officer at Sprint, that meant building a new in-house analytics team to take operations over from external partners.

“We needed to get the right people who know how to build the architecture to house all the data,” Roy explains.

Once he found them, Sprint worked to integrate data across channels — from web and social media to retail and display — allowing the team more advanced customer segmentation capabilities.

Encourage collaboration across teams

A recent McKinsey study showed that 51% of top-performing marketers were part of a networked organization — one where cross-functional teams come together as needed. Parinaz Vahabzadeh, VP of global data labs at Tapestry, is one leader who’s made sure her team collaborates as a single unit.

“Our mandate is to democratize the data,” explains Vahabzadeh. “As a small, centralized team, we need to find ways to focus on the most impactful projects and also enable the broader teams to run analytics independently.”

Find out more

Want the full stories behind how these three brands are reimagining what they can do with data to reach their customers in relevant ways? Download the full report to learn more.

1-2 MIT SMR Custom Studio/Google, “The Data Driven Transformation,” January 2018

Posted by Matt Earp, Content Marketing Strategist, Google Analytics team

Test and Build for Mobile with Google Optimize

2018-02-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

From buying new shoes to booking weekend getaways, mobile can make life more convenient for consumers — and create big wins for marketers. While 40% of consumers will leave a web page that takes longer than three seconds to load, 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile.¹ That's why getting your mobile site in shape is more important than ever.

To create the seamless and responsive mobile site that consumers expect, you need the right tools, like Google Optimize. Optimize makes it easy to test different elements of your site to find the winning combination for the best mobile site possible. Now it’s even easier with our new responsive visual editor – and be sure to read on and learn how two of our clients found mobile success with Optimize 360, our enterprise version.

New! Preview your mobile site on any screen size

While almost everyone has a mobile device, there are so many variations and screen sizes that it’s hard to take a one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing your mobile site. Now, once you’ve created your test page, you can use the new responsive editor to immediately preview what it looks like on any screen size. Or, if you want to see how it appears on a specific device, like a Nexus 7 or iPad, we’ve added more devices that you can select to preview. Learn more about the visual editor here.

Turn ideas to tests quickly

The responsive visual editor in Optimize is just one solution to help marketers succeed on mobile. Our enterprise version, Optimize 360, makes it easy to make improvements to mobile sites efficiently and rapidly.

Dutch airline carrier Transavia Airlines turned to Optimize 360 to try out different ideas on its mobile site. In fact, the team runs about 10 A/B tests each month on the site, all without having to spend significant time or effort. And the best part? Time spent on analyzing the success of site tests has fallen by 50%. This allows Transavia to focus more on testing to improve its mobile site. Learn more in the full case study.

The path to mobile excellence starts with the customer journey

Need some help determining what should test on your mobile site? Google Analytics 360 is a great place to start. You’ll be able to analyze any customer interaction, from search to checkout, to figure out which points of your purchase process need help. Then, once you’ve determined where your site needs work, using Optimize 360 to take action is simple, since it’s natively integrated with Analytics 360.

This is exactly how fashion retailer Mango used Analytics 360 and Optimize 360 to tackle its mobile site: After discovering that mobile visits to its online store had skyrocketed 50% year over year, Mango decided to dig a little deeper. In Analytics 360 Mango discovered that while many consumers browsed product listing pages, few were taking the next step to add products to their shopping cart. To reduce steps to checkout, Mango used Optimize 360 to include an “Add” button to product listing pages. This increased the number of users adding products to their carts by 49%. Find out more in the full case study.

Ready to optimize your own mobile site?

Start testing new mobile experiences with the responsive visual editor in Optimize. This update is one that can help marketers do more on mobile — because whether it’s changing a button or fine-tuning a homepage with quick A/B tests, we’ve learned that small tweaks can make a big impact.

And, if you haven’t already, sign up for a free Optimize account and give it a try.

¹ Google / Purchased: "How Brand Experiences Inspire Consumer Action" April 2017. US Smartphone Owners 18+ = 2010, Brand Experiences = 17,726.

Posted by Tiffany Siu, Product Marketing Manager, Google Optimize

Integration of Salesforce Sales Cloud to Google Analytics 360 is now available

2018-01-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

In November we announced a partnership with Salesforce, including a plan to build new integrations between Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, seamlessly connecting sales, marketing and advertising data for the first time.

Today we're introducing the first of these integrations: sales pipeline data from Sales Cloud (e.g. leads, opportunities) can now be imported directly into Analytics 360, so any marketer in a business that manages leads can see a more complete view of the customer’s path to conversion and quickly take action to engage them at the right moment. Enterprises such as Rackspace and Carbonite are already benefiting from this integration, saving hours piecing together data and reaching new, more valuable audiences.

A complete view of the customer journey

We often hear from marketers how difficult it is to connect online and offline customer interactions in order to see a complete view of a customer’s journey — and they also tell us how helpful it would be if they could do it successfully. Good news: with the turnkey integration between Sales Cloud and Analytics 360, marketers can now easily combine offline sales data with their digital analytics data so they can see a complete view of the conversion funnel.

This opens up new ways to understand how customers engage with brands and how marketing programs perform. For example, marketers can explore the relationship between the traffic source for online leads (e.g. organic search vs. paid search vs. email) and the quality of those leads, as measured by how they progress through the sales pipeline.

Example of a report in Google Analytics 360 showing the relationship between the traffic source for online leads and the progression of those leads through the sales pipeline, as tracked in Salesforce

With the built-in connection between Analytics 360 and BigQuery, Google Cloud's enterprise data warehouse, marketers can also easily move Sales Cloud data from Analytics 360 into Google Cloud to join it with other datasets and unlock BigQuery's powerful set of tools for identifying insights.

Better marketing outcomes

More visibility into the customer journey is great — but the real value comes from being able to take action. For example, if one source of site traffic consistently delivers leads that are higher quality than another source, budget can be shifted to drive more of the better traffic.

The built-in connections between Analytics 360 and Google’s media buying platforms offer additional ways to find new customers and drive incremental revenue. Marketers can use the tools in AdWords and DoubleClick Search to optimize their bidding on search ads based on the goal of actual sales (offline conversions tracked in Salesforce) rather than just basic website leads. Or they can create an audience list in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager so their display ads reach people with similar characteristics.

“People are doing backflips over this”

Rackspace® is a provider of managed cloud services that relies heavily on digital marketing channels to capture interest from potential customers and drive new business. Rackspace has been beta testing the Sales Cloud to Analytics 360 integration and the team has already seen significant benefits from connecting their sales pipeline reporting to their digital marketing analytics.

“Being able to easily see our sales pipeline data in Google Analytics and get complete funnel reports with no manual work has been a game changer. We’re now able to quickly diagnose changes in lead volume and quality, and trace them back to our marketing investments in a way that was not possible before.

We’re getting better insights into our marketing performance and getting those insights much more quickly than when we were trying to stitch this together manually — saving 8-10 hours each week and reducing the lag from importing offline conversion data from 4-6 weeks to virtually real-time. People are doing backflips over this!” - Lara Indrikovs, Senior Manager, Digital Insights & Analytics

Carbonite offers cloud data back-up services that help protect personal and business data from data loss. Carbonite has also been beta testing the Sales Cloud integration and is gearing up to change their media activation strategy to take advantage of the new insights that are now available to them.

“We’re really excited about the opportunity to leverage Salesforce data in Google Analytics and our AdWords media campaigns. This will allow us to activate pipeline acceleration and lookalike prospecting campaigns based on the profiles of companies that achieved key milestones in our customer lifecycle after becoming a lead. We expect this new approach will improve our ROI by shifting our targeting capabilities towards more valuable leads and opportunities.” - Norman Guadagno, SVP of Marketing

What's next?

Over the next few months we’ll be making additional Sales Cloud data available in Analytics 360, giving marketers even more intelligence. For example:

Product-specific data will make it possible to run remarketing campaigns that present cross-sell or up-sell offers to customers based on products previously ordered
Data predicting the likelihood of lead conversion will let marketers create audience lists of prospects who have a high likelihood of purchasing, which can be used for remarketing (to move people along the sales funnel) or prospecting
Lifetime value data can be used as a diagnostic tool to provide insight into which marketing channel brings in the highest value customers

As 2018 moves on, we'll continue to roll out more of the Salesforce-Analytics 360 integrations announced back in November. Soon marketers will be able to include conversion data from Sales Cloud in Google Attribution 360 for more accurate data-driven attribution modeling, surface data from Analytics 360 in Marketing Cloud for a more complete understanding of campaign performance, and make audiences created in Analytics 360 available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels like email.

Contact us here if you are not yet using Analytics 360 and would like to learn more. Current customers can talk to your account team or Certified Analytics Partner about developing a plan for implementing these integrations.

Stay tuned, it's going to be a big year!
Kyle Harrison, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics

How to Turn Your Team’s Data Curiosity into Results

2017-12-20T12:08:00.000-05:00

As a data expert, you know that most great ideas don’t strike like a bolt of lightning. They start with something slower: simple curiosity. They grow from “what if” to the seeds of an idea and, if you’re lucky, into some big next steps.

Many people on your team might also have these “what if” ideas too. For example, maybe they’ve got an insight about how to optimize your marketing plans and drive better results. But they might need a little nudge to turn those ideas into something bigger. For your organization to consistently get from insight to action, it’s important to give people at all levels the skills and training they need to explore their hunches using data. After all, you never know where your company’s next great idea might come from.

Here are three ways you can spread your data expertise to others, helping people beyond just a small team of go-to analytics experts.

1. Make training a priority

By analyzing the data that drives your business, anyone on your team can uncover how, when, and where consumers interact with your brand. That helps spread a deeper understanding of the customer journey throughout your organization. But to get there, you’ll need support to make data and analytics a priority — from the top down. In a recent study conducted by Google and Econsultancy, nearly two-thirds of leading organizations said that their executives treat data-driven insights as more valuable than gut instinct.¹

One way to have an impact? Help executives create a training plan by determining what your team needs to know in order to analyze the data they’ve collected. By identifying the gaps between what they already know and what they still need to learn, you’ll have the insights you need to provide your team with the right level of training. Once you run a training session, record it and keep it online for later use, and share it with anyone who couldn’t make the meeting.

2. Share your success

If you’re a go-to data expert on your team, sharing your success is one of the most powerful tools you have to spread data literacy. Look for time to recap the results of a recent A/B test and show your team members how you achieved results. That will get them excited about what they can do with data. Also, don’t be shy — at every opportunity, recognize and reward others you see using data effectively. This helps build enthusiasm. Finally, use your knowledge and demonstrate proven business results to communicate what data can do.

As an analyst, you may even want to start thinking of your role in a new light. Analysts don’t just pull reports — they weave data narratives and interpret how data influences business results. That brings data to life and shows its value to the whole team. By sharing openly, you’ll give colleagues the tools they need to answer burning questions or dig deeper into their own hypotheses.

Looking for more ways to turn everyone one your team into a data-savvy marketer? We put together an infographic with 5 key steps to help get you there.

3. Work together across teams

While it might be tempting to use your data powers to make your own team shine, data is actually better when it’s used across teams. In fact, marketing leaders are 1.6X as likely as their mainstream counterparts to strongly agree that open access to data leads to higher business performance.²

You can take it one step further. Use your expertise to create and share easy-to-understand data reports outside your team. It’s a great way to help beginners make sense of recommendations and insights, and to get an idea for productive ways to use them.

When sharing your data, make sure it’s organized and easy for all teams to access and understand. Include clear definitions and common metrics so that everyone is on the same page. To go above and beyond, tailor insights specifically for different teams. That way they can get a deeper understanding of the report’s value. And don’t forget to consider the ways in which you deliver the data — every team has its own preferred channels for communicating.

Finally, don’t stop reaching out once you’ve worked to break down data silos in your company. It takes continued, active steps to keep data flowing across an organization.

With training in data analytics, every member of your team can support big ideas with real data. That helps ensure those ideas are taken seriously. And, in turn, it encourages your team to continue bringing new, diverse points of view to the table.

For more tips on sharing data expertise across your company, check out our Data-Driven Marketer's Strategic Playbook.

^1-2 Econsultancy/Google, "The Customer Experience is Written in Data", May 2017, U.S. (n=677 marketing and measurement executives at companies with over $250M in revenues, primarily in North America; n=199 leading marketers who reported marketing significantly exceeded top business goal in 2016, n=478 mainstream marketers (remainder of the sample), May 2017

Posted by Matt Earp, Content Marketing Strategist, Google Analytics team

New ways to measure your users in Google Analytics

2017-12-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

Almost 90% of marketing executives say that understanding user journeys across channels and devices is critical to marketing success.¹

Today's customers have incredibly high expectations for personalized and relevant experiences from brands. That's why Google Analytics keeps working to better measure the full customer journey in all its complexity.

Let's look at four new Analytics features that are all about helping businesses understand users so they can deliver more personalized site experiences.

Focus on your users in reporting

Analytics standard reports have been updated to focus on your users. User metrics are an essential way to understand engagement with your customers, especially those who may have multiple sessions across multiple days.

With our updated standard reporting, you can see immediately, for instance, how many users are coming to your site from paid search ― in addition to seeing the number of sessions.

Users are now included in Analytics standard reports.

To enable this update, sign in to your account and go to Admin > Property Settings and then choose the toggle switch labeled Enable Users In Reporting.

For other ways to analyze by user, try existing reports like Active Users, Cohort Analysis, and Lifetime Value. In case you're wondering, session metrics will continue to be available in standard reporting ― that's not changing. Learn more about audience reports.

Measure lifetime metrics and dimensions for every user

Another tool that marketers can use to analyze visitors on an individual level is User Explorer. And now we've added something new: lifetime metrics and dimensions for individual users (based on the lifetime of their cookie). These new metrics and dimensions will give Analytics users a much more detailed way to measure visitors and customers.

New lifetime metrics and dimensions for individual users in User Explorer.

For example, you can look back and see the total amount of time an individual user has spent or the total number of transactions an individual user has made on your website. You'll also see new dimensions that show data such as when a user made their first visit to your site and which channel acquired them.

The new lifetime metrics and dimensions are already available in your Analytics account. Learn more about User Explorer.

Audiences in reporting

For marketers who live and breathe audiences ― which is most of us ― the breathing just got easier. We've added the option to publish any audience to a new report in Analytics that should help make every audience easier to understand.

Publish your audiences into Analytics and then view reporting in the Audiences report.

You can now go to the new Audiences report and see a cross-channel view of the audiences you’ve created in Analytics. This is a change from the past, where you could create audiences in Analytics and export those audiences to other products like AdWords, but you weren’t able to publish audiences to Analytics for reporting.

For instance, you might decide to publish an audience to Analytics so that you can see all users who have purchased within the last 12 months but not during the last 2.

You can find the new Audience report in your Analytics account. Learn more about Audiences in reporting.

Reach users most likely to convert

Meet our newest metric: Conversion Probability. It takes user-based metrics one step further to show you just what the name suggests: the probability that a given user will convert in the future. The calculation is based on a machine learning model that learns from users who have made transactions in the past.

The advantages are clear: Marketers can create remarketing lists that target users who have a high likelihood to purchase and then reach those users through either advertising campaigns in AdWords and DoubleClick or site experiments in Optimize.

We are also adding a new Conversion Probability report. This report will show you the Conversion Probability for all your users, including across important dimensions such as channel.

The new conversion probability report.

This new feature from Analytics Intelligence is the first forward-looking estimate of how likely a conversion is for individual users. It's rolling out in beta to all Analytics accounts over the next few months. Learn more about Conversion Probability.

These four new enhancements will help you better understand your users and what they are doing on your site, so that you can create better experiences for them. If you — like those 90% of marketing executives — are working hard to understand your users' journeys, we hope you'll find these features useful.

Happy analyzing!

¹"The Customer Experience is Written in Data." Econsultancy and Google, May 2017.

Posted by Gene Chan, Product Manager, Google Analytics