Analytics Blog: November 2013

Full Customer Journey: Three Lenses of Measurement

November 27, 2013

My son is a LEGO enthusiast, and even though I don’t build that often, I am usually involved in the acquisition process of LEGO sets or digital goods. To quote a few, we build with bricks, plan with their software, play with their apps, buy through their website and consume content on their social profiles. Quite a lot of touch points with their brand, and that’s not all!

On my side, I get very curious on how they measure and optimize their customer experiences, so I like to use them as an example of how challenging the measurement world has become. And the way we look at this challenge at Google is through three lenses of measurement:

Holistic Measurement: how can we understand our customers using multiple devices through multiple touch points?
Full Credit Measurement: how can we attribute the credit of bringing new and returning customers to marketing campaigns?
Active Measurement: how can we make sure that data is accessible, accurate and comprehensive?

This is the kind of challenge that we try to solve for and that drives our thinking. Paul Muret, VP Engineering at Google, discussed these three challenges in his article on the Harvard Business Review and how we should face them. Here is an excerpt:

This is creating tremendous opportunities for business teams to engage customers throughout their new and more complex buying journeys. But before you can take advantage, you have to understand that journey by measuring and analyzing the data in new ways that value these moments appropriately. The payoff is better alignment between marketing messages and consumers’ intent during their paths to purchase - and ultimately, better business results.

Below is a presentation delivered by me at Dublin, in a Google Think event earlier this year. I discuss each of the challenges in depth.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

SUPERWEEK 2014: January 21-23, Hungary

November 26, 2013

The following is a guest post contributed by Zoltán Bánóczy, founder of AALL Ltd. and the SUPERWEEK Conference series.

In the fourth week of the New Year, many of us will enjoy the gorgeous view pictured below as the actual backdrop for one the year’s most exciting analytics conferences. Speakers hailing from Jerusalem to Copenhagen to San Francisco to Ahmedabad promise to deliver insightful talks about a wide range of topics surrounding the modern digital industry.

The 3 day SUPERWEEK 2014 begins on January 21st, located on the beautiful mountaintop of Galyatető, at the highest-lying 4 star hotel in Hungary. Fly to Budapest easily from across Europe and rely on our shuttlebuses called SUPERBUS as an option for your package. Conference goers can expect advanced talks at the sessions, data based opinions shared during the panels, and Google Tag Manager deep dives - some say even deeper than the Mariana Trench.

In his keynote, Avinash Kaushik will share a collection of strategies to help you ensure that the focus of your analytics effort is on taking action and not data regurgitation in a session titled: “Driving an Obsession with Actionable Analytics.“ Caleb Whitmore (Analytics Pros) will be providing a “hands-on” training and conference goers can complete the GAIQ exam right afterwards. Excitingly, we get the opportunity to ask Avinash about Life! - in his Q&A session entitled: “Search, Social, Analytics, Life: AMA (“ask me anything”)”.

Speakers include industry thought leaders, Top Contributors to the AdWords forums and many Google Analytics Certified Partner companies - all from about 10 countries.

We’ll try to cover the latest of the industry: predictive analytics (Ravi Pathak, India), Universal Analytics & Google Tag Manager implementations (Yehoshua Coren - Israel, Doug Hall - UK, and Julien Coquet - France), PPC / display advertising (Jacob Kildebogaard - Denmark and Oliver Schiffers - Germany), A/B testing, privacy (Aurélie Pols - Spain) and even analytics expert “The Professor”, Phil Pearce from the UK.

Join us for the emblematic, traditional evening with campfire made from large 2+ meter logs where a wide range of (mulled) wine and mellow mood will be served.

Keep up to date on the agenda and other programmes by following us at @superweek2014 (or #spwk during the event) on Twitter.

Posted by Zoltán Bánóczy, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Intuit Team Crunches its Own Numbers with Google Analytics Premium

November 25, 2013

Intuit products like Quicken and TurboTax have been putting the power of numbers in the hands of users since 1983.

Which is why we're so pleased that when Intuit wanted to boost the power of analytics for one of their own teams recently, they turned to Google Analytics Premium. The details are in our new case study, which you'll find here.

The study has the full story of Intuit's Channel Marketing Team, which now uses Google Analytics Premium to measure data for multiple business segments. Once they began using it, Intuit discovered that they had been under-reporting the success of their SEO traffic by at least 27% and conversions by up to 200%.

Those are exactly the kind of vital numbers that Google Analytics Premium is designed to provide.

Intuit used Blast Analytics and Marketing, a Google Analytics certified partner, to build out their solution, which was configured to match Intuit's own organizational structure. That structure helped Intuit "democratize" its data so that now anyone on the team can get what they need right away, in real time. Instead of the two days it used to take to request and deliver reports, it takes two hours or less.

Simply put, Ken Wach, Vice President of Marketing at Intuit said, “Google Analytics Premium increased the speed and accuracy of actionable data that drives our business.”

For more, read the full Intuit case study or learn about Google Analytics Premium.

Post by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

New Secondary Dimensions Provides Deeper Insights Into Your Users

November 21, 2013

Today we’ve added many new secondary dimensions to standard reports, including the much-asked for Custom Dimensions.

Custom Dimensions is a new Universal Analytics feature that allows you to bring custom business data into Google Analytics. For example, a custom dimension can be used to collect friendly page names, whether the user is logged in, or a user tier (like Gold, Platinum, or Diamond).

By using Custom Dimensions in secondary dimensions, you can now refine standard reports to obtain deeper insights.

In the report above, Direct Traffic delivers the most traffic, but these are Gold users (lower value). At the same time, Google Search delivers the third and fourth most site traffic and these are Diamond users (high value). Therefore, data shows this site should continue to invest in Google Search to attract more high value users.

The new data in secondary dimensions gives analysts a powerful new tool. We’d love to hear about any new insights in the comments.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Product Manager, Google Analytics API team

Insights on the fly: Introducing executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

November 20, 2013

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.

DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster -- and we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.

With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.

Click image for full-sized version

As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.

“Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.”

Three ways to get started with executive reporting

Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.

High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.

Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track.

Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “Success with DS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don’t see the ‘Executive Reports’ tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open whitelist.

Posted by the DoubleClick Team

Optimizing AdSense Revenue Using Google Analytics

November 19, 2013

Recently Google Analytics launched two important new capabilities for its AdSense integration: AdSense Exits reports and AdSense Revenue as an experiment objective. They both come as a great additions to websites that use AdSense for monetization. In this post I will go over the the AdSense Analytics integration and how it can be used to optimize AdSense revenue.

Integrating AdSense and Google Analytics

Before going further into the wonders of the Analytics AdSense marriage, you should first be sure that your accounts are linked properly. Here is how to do it. First follow the steps in the screenshot below after logging into Google Analytics (Admin => AdSense Linking => Link Accounts):

AdSense and Analytics Integration (click for full size)

You will be sent to your AdSense account in order to confirm the linking and then you will be sent back to Google Analytics to choose which profiles should include this data. If you have any problems or additional questions, take a look at the AdSense Help Center. After the integration is complete the following metrics will be available on your Google Analytics account:

AdSense revenue: revenue generated by AdSense ads.
Ads clicked: the number of times AdSense ads were clicked.
AdSense CTR (click-through rate): the percentage of page impressions that resulted in a click on an ad.
AdSense eCPM: AdSense revenue per 1,000 page impressions.
AdSense ads viewed: number of ads viewed.
AdSense Page Impressions: the number of pageviews during which an ad was displayed.

AdSense Reports On Google Analytics

Currently, there are 3 out-of-the-box AdSense reports available on Analytics: Pages, Referrers and Exits. You can find them here (direct link to report).

1. AdSense Pages

This report provides information about which pages contributed most to AdSense revenue. It will show each of the pages on the website and how well they performed in terms of AdSense. For each page in the website that contains an AdSense unit we will be able to analyze the following metrics: AdSense revenue, AdSense ads clicked, AdSense CTR, AdSense eCPM, AdSense ads viewed and AdSense page impressions.

This report provides an interesting view of which page performed best, and it can be used to optimize website content. For example, if you find that posts about celebrities generate more revenue than posts about soccer, you might consider writing more about celebrities (if your main objective is to make money on AdSense.)

2. AdSense Referrers

This report provides information about the performance of domains that referred visitors who generated AdSense revenue. This information is extremely valuable; however, I suggest using a different report, since it provides more in-depth information: “All Traffic”.

The AdSense Referrers only displays information about websites that generated AdSense Revenue, it does not provide information on other types of traffic sources and campaigns. For this reason, I believe the All Traffic report presents a more complete view. To find the report, go to this page (direct link to report) and click on the AdSense tab just above the chart.

3. AdSense Exits

AdSense Exit report shows the number of sessions that ended due to a user clicking on an AdSense ad. This is an interesting metric as it can show which pages have a "high conversion rate", i.e. the ratio of visits to a page and those that left the website clicking on an AdSense unit through it. If your monetization is made through AdSense this report will give just that: AdSense conversion rate per page.

Optimizing AdSense revenue using Google Analytics

Below is an example of how to use the integration from my Analytics for Publishers eBook. Most websites work with templates and each template may have different AdSense placements; this means that an important analysis would be to compare performance by template (or by category) rather than by page.

In order to analyze template performance, we will need to create one segment per template. If you want to learn more about creating Segments, check this Help Center article. For example, let’s suppose your website has the following page templates:

Analytics pages with URLs structured as example.com/analytics/...
Testing pages with URLs structured as example.com/testing/...
Targeting pages with URLs structured as example.com/targeting/...

In this case you would create three segments using the dimension Page, each containing its unique pattern: /analytics/ for analytics pages, /testing/ for testing pages, and /targeting/ for targeting pages. Below is an example of how the segment would look for the analytics pages:

Analyzing template performance using segments (click for full size)

After creating the segments for all three templates, you will be able to choose all of them in the top-left corner of the screen (just above the chart, see bubble #1 above) to see a comparison between them. Below is a screenshot showing how such a comparison would look like:

Table comparison metrics for different visitor segments (click for full size)

In the table above we are able to compare pages by all metrics available. For example, we can see that while the Analytics section has higher revenue, this is related to the number of impressions, which is also significantly higher. When we analyze further, we see that the Testing and Targeting sections have a good potential, with the same CTR but significantly higher AdSense eCPM. Based on these metrics we can understand which templates and content types are the most effective.

As mentioned above, once you find out which pages are performing well and which pages are not, you can use Content Experiments to optimize them. Here is a Content Experiments guide.

Closing Thoughts

Here are a few takeaways for you to start optimizing today!

Understand which content type and subject generates the highest revenue and create content based on this data.
Understand which page templates bring the best results by using advanced segments.
Analyze AdSense performance to learn which segments have a good CTR; this might bring insight into which audience to target.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

Learning what moves the needle most with Data-Driven Attribution

November 18, 2013

"Tremendously useful." That's what Chris Bawden of the TechSmith Corporation says about Data-Driven Attribution.

What is Data-Driven Attribution? Well, in August we launched a new leap in technology that uses algorithmic models and reports to help take the guesswork out of attribution. And it's available now to Google Analytics Premium customers around the world.

Data-Driven Attribution uses statistical probabilities and economic algorithms to analyze each customer's journey in a new way. You define the results that count — sales, sign-ups, or whatever matters to you— and the model assigns value to marketing touchpoints automatically, comparing actions and probabilities to show you which digital channels and keywords move the needle most.

The bottom line: better returns on your marketing and ad spend.

We checked in with companies using DDA and results have been strong:

"Data Driven Attribution really showed us where we were driving conversions," says Will Lin, Senior Director of Global eMarketing for HomeAway. They saw a 23% increase in attributed conversions for their test keywords after making changes suggested by Data Driven Attribution. Download case study.

TechSmith Corporation saw a 19% increase in attributed conversions under the Data Driven Attribution model. "It uncovered growth potential we would have not seen otherwise," reports Nicole Remington, their Search Marketing Manager. Download case study.

And the digital analytics firm MaassMedia saw display leads increase 10% while costs per lead remained flat. "We now have a much more accurate measure of how display impacts our business," one of their clients told them. Download case study.

In short, the early returns for DDA users have been strong. Some of the key advantages of this model:

Algorithmic and automatic: The model distributes credit across marketing channels scientifically, based on success metrics you define.

Transparent: Our unique Model Explorer gives you full insight into how marketing touch points are valued — no “black box” methodology.

Actionable: Detailed insights into both converting and non-converting paths offer clear guidance for your marketing decisions.

Cross-platform: DDA is deeply integrated with other Google products like AdWords, the Google Display Network, and YouTube, and you can pull in data from most any digital channel.

You'll learn much more about the benefits of Data-Driven Attribution when you download our cheat sheet. Or to learn more about Google Analytics Premium, contact your Google Account Manager or visit google.com/analytics/premium.

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, and Jody Shapiro, Product Manager for Google Analytics Premium

Sharpen Your Analysis Skills Over The Holidays At The Analytics Academy

November 15, 2013

Last month, we launched the Analytics Academy, a new hub for all users to participate in free, online, community-based video courses about digital analytics and Google Analytics.

We’re pleased to share more than 145,000 students signed up for the Academy. Our team is delighted so many are interested in advancing their skills as marketers, analysts and business owners. But the good news is that while the current window to earn a certificate has ended, the educational materials remain up for everyone to access.

Don’t fall behind your peers: the Holidays present the perfect opportunity to put some time aside and learn the latest in analytics. Start your journey in the Academy today by completing Digital Analytics Fundamentals. This way, you’ll be ready to go when we announce the next course in early 2014.

Some key highlights from the course include:

An overview of today’s digital measurement landscape
Guidance on how to build an effective measurement plan
Best practices for collecting actionable data
Descriptions of key digital measurement concepts, terminology and analysis techniques
Deep-dives into Google Analytics reports with specific examples for evaluating your digital marketing performance

And a quick bonus for everyone: we recently conducted a Hangout on Air with Google Analytics Evangelist (and course Instructor) Justin Cutroni and Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik that’s a must-watch for all course participants and the Analytics community as a whole. We’ve embedded it below in case you were unable to attend live.

The next course is scheduled to start in early 2014 and will cover how to progress from measurement planning to implementation. We’ll be sharing more information with you soon.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Launching Real-Time Events and Conversions Reports out of Beta

November 12, 2013

It wasn’t too long ago that we launched events and conversions in Google Analytics Real-Time reports. We’ve heard from many of you who are using Real-Time reporting to test changes to your site, create dashboards to monitor your traffic and goals, or make rapid decisions about what content to promote today.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Real-Time events and conversions reports will be coming out of Beta to all users over the next few weeks. Based on your feedback, we’ve refined these reports to make them even more valuable: you’ll soon see them in App profiles, and we’ve also added dedicated metrics for Unique Visitors.

Events and Conversions in App Profiles

Once the development is done, launching a new version of your app is always a bit nerve-wracking. So many problems can happen at that stage, and most of the channels for finding out that things went wrong aren’t very helpful for helping you know how your whole user base is seeing things. Wouldn’t you like to know what your users are experiencing, not just what your servers or social media are telling you? With event tracking in real-time, you can use event labels and values to measure interactions at your users’ devices, so you can best understand and respond to what users are seeing in the wild.

(Click image for full-sized version)

Perhaps your latest release adds some new social features, and you want to maximize the number of people sharing content. You can add an event to a small interaction, or a view snippet to a dedicated dialog screen. Once you’ve done that, create a goal based on that interaction, and see it show up in real-time as users help spread the word.

Unique Visitors for Events and Conversions

Google Analytics users are a creative bunch, and use events and conversions for an incredibly wide variety of things - from caffeine to detailed web interactions. We’re always doing our best to help you understand your users better, which is why we’ve added Active Visitors metrics to the Real-Time Events and Conversions reports. Sharing a link or staying on a page for several minutes is great, but it’d be even better to be able to understand what percentage of your users hit a certain event or reach a particular goal in real time.

When you create a new advertising campaign, blog post, or social media engagement, your traffic usually goes up - but without a knowledge of how individual users behave, it’s difficult to see the quality of your traffic as it changes. By looking at Active Visitor Conversions in real-time, you can better understand your conversion funnel as it’s happening: whether users are just browsing, or whether they’re actively engaging and converting.

We hope you find the new reports valuable! We’d love to hear how you use them - let us know in the comments. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Jon Mesh, Google Analytics team

Improve your website’s performance with the new Speed Suggestions report

November 5, 2013

Users prefer fast sites. And businesses benefit from it: faster sites tend to have lower bounce rates, increased customer satisfaction and better engagement. Site owners agree, and it shows in their actions taken to optimize site speed: we’re pleased to see from our own benchmarks over the last two years the web is getting faster (not only desktop, even mobile access is around 30% faster compared to last year).

Making your own site faster is something you can act on today and one of the best ways to improve user experience. To help, we’re excited to launch the new Speed Suggestions report in our suite of website performance reports. Not only can you measure and visualize the performance of your website, but you can now also speed up the slowest pages with concrete and actionable suggestions.

Speed Suggestions report

The new Speed Suggestions report shows the average page load time for top visited pages on your website and integrates with the PageSpeed Insights tool to surface suggestions for improving the pages for speed. The PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes the contents of a web page and generates a speed score and concrete suggestions. The speed score indicates the amount of potential improvement on the page. The closer the score is to 100, the more optimized the page is for speed.

In the report, you can click through a suggestions link to see a page with all of the suggestions sorted by their impact on site speed. Example suggestions include reducing the amount of content that needs to load before your users can interact with the page, minifying JavaScript, and reducing redirects. Note that if you rewrite your urls before displaying the url in Analytics, or your pages requires a login (see the help article for more details), then the PageSpeed Insights tool may not be able to analyze the page and generate a score and suggestions.

If you would like to dig into the which of your pages take the most time for your users to load, check out the existing Page Timings report which breaks down the average page load time for each page. Once you’ve identified your slowest pages, you can use the new Speed Suggestions report to improve them. For more general suggestions on how to improve your website, check out these performance articles, and read more about the new report in the detailed help center article. As always, we welcome feedback on ways to improve the report for our users.

For more help, visit our Google Developers site with tools tips and ideas on making the web faster.

Posted by Chen Xiao, Google Analytics Team

Digital Analytics Association Symposium in San Francisco: End-to-End Data Measurement & Visualization

November 4, 2013

The annual Digital Analytics Association (DAA) San Francisco Symposium is happening on November 12^th and this year we are happy to host the event at Google’s San Francisco office. The theme this year is end-to-end data measurement and visualization and the DAA SF chapter has lined up industry leaders who will be sharing their experiences. We are expecting a great afternoon of discussion followed by a networking reception. Below are the event details, please join us!

Our lineup of great speakers is focused on presenting real-world solutions to the challenges you face everyday. The lineup includes:

Jim Sterne, Target Marketing and the DAA
Jon Miller, Co-founder and VP of Marketing at Marketo
Michelle Kiss, Partner at Web Analytics Demystified
Joe Megibow, SVP/GM of Omni-Channel eCommerce at American Eagle Outfitters
Senior Manager, eCommerce Optimization at Symantec
Laura MacTaggert, Director, Web Analysis & Optimization at Salesforce.com
and other great speakers

By attending you will:

Learn how today's consumer interacts with your brand and how to leverage this interaction data for success
Discover how your analytics can drive savvy optimization across multiple channels
Uncover how marketing attribution's data output leads to more informed marketing decisions
Learn the latest on data visualization from practitioners and vendors

Theme: End-to-end data measurement and visualization

When: November 12th, registration starts at 12:30, the program goes from 1:00 to to 5:30, followed by a networking reception

Where: Google San Francisco, 345 Spear Street, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

Cost: $25 for DAA members/$75 for non-members

Event website and registration: register here.

Space is limited so register early!

Last but not least, this Symposium is organized by local DAA members and volunteers. We encourage you to become a member of the DAA and join our local efforts. Become a member and reach out to one of the local chapter leaders, Krista, Charles or Feras.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

The New Dimensions and Metrics Explorer

November 1, 2013

To make it easy to navigate all the 270+ data points the Core Reporting API exposes, today we launched version 2 of the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer.

Click to see the list view.

This tool makes it easy to browse all of the dimensions and metrics, identify valid combinations, and get comprehensive definitions and descriptions.

Click to see the description view.

No wonder it’s the third most visited page on the Analytics Developer site.
Today’s update to the tool added:

Modes - easily see how API names map to Web View Names, and App View Names.
‘Allowed in Segments’ - Quickly see which data can be used in segments.
Updated descriptions- See more details like data type, index ranges, UI names, deprecation status, calculations. For example, see the Custom Variables and Columns group.
It’s fast! - No more page loads as you browse and switch between modes.
Deep links - Share details of a specific dimension or metric by copying the URL of any view.
Automatic Updates - The Metadata API is now used to power the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer. This is a big change and means the tool will automatically update with the latest dimensions and metrics as soon as they’re released.

Visit the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer and tell us what you think.
This tool is built completely using the Metadata API. If you’re thinking about developing your own tools with this data, get started here!
Posted by Pete Frisella, Developer Advocate, Developer Relations Team

Google Analytics Solutions - new product innovations.

Full Customer Journey: Three Lenses of Measurement

SUPERWEEK 2014: January 21-23, Hungary

Intuit Team Crunches its Own Numbers with Google Analytics Premium

New Secondary Dimensions Provides Deeper Insights Into Your Users

Insights on the fly: Introducing executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

Optimizing AdSense Revenue Using Google Analytics

Learning what moves the needle most with Data-Driven Attribution

Sharpen Your Analysis Skills Over The Holidays At The Analytics Academy

Launching Real-Time Events and Conversions Reports out of Beta

Improve your website’s performance with the new Speed Suggestions report

Digital Analytics Association Symposium in San Francisco: End-to-End Data Measurement & Visualization

The New Dimensions and Metrics Explorer

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