Google Analytics Blog

Making it easier to measure your Goals

2013-05-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Just as physical stores need to keep track of their sales and in-store visits, businesses with an online presence need to understand how visitors are interacting with their site. Google Analytics provides tools to help understand and evaluate these interactions. For example, if purchases are your key objective, Ecommerce tracking allows you to measure sales performance. Yet sales are just one possible goal—there are many other important interactions that may be valuable to your business, such as media plays, social connections, newsletter sign-ups, a minimum purchase value, or the amount of time spent on a screen. Using Goals, you can measure these types of engagement activities and track how these interactions help you to meet your larger business objectives.

Today, we’re announcing several updates to Goals in Google Analytics—including a new set-up flow, new templates, and new verification capabilities—to make it easier for you to measure customer behavior and evaluate your performance. These updates are now live in Google Analytics.

How to get started with Goals
Goals are set at the profile level. To find a profile in your Google Analytics account, click the Admin tab, then navigate to the account, property, and profile you want. Click Goals, then Create a Goal. Follow the flow to set up and start measuring your Goals. For guidance as you set up Goals, visit our help center.

Introducing templates: An easier way to set up Goals
We’ve redesigned and added new templates to the Goals set-up flow so you can add meaningful and actionable Goals to your Analytics account quickly.

When you use a template, the Goal setup flow is prefilled with suggested values (based on your industry) that you can either keep or change as you walk through the process. The templates are organized into four business objectives (Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement) to help you think about the purpose of each Goal, plus you can still create custom goals. Note that “revenue” goals don’t necessarily imply a direct sale -- these goals are user activities which have a strong impact on your desired business outcomes. Depending on your business model, a Revenue Goal could be a purchase, such as a completed checkout; or it could also be a successful lead submission, such as a scheduled appointment. Some Revenue Goals might lend themselves to Ecommerce tracking as well.

The templates you see are based on the Industry Category selected in your property settings, so you only see templates that are relevant to your business. We also added a set of 20 new industry categories to Google Analytics. This classification is now aligned with Google’s web standard for industry vertical classification. Please edit your property settings to make sure you’re using the one that best describes your business.

Verify each Goal before you save
In addition to the templates, we’ve added a way for you to check your setup before you save. You’ll find a verify option at the end of the setup flow that lets you see what the conversion rate would have been for the past seven days had this Goal been setup. Using the verify option gives you immediate feedback, so you can decide to save or modify the Goal configuration you’re working on.

Analyze how different Goals perform and relate to each other
Use the Goals Overview report under the Conversions section to see how your goal completions happen over time. Develop a sense how often a Goal conversion happens, and look to identify relationships between different Goals.

In the Goals Overview report you can use the metric selector to choose the relevant metric.

Example: Goal performance over time
Select a single Goal and observe the performance over time. Use the date range selector and compare the Goal performance month on month, or quarter on quarter. This way you can compare seasonal trends, and the growth rate of your goal over time.

Example: Discover relationships between goals
Selecting two Goal completion metrics next to each other will allow you to see correlational effects over time. A Goal measuring site engagement, like a media interaction, or a social share, could be indicative of a rise in sales.

Ultimately, understanding how your users interact with your site allows you to make important decisions about site content and effective use of your marketing and advertising resources. In addition to the Goals overview report, you can look at the reports in Multi-Channel Funnels. These reports focus on your visitors’ entire path to conversion — including the different off-site interactions they had before making a purchase or completing a goal. See if you can discover new insights and additional opportunity through Goals.

Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Explore the Future of Digital Marketing with Google and Industry Executives on June 4th

2013-05-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

A version of the following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?

The full agenda for the thinkDoubleClick event is listed below. You can join in the conversation on June 4 by using the #thinkDCLK hash and commenting during the live stream at www.youtube.com/doubleclick.

Event Date: June 4, 2013

Time: 9 am - 12:15 PDT

9:00 - 9:30 am	Connecting Digital, Accelerating Growth Neal Mohan, VP Display Advertising, Google
9:30 - 10:00 am	The Coca-Cola Company's Liquid & Linked Marketing: How a 127-year-old company is pivoting for success in a real-time, socially-connected world The Coca-Cola Company sells over 500 brands in 207 countries, with over 700,000 System associates and 1.8B+ servings of their beverages everyday. Hear insights and lessons learned on how the world's most valuable brand is remaining relevant by becoming more connected, transparent and nimble in real-time. Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities, Coca-Cola
10:00 - 10:35 am	Advertisers Must be Inventors This year, Volkswagen and Deutsch LA partnered with Google to work on a briefto re-imagine how to build a stronger, bigger community around its brand. In today’s connected world, telling stories alone isn’t enough; we need to create tangible value and utility to bring the brand’s promise to life. In this session the creative team from Deutsch LA will be talking about the process for developing more rewarding and shareable experience. Winston Binch, Partner/Chief, Digital Creative Officer, Deutsch LA David Kim, Group Creative Director, Deutsch LA
10:35 - 11:15 am	Time to Rethink the Marketing Mix? Emerging trends in digital marketing -- including new ad formats, the rise of social media, and proliferation of channels -- are creating new challenges and opportunities for brand marketers. What are the key trends marketers should be concerned about -- and how should they respond? AdAge deputy editor Michael Learmonth poses the hard questions in an executive dialogue on what’s next for brand marketing. Fireside chat with: Michael Learmonth, Deputy Managing Editor, Advertising Age Lorraine Twohill, VP, Global Marketing, Google Jonathan Nelson, CEO, Omnicom Digital
11:15 am - 12: 15 pm	New and Native: Extending the Conversation Technology has had a profound impact on the media industry. This disruption, though, has brought along significant opportunities for creative publishers to thrive. In this session we’re bringing in three executives to show how they’ve leveraged the digital revolution to deliver more engaging content and differentiated solutions to advertisers. Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau (provocateur) Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive Peter Horan, President & Chief Operating Officer, Answers Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief Revenue Officer, Forbes Media

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th at thinkDoubleClick.

Posted by the DoubleClick team

Google Analytics at Google I/O recap

2013-05-20T15:48:00.000-07:00

It was a busy week in San Francisco at Google I/O. We unveiled new products and features, such as deeper mobile app analytics integration with Google Play and Google Tag Manager for mobile apps. If you missed the earlier announcement, you can learn about our new features here.

Our team at Google I/O!

We also gave several great presentations on some of our new features. Our Developer Relations team also showed off some tools for multi-screen measurement here, so take a look if you didn’t manage to catch our livestream this past Thursday.

We also presented on dynamically configuring mobile applications using Google Tag Manager for mobile apps, and talked about Google Analytics and AdSense data analysis in BigQuery.

It was great to see so many GA users and developers-- we can’t wait to see everyone next year at I/O!

Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics team

I/O Announcement: Google Analytics Premium data in BigQuery is coming soon

2013-05-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

The landscape in data analysis has changed rapidly in the past few years. Organizations and developers are analyzing larger data sets, from more data sources, to drive their decision-making. They are examining huge volumes of unsampled data to make informed business decisions--often mining information in business intelligence tools for strategic insights. For the data scientists that perform these analyses, having direct granular access to Google Analytics data is becoming increasingly important.

Today at I/O, we announced that we are giving Google Analytics Premium users the ability to glean new business insights by accessing session and hit level data and combining it with separate data sets. Organizations and developers can analyze in seconds without massive cost by leveraging Google BigQuery, a web service that lets developers and businesses conduct interactive analysis of big data sets and tap into powerful data analytics.

Interactive data analysis and data ownership

The upcoming BigQuery integration, happening later this year, is a planned feature for Google Analytics Premium that allows clients to access their session and hit level data from Google Analytics within Google BigQuery for more granular and complex querying of unsampled data. For those unfamiliar with Google BigQuery, it’s a web service that lets you perform interactive analysis of massive data sets—up to trillions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand. Plus, your data is easily exportable; you own it.

Benefits of BigQuery

Leverage Google’s massive computing power to get business insights from big data in seconds rather than hours.
Analyze massive amounts of data in the cloud with no up-front investments (hardware provisioning or software licensing investments).
Share and collaborate quickly and securely using Access Control Lists.
Store as much as you want, paying only for what you use.
Protect your data with multiple layers of security from Google.

Potential Uses of the Google Analytics Premium and BigQuery Integration

Having Google Analytics session and hit level data available in BigQuery opens several possibilities for developers and data scientists. Usage includes, but is not limited to, the following

Analyzing visitor behavior across very large date ranges. Answer the question: "From 2010 to 2013, which sections of my site had the most volatility in daily traffic volumes?"
Joining against data from other sources. Make detailed, custom analyses, such as: "I have a database that contains all the metadata about each article posted on my site and would like to see the bounce rate, conversion rate and new visitors generated by author and topic."
Understanding complex queries. Answer the question: "Of the visitors to my site that used a voucher code, how many originally discovered my brand from a voucher code site and how many left the checkout process and returned within 10 minutes with a voucher code? Which codes were used in each case?"
Integrating with Data Warehouses. Make detailed, custom analyses, such as: "On a weekly basis, for each of my logged in customers, I want to see the top 5 products that they viewed but did not buy and add that information into their record in our CRM."

We are looking forward to getting this granular data access into the hands of developers and data scientists. To receive more information about this integration as it comes available, developers may register their interest here: http://goo.gl/QJR9Y.

Posted by: Clancy Childs, Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium

The Future of Measurement Starts at I/O: What’s New and on the Horizon for Analytics

2013-05-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

Last year at I/O we launched Mobile App Analytics, a re-imagining of app analytics from the ground up, speaking the language that matters to app developers and marketers. Since launch, the insights provided are already helping hundreds of thousands of app developers and marketers create more successful Android and iOS apps and experiences by measuring metrics at all stages: acquisition, engagement and outcomes like in-app purchases.

This year at I/O, our team continues to improve mobile analysis with two announcements: Mobile App Analytics Play Integration and Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps. These updates, to be available for all users shortly (with links below to help you get on early whitelists) will let you better measure a mobile world and use your data in more ways to improve the customer experience.

Better understand the total picture of your app users with Google Play Integration

We’re excited to announce a long-anticipated integration of Mobile App Analytics more deeply with Google Play. It’s especially exciting for app developers and marketers because it’s the first time we’re presenting a complete view of the Play acquisition funnel in one clear, easy to understand report.

The data sources you’ll be able to see include:

Google Play traffic sources: understand which traffic sources and Google search keywords account for most new users. Campaign sources will help you refine your app marketing mix in order to focus on those campaigns and programs that bring the highest quality traffic.

Google Play views: at the very top of the app funnel, you’ll want to understand clearly how many views your app is receiving in Google Play from each campaign or source.

Installs: installs simply shows the number of users who actually installed your application from Google Play. It’s useful here to determine which sources are successful at driving installation.

New users: beyond installs, new users shows you how many users actually launch your application. This is a key metric to see even beyond installations and tracing the path up the funnel.

As this report is using flow visualization, you can also select any path you wish to analyze further which will highlight that path and present useful data points along the funnel such as drop off rate.

Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps

Ever want to make a small tweak to your mobile application but your users have already downloaded your app? Ever forget to add analytics to a key event until it’s too late? Shipping your app usually means you have one chance to get it right, and that’s not the best way to build a business.

With Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps launching in beta, you can dynamically configure your mobile applications on Android and iOS server-side. You can hone your app for various audiences, and you’ll never get caught by old versions or forgetfulness again.

Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps uses Google Tag Manager’s sophisticated rule-based serving engine and easy-to-use management interface to make it a snap for developers to make changes to their applications, even after an app has been downloaded by users. Now changing the configuration of your application or rolling out a new feature is as easy as going to the Google Tag Manager web interface, changing a couple of values, and then pressing a Publish button. Changes go live in seconds.

You can configure virtually anything in your application: from ad values such as frequency and duration and UI settings like colors and layout, to time-based events such as in-app promotions and special events. Sign up for the whitelist to be among the first to try out GTM for Mobile (you’ll need to first visit the Google Tag Manager site and create an account if you haven’t already).

We’re excited to continue to push the envelope with what analytics can do across devices and platforms and cater to developers with tools they want.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics at Google I/O

2013-05-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

We’ve been working hard getting ready for Google I/O! We're livestreaming our presentation on how to optimize web and mobile apps across devices using Google Analytics on Thursday, May 16 at 1:40pm PT and we’d like to invite everyone to join us.

We recently launched Universal Analytics, a new way to measure user interactions across any device / platform / environment. By measuring this data, developers can better optimize their applications. In this session we'll discuss how to measure user-interaction from any device as well as demo new reports and best practices to optimize both web and mobile apps.

For those of you who are going to be at I/O, please stop by the Ads sandbox and say hi to the Analytics team! We’ll be around to answer questions, and we may even have some pretty cool Analytics gear to give out. Be sure to check out all of our Analytics sessions. You can find the full schedule here.

Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics team

New Google Analytics Filter Fields

2013-05-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

One powerful feature of Google Analytics is the ability to create filters to limit and modify the traffic data that is included in a profile. Custom filters can be made on specific fields of data; our users have long been asking for more data to filter, especially for mobile and social. We have listened, and are glad to announce an expanded fields list. Full descriptions of the new fields and values are documented here, and following is a summary:

Mobile

Is a mobile device
Is a tablet
Mobile brand name
Mobile model name
Mobile marketing name
Mobile pointing method
Mobile has QWERTY keyboard?
Mobile is NFC supported?
Mobile has cellular radio?
Mobile has wifi?

Social

Social network
Social action
Social action target

Content & Traffic

Hit type: (page, social, transaction, etc.)
Internal search term
Internal search type

Audience / Users

Browser size
IP version

E-commerce

Local currency code

Use these new filter fields for improved data analysis and for more refined and targeted reporting views.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Ariat Uses Data to Improve Customer Experience and Drive Results

2013-05-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

Ariat is the leading equestrian footwear and apparel brand in the United States. Their website - Ariat.com - is an ecommerce sales channel, a branding tool, and a medium to feature their channel partners. Its goal is to facilitate the entire buying cycle from awareness to loyalty.

In 2010, Ariat invested heavily in digital by creating a powerful new website. In order to justify the cost and report a return on investment, the new website would require a comprehensive web analytics and reporting program. Beyond just evaluating key performance indicators (KPIs) for e-commerce, such as revenue and conversion rate, Ariat needed to measure the effectiveness of their new merchandising and promotional features, and also the effectiveness of various digital marketing channels.

Ariat reached out to SwellPath to assist in the evaluation of analytics tools and general consultation on the measurement strategies for their new site. SwellPath determined that Google Analytics was the right tool for the job, based on its flexible measurement capabilities and advanced analysis tools. They then created a custom measurement strategy and analytics framework to align the data with Ariat’s business goals. This framework ensured that they could measure the effectiveness of their internal promotional campaigns, shopping tools and product page features, and all digital marketing channels.

SwellPath also introduced Ariat to “micro-conversion” metrics. These are actions that may not be a straightforward goal completion, but rather support the conversion process or have their own inherent value. For Ariat, this included email signups, sharing content with social media buttons, and outbound clicks to channel partners.

Ariat’s new website launch has been a huge success thanks to data-driven improvements made from the very beginning. Being able to measure and optimize the many features of the shopping experience allowed them to identify improvements that decreased cart abandonment by 18% and increased conversion rate by 14%. Acting on these opportunities so soon after launch allowed them to save large amounts of potentially lost revenue, and avoid customer irritation through a simpler checkout experience.

Merchandising promotions on the homepage were also optimized based on insights from custom analytics data. The ecommerce conversion rate for visitors interacting with these promotions rose over 80% from 2011 to 2012. Consistent digital campaign tracking and attribution analysis identified key success factors in email campaigns, social media marketing, and display campaigns. This allowed for optimal budget planning and campaign optimization resulting in a 14% year-over-year increase in the ecommerce conversion rate for those campaigns, and a 17% increase in per-visit value.

Using advanced analytics and measurement tactics with Google Analytics allowed Ariat to quantify the improvements to their website, revealing a fantastic ROI and providing many opportunities for future growth.

Check out the full case study here [PDF]

Posted by the Google Analytics team

See Your Conversions In Real-Time

2013-05-02T09:55:00.001-07:00

Over the past year, we’ve been making continued improvements to the Real-Time reports in Google Analytics. Significant updates include real-time now supporting profiles, 4 key analysis improvements as well real-time widgets available for dashboards.

But have you ever looked at your real time report and thought, “wow check out how many visitors I have today, I wonder if any of them are converting?” We had that same question and so we are happy to announce the beta launch of our new real-time goals report! Now you can monitor in real-time how many of your website visitors are converting and against what goals.

Use this feature to track the live results of how your new email newsletter, ad campaign or TV commercial is performing. An important note, with this first launch we’re introducing URL based goals only. So computed goals such as Time on Site or Pages / Visit are not included yet. For ease of use, you will see all goals that are being tracked in the UI regardless of whether there have been any completions in the past 30 minutes.

As with the rest of the real time reports, clicking a specific goal will automatically segment that report. Basic filters also apply to goals so you can analyze goal completions from a specific location or other dimensions you care about.

So now, the next time content on your site goes viral, you get a hot mention in the media, or large social traffic spike be sure to check out your real-time goals report to see in real-time the bottom line impact.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Linus Chou, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Display Remarketing from Search Ads Out of Beta

2013-04-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

A version of this post originally appeared on the DoubleClick search blog.

Back in October, we announced the beta release of display remarketing from search ads, which allows advertisers to use insights from paid search clicks to remarket to audiences across ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or the Google Display Network (GDN) -- all with a seamless, tagless workflow.

We’re excited to announce that display remarketing from search ads is now out of beta, and is available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. This brief video provides a visual explanation:

Already, customers have shown some impressive results. Anton Kanis, Head of Business Solutions, Netherlands for OmnicomMediaGroup, has been using the feature to remarket via DoubleClick Bid Manager. Kanis notes “Display remarketing from search ads is proving itself to be a very valuable feature, often outperforming regular funnel remarketing and sometimes even search in terms of CPA.”

If you’re interested in trying display remarketing from search ads to take advantage of more cross-channel opportunities, reach out to your DoubleClick representative, visit the DoubleClick site, or contact the DoubleClick Search support team at ds-support@google.com.

Posted by the DoubleClick Team

Introducing “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" — interactive insights on multi-channel marketing

2013-04-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.

The tool draws on Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorized sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries. Purchase paths in this tool are each based on interactions with a single ecommerce advertiser.

You’ll find benchmark data for:

how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey
The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:

As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.
Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:

Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey
We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values.

For example,

in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.
in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.
in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:

In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work
For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Try The Customer Journey to Online Purchase today on Google’s new Think Insights website.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics

The Periodic Table of Google Analytics

2013-04-24T09:39:00.001-07:00

The following is a guest post from Jeff Sauer, Vice President at Three Deep Marketing, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Jeff writes often about Digital Marketing at his Jeffalytics Blog and he writes about Travel on his Free World Traveler blog.

I have long compared Google Analytics to the slogan for board game Othello: "A Minute to Learn, a Lifetime to Master" because it is so easy to get started, yet there are so many customization options and continuous product improvements that it takes years to master all aspects contained within GA.

The Google Analytics team has done such an amazing job at making the product easy to use that a significant portion of the web measures their website performance with Google Analytics. With that said, I've found that because it is so easy to use, not all marketers are aware of the advanced features contained within GA.

While conducting in-person Google Analytics training the past several years, I have been looking for the best way to show my students just how much they can do with Google Analytics. While a comprehensive classroom session goes a long way, a more elegant way of simplifying the complex is also valuable in the long run.

After much brainstorming with colleagues, we came up with the idea of creating the Periodic Table of Google Analytics, inspired by similar periodic table pieces that have ran in the past by well known marketing focused websites. Since the concept works so well for displaying many elements in one place, it worked perfectly for defining the 60+ elements that were included in the Periodic Table of Google Analytics. We hope you enjoy the results!

We created the table to be consumed in many different ways. On Jeffalytics.com, you will find an interactive version of the table which gives an explanation of each element as you hover over. You can also find a printable PDF version of the document for printing at home. Last, we have created an embeddable graphic that you can share on your site.

Posted by Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Google Analytics Premium expands into Europe and drives insights for 3 Suisses, Rocket Internet, Privalia & LAN

2013-04-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

Bonjour, guten Tag, & hola -- we’re expanding Google Analytics Premium to France, Germany and Spain. Google Analytics Premium is all the power and ease you expect from Google Analytics standard, plus extras that help larger businesses get the most from its robust capabilities. Google Analytics Premium provides access to a dedicated services and support team, service guarantees, and greater data processing power - all for one flat fee.

Now companies can purchase directly from our network of Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers in France, Germany, & Spain. Leading up to this launch, we worked with a select few European reseller partners and well known global companies to help us kick the tires and ensure that Google Analytics Premium has been regionally tested for success. Big thank you to our clients 3 Suisses, Rocket Internet, Privalia Group & LAN along with our first reseller partners fifty-five, Trakken, e-Wolff, WATT, Webanalytics.es & Metriplica for sharing with us their experience using Google Analytics Premium.

Here are a few ways that they’ve found Google Analytics Premium to be helpful:

Headquartered in Croix, France
With a presence in almost 20 countries throughout Europe, 3 Suisses is a major e-retailer and the 2nd largest fashion and home-decor site in France. In order to continually improve customer service and site performance in Europe, 3 Suisses chose Google Analytics Premium in part for the close collaboration with Google’s teams. The main objectives are:

Improve the purchasing experience of millions of customer on their websites
Optimize the performance of product merchandising for over a million visitors per day
Enrich CRM programs with web analytics data in order to develop a 360-degree view of customers
Boost the fast-paced development of 3 Suisses’ e-commerce activities

In order to quickly reach these business objectives, 3 Suisses is working with 55, a long-standing partner well known for its expertise in Business Analytics. 55 are helping to implement and leverage Analytics in all realms of their business organization. A major objective for 3 Suisses is to allow marketers and managers alike to make fast decisions that can help them to achieve their ambitious e-commerce growth targets. The Analytics interface is incredibly user-friendly and easy to use, which makes it an important asset to foster a broad user adoption across 3 Suisses’ teams.

Headquartered in Berlin, Germany
Rocket Internet is a leading international online venture firm & incubator, with over 100+ companies launched in over 25 countries since 1999. Rocket Internet decided to purchase Google Analytics Premium via Trakken Web Services in Germany to support their growing businesses. The additional product features helped them break through the limitations they had been experiencing with the standard version of Google Analytics. Google Analytics Premium’s dedicated account support and increased features helped them to truly scale and grow data driven decision-making across all of their businesses. Read the full case study

Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain
The Privalia Online Fashion Group was founded in Barcelona in 2006, as a private club that offers flash sales on fashion’s top brand at exceptional prices exclusively for its members. They selected Google Analytics Premium through authorized reseller WATT to gain insights on how their users respond to content tests, personalization, and on different types of devices (mobile, tablet, desktop). Read the full case study

“Google Analytics Premium meets the demanding digital analytical needs of Privalia. We find it to be a comprehensive, flexible, easy to use solution, with a rich pool of professional users in Spain. We have confidence that we can scale with it being backed by Google and the support of its local partner network (Google Analytics Certified Partners). We’ve been impressed at the constant innovation, with new features and improvements released each year without losing usability.”
- Andres Flores, Marketing Business Intelligence & Web Analytics Manager, Privalia.

Headquartered in Las Condes, Chile and operating in Spain
LAN Airlines is one of the top flight carriers in the world, flying to 96 destinations across Latin America, North America, Europe, and Oceania. Their website LAN.com is a key component of their sales path, they have selected Google Analytics Premium through authorized reseller Metriplica.com in Spain to help them find insights on their digital marketing. They want to find the right information to enable them to make decisions fast, and expand use of analytics throughout their company with the ease of use and robustness of the Analytics Premium platform. They also receive constant support and training from Metriplica to help them grow sales through data based insights.

Google Analytics Premium provides businesses with more processing strength for granular insights, a dedicated services and support team, service guarantees and up to 1 billion hits per month, all for one flat fee. For those with more than 1 billion hits, tiered pricing is available. Google Analytics Premium helps power the analytics of world-class brands including Travelocity, Gilt, TransUnion, Zillow, Papa Johns & IGN.

We’re excited to see how analytical companies in France, Germany, and Spain take advantage of the data, flexibility and account support offered by Google Analytics Premium. If you would like to learn more about Google Analytics Premium and how it can help your business, contact the Google Analytics sales team or one of our Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers.

Posted by Clancy Childs, Google Analytics Premium Team

Google Tag Manager grows nearly 300% since January, boosts enterprise performance

2013-04-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Since launching Google Tag Manager last October, we’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of great clients and help them to become more agile marketers, boost their website speeds, reduce IT infrastructure headaches, and improve ROI for tagging related projects. We’ve seen impressive growth since the beginning of the year, with nearly 300% growth in traffic and 120% growth in enterprise customers.

We’ve just added a new “Success Stories” page to our website to highlight some of our favorite customer stories. You’ll find case studies from Airbnb, a community marketplace for accommodations, GoPro, maker of wearable cameras, and Magazine Luiza, a large online retailer in Brazil. These are just a few of the many enterprise customers now using Google Tag Manager -- and check back soon, we’ll be adding more stories to the page.

Google Tag Manager is designed to be easy and self-service, but if you’d like extra help (for example, if you have a complex web property with lots of existing tags), many of our clients have worked closely with our Partners, including GoPro, who worked with partner Analytics Pros.

We hope you’ll find these stories inspiring and helpful as you get started with Google Tag Manager.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics

Google Analytics Conference in Stockholm, Sweden

2013-04-19T09:33:00.001-07:00

Join the Google Analytics Certified Partners for Google Analytics Conference Nordic in Sweden.

The event takes place on May 23rd in Stockholm. You can expect to hear expert tips on how to get maximum value out of Google Analytics, and learn from other organizations, such as VisitSweden and Resurs Bank, using the tool.

Started in Stockholm 2011, based on an initiative by Outfox who gathered the other Google Analytics Certified Partners, the conference sold out the first two years. Now that the conference is returning for the third consecutive year, it will be visited by Paul Muret, Google Analytics Engineering Director and founder and CEO of Urchin Software acquired by Google in 2005. Urchin technology became what you know as Google Analytics today. Paul will hold the keynote presentation.

Learn about Universal Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Attribution Modeling, Cost Data Upload, Data Visualization, and much more.

Erik Modig from Stockholm School of Economics will also share his insights into human behavior and modern advertising strategy and you'll also meet Mike Kwong, a software engineer working on Google Analytics backend.

Our Stockholm conference includes:

• Clinics/huddles led by top Google Analytics experts

• Case studies from businesses and other organizations

• A live demo of how to add new sources of data to Google Analytics

• Opportunities to interact with peers and experts

• A more creative venue, The Rival movie theatre

• Fun and games during breaks

• ...much more!

To join us in Stockholm on May 23rd, visit the conference site and secure your ticket before it's sold out again.

Readers of this blog get the price of 2490 SEK if signing up before May 15th, and by entering the discount code "VIP Google" as a note before submitting the form.

If you want to be the first to know about other upcoming analytics events in Sweden, follow Outfox on Google+.

Posted by Lars Johansson, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Universal Analytics Business Applications

2013-04-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

The following is a guest post by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

Universal Analytics introduces a new set of Google Analytics features allowing businesses to gain a deeper and more strategic understanding of what’s capturing the attention of customers as they move from online to offline. So how can Universal Analytics help businesses turn customer data into sales? We at Loves Data designed a simple experiment to find out.

Who drinks coffee? Who drinks tea? How much? How often? When? The answer to these questions reveal the role our espresso coffee machine and tea kettle play in productivity - and any need to order more tea or coffee! Take a look at our video to see what we learned.

Our experiment at Loves Data also measured how often and how much time team members spent standing in front of a display screen in the office viewing our website analytics.

Montage: Loves Data’s Universal Analytics office experiment will benefit businesses:

Experiment creates a new path to customers

Our team designed an experiment to dive into Universal Analytics by creating interactive scenarios inside our office. We integrated sensors and RFID readers to capture data about coffee and tea making behaviour in our office. We also measured each time the fridge was opened, when one of our team updated a support ticket, client hours were logged, code was committed, administrative tasks, and viewing of our Google Analytics dashboard display.

New Business Opportunities

Measuring users across platforms opens up new business opportunities. The RFID keys we’ve used in our experiments can be used to measure loyalty card usage. We can use Universal Analytics to enable retailers with bricks and mortar stores to measure customer behaviour and to improve and integrate online and offline sales and marketing.

Here are a few Universal Analytics opportunities we have identified at Loves Data for our clients:

Integrated measurement and analysis of in-store POS systems along with desktop and mobile e-commerce platforms
Measuring offline macro and micro conversions through physical buttons or integration with CRMs
Measuring physical interaction for example at display booths at conventions or artworks at major exhibitions through to online engagement on associated websites

Our office experiment provided ourselves and our clients with a range of valuable insights and showed that with Universal Analytics we can measure just about anything!

Posted by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Learn more about Loves Data on their website, Google+ or check out their digital analytics and online marketing blog.

3 Key Google Analytics Features In-House Practitioners Should Be Using

2013-04-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Working as a practitioner in house at a technology company, one of my jobs is to teach my team members how to fish with Google Analytics. What should they be looking for in GA? Where do they start? What is meaningful? Are the campaigns being measured? Are the microsites tagged? These are the types of questions I get everyday, and very likely, you do too.

I've narrowed down my tips to 3 key things I try to get people comfortable with first (bite sized bits to get them hooked).

1. Event Tracking

Most of the things that people are interested in are actions on a page. Did a visitor click on button X? Did they complete form Y? Watch video Z? These are all questions we can answer with event tracking.

Because event tracking in Google Analytics is a blank slate in terms of setup and use, there is no one right answer for how to set it up and use. Given that most of my account was setup before I arrived in this position, I too have had to get used to a new architecture. The way I do this, and the way I explain it to my colleagues, is by investigating the event hierarchy. What are the categories, actions, and labels? How is data organized into these three tiers?

While there is no one 'best way' of organizing an event tagging hierarchy, and while it will vary site to site, I like to set mine up like this:

Category: location of event (Homepage, About Us page, Resources page, etc)
Action: action the user took (Video, Whitepaper download, Start Trial, etc)
Label: specifics about action (Video name, Whitepaper name, detail of linked clicked if there are multiple with same action (ex. Learn more - product A, learn more - product B, etc)

2. Advanced Segments

Advanced segments are a great way to filter data to be more specific to the question you are trying to ask. For example, you can create a segment for a region (North America = US + Canada), or you can create a segment for a set of pages (meaning visit applies to homepage and/or about us page). To evangelize and teach this, I've created a Google doc that I've shared with my team with step by step instructions and links to some pre-built regional segments.

As an account admin, it's great to share out globally the segments you make that may apply to multiple consumers. And you can easily share links to segments for users to apply to their own account.

Regional Segment example:

3. Shortcuts

Normally when an internal user asks for GA training and/or help pulling a report, it's for something they plan to look at on more than one occasion. Depending on how complex the report is, it may be useful to create a shortcut.

Ex. Your account has 5000 uniques pages tracked in the pages report. You are interested in 4 pages that all share the same sub-domain (they may be steps in flow - example: www.myshoppingsite.com/women, www.myshoppingsite.com/accessories, www.myshoppingsite.com/handbags, www.myshoppingsite.com/gucci).

You can filter the pages report (using advanced filters) to show only these 4 pages. Then you want to know how many visits to those pages had a checkout, so you apply a checkout segment onto the report. Then you also want to define that group one more step by only looking at North America traffic, so you apply a second advanced segment for North America. Then, just for kicks (or analysis) you want to know what the landing page was for this subset of purchasers, so you apply a secondary dimension for landing page.

Now that's a fairly complicated report that took several steps to build. Your may not want to go through all those steps the next time you need this report (nor as an admin/power user do you want to have to show them again), so you can create a shortcut for this report. The shortcut link is a new beta feature located on the top nav bar that allows you to save a report as is and provides a shortcut link on the left hand nav to get back to it quickly. Pretty handy.

As an admin or power user: Once your users have these three functions handled they will a) be able to pull a lot of their own data, freeing up your time, and b) feel more confident and excited about using Google Analytics to make data driven decisions. Win-win.

Posted by Krista Seiden, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

Real-Time Widgets Now Available in Dashboards

2013-04-16T11:30:00.001-07:00

The Dashboards feature in Google-Analytics is a great way to arrange a set of related custom widgets into a report you look at frequently (for example, see dashboards for a variety of use cases in our Solutions Gallery). Today we’re expanding dashboards’ functionality with four new real-time widgets that you can and plug into any dashboard (new or existing) of your choosing!

1) Setting up a real-time widget

If you have set up a dashboard widget before, then this will be very familiar to you. Create a new dashboard or click on the +Add Widget menu option of an existing dashboard.

Pick any of the four widgets available in the Real-time: section and customize the widget. Below I have created a widget that shows me active visitors from Canada but split up by Traffic-Type:

Here is how I set up this widget:

I chose the ‘Counter’ real-time widget and gave it a custom name (“Canada Active Visitors”), then set up a ‘Group by’ on ‘Traffic type’. This is how I see the split between referral and organic in the widget. Finally, I set up a filter to only show visitors from Canada.

2. Combining with other dashboard widgets

By creating and combining widgets, you can perform many types of analysis at a glance.

Using filters you can compare different segments of your real-time traffic. For example you can create two separate widgets that have different filters for the Country dimension (say Country==USA for one and Country==Canada for another) and you can compare real-time USA traffic versus India traffic, side by side.

You can go further and set up real-time and non real-time widgets on the same dashboard.

Here is how one of my dashboards looks like (I use it to monitor and understand how traffic from Canada behaves after a blog post):

I have 5 widgets and widget #4 is a non real-time widget that gives me context on where I get visits from across the globe over the last month.

We hope you will enjoy creating new dashboards with these widgets and sparkling some real-time magic on existing dashboards!

Posted by the Google Analytics Real-Time team

Is the web getting faster?

2013-04-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster. A faster web is better for both users and businesses - faster pages lead to better user experience and improved conversions.

The Site Speed reports in Google Analytics give every website owner detailed data on the speed of their web pages, as experienced by real users.

Last year, we published a study on the speed of websites around the world based on one week of aggregated Site Speed data from opted-in web publishers.

Over the last year, we have seen significant improvements in the core infrastructure that powers the Internet: the web browsers have gotten faster; there have been quite a few LTE/4G deployments making mobile networks a lot faster; and processing power on mobile devices continues to increase at a rapid pace.

To determine whether these improvements in technology are making the web faster, we present recent Site Speed data and compare it with the data from last year.

Here are the results.

While access from desktop is only a bit faster, it is still impressive given that the size of the web pages have increased by over 56% during this period. It’s great to see access from mobile is around 30% faster compared to last year. This is evident from the histograms below as well. For desktop, there is not a significant change in the bucket distributions, but for mobile we see a shift from slower buckets (i.e. higher page load time) to faster buckets.

Taking a look at change in the speed of web pages for a few specific countries, for most of them, there is a slight improvement in page load times on the desktop.

However, there is a significant improvement in page load times on mobile.

The following interactive world map compares the relative improvement in median page load times for desktop over the last year.

This map shows the same data for mobile (Countries without enough data for accurate measurement either this year or last year are shown as having 0% improvement). Speed improvements are greater for mobile in most of the world.

If you are a web site owner, you can analyze and speed up your web site using the PageSpeed products, and check the resulting improvements in Site Speed reports.

Posted by Arvind Jain and Mustafa M. Tikir, Google Analytics team

Analytics Pros Best Practices Conference: May 2, San Francisco

2013-04-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

The following is a guest post contributed by Caleb Whitmore, founder of Analytics Pros and the BEST Practices Conference, Google Analytics enthusiast, and aspiring mountaineer.

Join us on May 2nd in San Francisco to learn about the best practices for Google Analytics. At this interactive conference you will be engaged, learn strategy for Google Analytics and be trained in using and optimizing the tool.

We think about our conference like this:

Looks like useful fun, right? We promise it will be well worth your time.

A side note, just in case you were wondering: my prior conference, GAUGE (now “retired”) was an initiative to bring together users across the Google Analytics community to learn from each other. The BEST Practices conference series builds on this legacy and delivers hands on tutorials and interactive sessions.

Look forward to hear from thought leaders in the Google Analytics space, including Google’s Jesse Nichols, Andrew Wales and Ian Myszenski. We are excited to have Dan Siroker from Optimizely and I will weigh in with my latest finds and processes as well. We will talk and work with you on Universal Analytics, Multi-Channel Funnels, Attribution Modeling and more tips and tricks that we apply to our use of GA.

Our San Francisco conference includes:

An after-party event hosted by the Google Analytics Premium team at the San Francisco Google office
Hands-on sessions and workshops led by top GA experts
Interactive “Table Topics” lunch session, including teaching and roundtable discussion on Universal Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mobile Strategy and more
Opportunities to interact with digital analytics peers and experts
Insights into the Google Analytics strategies of leading companies
An amazing conference venue that allows for big-picture thinking, the Jewish Contemporary Museum

Join us in San Francisco on May 2nd for our Spring event. Use discount code BESTAnalyticsBlog for a 20% discount off the Conference Pass. We also offer a 50% discount for government, non-profit employees and full-time students.

And don’t forget to check out other BEST Practices conferences as we storm the country. We’re headed to Boston on October 3rd and back to the Pacific Northwest in Seattle on November 14th - don’t miss out!

To keep up to date on what’s coming, follow our team at @analyticspros and @BEST_con to hear about the latest speakers, locations and events. As a bonus, this video should provide a good introduction to our event if you've never been to one in the past:

We hope to see you in San Francisco this Spring. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Caleb Whitmore, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Updating Export And Send Features To Support Your Legacy Technology

2013-04-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

We believe you should be able to access your Google Analytics data from wherever, whenever. And while yes, it’s pretty convenient to be able to export data to Google Spreadsheets or send a report to an email recipient with a few simple clicks, we recognize there are other ways people like to be able to share their data as well. That’s why we’ve re-imagined our Export and ‘Send To’ options to give you even more options and support some of our favorite legacy technology.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a new set of old school export and send-to options that aren’t just useful, they’re fun. So flex those creative muscles and think of all the ways you might use these to do your job better:

Updated export options - moving beyond web:

CDROM: not only can you soon export to CDROM, we’ll automatically label the CDs for you to avoid the dreaded stack of unlabeled CDs that plagued users in the past. Bonus: insert your CDs into your car CD or portable CD player and we’ll play either upbeat or melancholy sounds, depending on if your reports are trending the right direction.

3.5 Floppy: have you ever wanted to access your reports on your old IIGS, 486 or similar? Yes it takes us back to those joyful memories of coding forever, hitting execute and watching with glee as it drew a blue star in 30 seconds. Take your data easily to them (or share with a friend) via a colorful 3.5 floppy. Now you can work on reports while you also play classics like The Oregon Trail or Odell Lake.

Sticky note: ever just wanted to share one quick dashboard with your boss that shows how your conversions are trending “up and to the right,” but you just can’t get them to read your email? We hear you. Export just one graph to a bright fluorescent sticky note and put it right on their desk where they can’t ignore it. You’ll soon be the most talked about marketer at the water cooler.

Papyrus: papyrus, the thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant is back. First manufactured in Egypt as far back as the third millennium BC, it is actually still used by communities living in the vicinity of swamps. We’ve heard the requests loud and clear: papyrus report exports would be an exciting option that would provide a “wow” factor at your next presentation and make your data more tangible. Just be sure you keep them in a dry climate where it is most stable. Next time your HIPPO questions the data break out the Papyrus and Abacus and prove them wrong!

Updated 'send to' section - beyond email:

Fax Machine: have a client or executive who prefers to receive faxes? No problem. You can now export reports, in full color, directly to the fax machine of your choice along with a branded cover page.

Electronic Telegraph: have a friend still obsessed with 1800’s business culture? Put on a monocle, your classiest suit and get ready to send a telegraph with an encoded message of the data of your choosing. For those super important “your eyes only” reports we also support encrypted morse code options as well. Note, the cost of sending 10 words (approximately 45 characters) is $1.55 (per the going rate of the 1850’s) so choose the data you send wisely.

Carrier Pigeon: pigeons aren’t just used to sort our web index any longer. We’ve trained a select set of our trusty PigeonRank™ pigeons to fly your reports to their intended recipient. Note there is a weight limit associated with this option, so only choose rows 1-25 of data are selected at most or your pigeons may not be able to take off.

Telegram Messenger: sometimes, it’s necessary to send a physical person to deliver your reports. The send via telegram option will dispatch a telegram messenger on a Google bike to share a physical printout of the reports of your choosing. A future iteration of this option will include telegram messengers dressed up as characters who can deliver “hug-o-gram” reports to cheer people up.

We hope you enjoy these new options and share your data in even more places!

Posted by the Google Analytics team

...and yes, this is our April Fools' Day joke.

4 Improvements To Google Analytics Real-Time Reports

2013-03-28T08:58:00.003-07:00

Real-time reports provide useful insights for businesses that help them understand how their systems are reacting, instantly, such as when you send out an email campaign or engage in marketing that has a temporal nature. It provides alerting / intelligence, giving insight into things that are new or different such as a sudden increase in site traffic. Real-time also lets you win social by capitalizing on trending topics. For example, if you noticed a blog post you published previously is suddenly gaining attention due to something happening in the news, you could highlight it on the front page of your site to draw additional attention and ‘pour fuel’ on the social fire.

Today, we're announcing 4 improvements to real-time reports. You can now:

Analyze Events in real-time
Breakdown real-time by Desktop/Tablet/Mobile traffic
Create shortcuts to your favorite real-time segments
Compare real-time filtered data against overall real-time data

Let’s go through the changes in more detail:

1. Realtime Events Report

With the real-time events report, you can now not only see the top events as they occur but also filter on particular event categories (and actions). Additionally, you can see whether particular segments of visitors trigger different events and debug your events deployment in real time.

To access this report, navigate to the real-time section of Google Analytics and click on the Events section. You should see a report similar to this:

Clicking on any of the Event Category will drill down and show all the Event Actions and Event Labels for that particular category.

If you are trying to see what events a particular segment of visitors generate, that is easy as well. Any filters you set up in any part of real-time are preserved in the Events report. For example, in the above screengrab we have set up a filter here to see what events are triggered from visitors coming via organic search.

2. Content Breakdown by Desktop/Tablet/Mobile

We live in an increasingly multi-screen world, and now you can see in real-time the type of device that visitors are using to visit your web site (desktop, tablet and mobile). This is available in the content report as shown below:

As with real-time reports, you can easily see your visitors filtered by the device type (by clicking on either of “Desktop” “Tablet” “Mobile”).

3. Shortcuts for your important real-time segments

We’ve heard from users that you like to look at certain segments of visitors in real-time, but dislike setting up the filters each time. Now, you can use the “Create Shortcut” feature to store your favorite segments.

Now all you need to do is open up Shortcuts from the left navigation menu and click to any of your shortcuts.

4. Comparison real-time to overall data

Finally, you can compare the pageviews of your segmented visitors to overall traffic as shown below. This is nifty if you want to see quick comparison trends. For example, many times, after a G+ post, I create a filter by device type of “Mobile” and can see that the mobile traffic picks up much faster and also contributes more to the initial increase in pageviews.

Stay tuned for continued improvements to real-time, a growing area of importance for your digital marketing.

Posted by the Google Analytics Real-Time team

Improving The Activity Stream In Social Reports

2013-03-26T11:39:00.001-07:00

We’ve redesigned the Google Analytics Social Reports to make it easier to see the conversations and activity happening surrounding your content on our Social Data Hub Partners. We’re introducing 2 new reports that make it easier to consume this data:

Data Hub Activity
Trackbacks

The activity stream was previously available via drill down from the Network Referrals or Landing Pages reports. We have now made it a standalone report. By navigating to the Data Hub Activity report you’ll see a timeline of the number of activities that have occurred in the Social Data Hub and the raw activities in a list below. You can also filter this list by any specific networks you choose.

We’re also excited to announce that Trackbacks are now available in a standalone report. Trackbacks are all of your inbound links across the web, so you’ll be informed if anyone from a small to blog to the New York Times posts a link to your site. Additionally, we are providing context for the significance of each of these trackbacks by displaying the number of visits that were driven by each endorsing URL during the reporting period. You’ll see this number presented alongside the trackback.

Image via Google’s Analytics Advocate, Justin Cutroni

Give them a try and happy analyzing!

Posted by Linus Chou, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Expanding Universal Analytics into Public Beta

2013-03-22T08:59:00.002-07:00

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity.

Back in October, we announced the limited beta release of Universal Analytics as a way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey. Today, we’re excited to welcome and invite all Google Analytics customers to try Universal Analytics.

The benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are:

Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points,
Insights into the performance of your mobile apps,
Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

Testimonials from the initial beta release

Our initial beta customers using Universal Analytics and are pleased with their results. Rojeh Avanesian, VP of Marketing at PriceGrabber.com reports:

"At PriceGrabber, we know it’s important to understand consumer shopping behavior so we can provide a more customized experience to our users. Google’s Universal Analytics will solve this problem for us and many sites that are facing this challenge and help us serve our users better by providing them with more relevant content and shopping results. We can use Google Analytics’ metrics to segment our users in a way that improves and simplifies the shopping experience for consumers. That’s what we strive for at PriceGrabber, to make shopping and saving money as easy as possible."

How to get started using Universal Analytics

If you’re new to Google Analytics, you can choose Universal Analytics when you setup your account. Already using Google Analytics? Create a new web property in your Google Analytics account to set up Universal Analytics and explore the new features.

Here’s what you’ll see when you create a new web property. Select the Universal Analytics column to get the new analytics.js code snippet you can implement on your website:

You can implement Universal Analytics with the new analytics.js JavaScript for websites, our iOS and Android SDKs for apps, and the new Measurement Protocol for all other platforms.

Find more details on how to set up using our help center or developer guide. (Migration guides for properties using ga.js coming soon. Until then, set up a new property in your account for Universal Analytics).

To tag in the most flexible way possible, you can also take advantage of the Universal Analytics template available in Google Tag Manager, which allows you to make additional changes and enable new features to your analytics setup without changing the hard-coded tags on your website. Learn more about how to implement Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager.

For more information on Universal Analytics, visit our help center and developer guides.

Happy analyzing - in the new and innovative ways you can with Universal Analytics!

Posted by JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Learn from Google at #SESNY 2013

2013-03-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

SES New York (#SESNY) is coming up next week, and just like last year, we hope you’ll join us again in the Big Apple.

During day 1 of SES New York, we’ll be on the expo floor with a custom-built Google classroom as well as part of the main conference sessions. Join us where you’ll learn about the newest need-to-know tools, features, and solutions from Google Analytics, AdWords, Mobile, GDN and DoubleClick Search to help you win in a constantly connected world. Following is a listing of our sessions to help you plan your SES experience.

Google Solutions for a Constantalny Connected World

Day 1 - Tuesday, March 26th all day in the Expo Hall

10:30-11:30am: Reaching customers whenever, wherever, across any device. Surojit Chatterjee, Lead Product Manager for Enhanced Campaigns

11:45-12:45pm: Understanding the Full Value of Mobile. Brendon Kraham, Director, Global Mobile Solutions

2:00-3:00pm: Engaging with your audience in a multi-screen world.

3:30-4:30pm: Using DoubleClick Search to manage campaigns across channels and devices. Anthony Chavez, Product Manager for DoubleClick Search

Don’t have a pass yet? Don’t worry. Expo Only passes are free and get you access to our Google classroom. You can also use the code NYGOOGLE which is redeemable for up to $700.00 off a full conference pass.

For attendees of the main conference, Google Analytics team members will be participating in the following sessions:

Landing Page Optimization

Day 1: Tuesday, March 26 from 11:45-12:45pm

Are your search landing pages working hard or hardly working? Landing pages can be the hardest-working part of your search campaigns, or they can kill your lead generation and sales conversion rates. Testing insignificant details such as button colour and headline size won't lead to real lift in your conversion rates. This session will show you what to test, how to analyse your landing pages, and how to get significant revenue lift quickly.

Moderator:

Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board; President, Page Zero Media

Speakers:

Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate, Google

Angie Schottmuller, Director of Interactive Strategic Planning & Optimization, Three Deep Marketing

The Dawn of Convergence Analytics

Day 1: Tuesday, March 26 from 3:30-4:30pm

The combination of "big data," access to cloud computing, powerful algorithms, and unprecedented visualization capabilities has created an emerging new class of analytics tools for the marketer. It's being called "Convergence Analytics". It's the marketing equivalent of "one ring to rule them all." Though still in its infancy as a discipline, there are many vendors in the market, and their goal is to pull together data sources from multiple touch points from the web and beyond. They're also using advanced data gathering and data regularization strategies to create a correlative dashboard-like experience for the marketer.

Moderator

Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Speakers:

Andrew Edwards, Managing Partner, Efectyv Marketing

Rand Schulman, Managing Partner, Efectyv Marketing

We hope to see you out at the event, you can find out more details on the conference site.

Can’t make it to NY? Be sure and follow Google Analytics on Twitter and Google+ for real-time updates on sessions throughout the day sharing interesting bits from the conference.

Posted by the Google Analytics team