Google Analytics Solutions: May 2014

FEATURED

We’ve moved. For new posts about enterprise products, check out the new Google Marketing Platform blog. For information on free products, follow our new Google Analytics products blog. Don’t worry: We’ll still keep this blog around in case you want to check out past posts.

Broader views and faster action for marketers: Google Analytics Premium integrates with DoubleClick Digital Marketing

May 30, 2014

“With Google, we’re getting actionable insights, whereas before we were just getting a lot of data.”

- Lee Pinnington, Multi-Channel Marketing Director, Matalan

As we announced earlier this week, Google Analytics Premium is now integrated with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This enhancement is now available for Google Analytics Premium customers.

Today's consumers move easily across many channels and devices on their journey to a purchase. Top marketers rely on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to run the sophisticated cross-channel ad campaigns that can reach their customers every step of the way. This new step gives Google Analytics Premium users even better ways to see the full customer journey, so they can adjust and make the most of marketing dollars across all channels and devices.

The integration is providing a whole new level of visibility for display advertising by reporting on view-through visits in addition to click-through visits. We're now reporting detailed post-view and post-click engagement and conversion metrics to offer a better view of your strongest opportunities.

1. A clearer view of the customer journey

Display campaigns are typically used in the upper funnel, so they don't get credit in simplistic last-click attribution models. But better attribution models can give full credit to display and other top-of-funnel marketing tools. With the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration you can link your DoubleClick Campaign Manager campaign information into Google Analytics Premium reports, Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) and/or Data-Driven Attribution (DDA), and as a result, you'll see a much more holistic view of how display works together with other channels to drive site engagement and conversions.

“This gives us the ability to see the hidden power of different channels. One of the most interesting things about the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration has been around assisted conversions. It’s really helpful to see how one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel.”

- Adam McCann, Online Search & Affiliate Assistant, Matalan

2. Better investment decisions

With a complete view of the customer journey, you can make smarter decisions on how to allocate your marketing spend. This change helps Google Analytics Premium customers analyze campaigns and ROI at the level that matters to them most, even down to specific versions of creative. It's even easier now to act on this data in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, since Google Analytics Premium uses the same campaign hierarchy and dimensions as DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

3. Greater speed

The integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager means you can spend less time merging campaign data and more time planning winning strategies. We've also made this integration easier, starting with new automatic campaign tagging within DoubleClick for Google Analytics Premium. In the past you had to manually tag every single campaign, creative and landing page URL for them to be recognized in Google Analytics Premium. Now, in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, a simple checkbox makes it incredibly easy to accurately track those campaigns in Google Analytics Premium.

4. Automated and customized marketing

Advertisers are seeing great results with Google Analytics remarketing, for example, Watchfinder revealed a 1300% return on their campaign investment. We’re improving these tools by enabling you to create granular remarketing lists from your Google Analytics Premium account and then share the lists with a DoubleClick Bid Manager advertiser account for real-time remarketing. Plus, Google Analytics Smart Lists feature also works with this integration, allowing you to generate a remarketing list of your best users automatically, based on machine learning from their conversion data.

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.

- Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

The amazing changes in customer journeys are opening up real opportunities for businesses. Making the most of those opportunities starts with seeing the journey more clearly, then reacting quickly to reach the right customers at the right moments with messages that are designed just for them. This new integration is designed to help Google Analytics Premium customers do all those things. We’re just getting started as we’re planning deeper integrations within DoubleClick Digital Marketing in the coming months so stay tuned!

Learn more today and get started

Find out more about the Google Analytics Premium integrations with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. And download a case study.

Posted by: Ravi Mruthyunjaya, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Better data, better decisions: Enhanced Ecommerce boosts shopping analytics

May 30, 2014

Earlier this week, we announced the beta launch of Enhanced Ecommerce for Google Analytics. It's a complete revamp of our ecommerce analytics, designed to provide richer insights into pre-purchase shopping behavior and into product performance.

“With Enhanced Ecommerce our clients can immediately gain clear insight into the most important metrics about shopper behavior and conversion: what products are viewed, where they are viewed, when they are added to carts, how the checkout process works and where customers get lost, and even details like payment methods.”

- Caleb Whitmore, CEO of Analytics Pros

Enhanced Ecommerce is designed to keep pace with the remarkable rise of online retail, which grew another 30% year over year in 2013. Digital data has played an essential role in that growth, offering deep insights into shopper behavior and letting retailers make smarter decisions. But needs are rapidly increasing and retailers are requiring more sophisticated and comprehensive analysis tools to understand shoppers and product-level performance. With the launch of Enhanced Ecommerce, we’re providing these tools.

“Enhanced Ecommerce will help us to overcome many challenges. As an example, I'm looking at a report that indicates a 74.4% checkout abandonment rate. That insight is shockingly simple: over 7 out of 10 people that add something to the cart and start to checkout don't complete it! This is the kind of data that can drive change more readily than, say, simple conversion rates for e-commerce orders.”

- Caleb Whitmore, CEO of Analytics Pros

Enhanced Ecommerce is built on top of the powerful Universal Analytics foundation. It includes tracking code updates (including full support for Google Tag Manager), data model changes, and new end-user reports that address ecommerce-specific use cases. Together they help online retailers see farther and understand customers better than ever before.

Get deeper insights

Analyze how far shoppers get in the shopping funnel and where they drop off.
Understand which products are viewed most, which are frequently abandoned in cart and which ones convert well.
Upload rich product metadata to slice and dice your data.
Create rich user segments to delve deeper into your users’ shopping behavior and the products they interact with.

Optimize your site

Create product lists for onsite merchandising rules and product landing pages to see which lists and products are best at driving customer engagement.
Analyze how internal promotions impact sales, and act immediately on the results.
With retailers reporting average on-site conversion rates of around 2.7%, even small improvements can have a big impact.

Close the loop

With refund support, Google Analytics now covers the entire shopping lifecycle.
Import user segments, based on ecommerce activity, for targeting in your remarketing campaigns.

In the chart below, see an example of how the new reports can benefit your business. You can create segments directly from the funnel reports to analyze abandoned cart sessions. See which products were abandoned and which devices to target to recapture those users. This data allows you to take immediate action.

Shopping behavior funnel report. Use the table to analyze by any session level dimension

Enhanced Ecommerce is all about the bottom line. We've designed it to help you improve your total experience and turn more shoppers into buyers.

Learn more

Sign up today for the new Analytics Academy course on Enhanced Ecommerce! Or come learn more at Internet Retailer Conference Exhibition on June 12; Google’s Jesse Nichols will present Enhanced Ecommerce live.

You can find more information on getting started with Enhanced Ecommerce in our Help Center and Developer site.

Happy Analyzing!

Post by: Marcia Jung, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Google Analytics Summit 2014: What’s Next And On The Horizon For Analytics

May 28, 2014

As they have for years, Google Analytics Certified Partners, Premium customers and developers will once again join us in the Bay Area for our annual summit this week. We are constantly working to improve our products based on feedback from our most dedicated users and this event lets us hear directly from our community. We wanted to share an overview of some of the tools and features we’ll discuss at the 2014 summit so that even if you aren’t able to attend, you can about hear what’s next.

Enhanced Ecommerce

Google Analytics Ecommerce data traditionally focused on details about the purchase - transaction details, product details, and others. But, marketers today want to understand the entire customer journey. They want more details about customer behavior when looking at products, interacting with merchandising units and on-site marketing. Today we’re announcing the beta for Enhanced Ecommerce - a complete revamp of how Google Analytics measures the Ecommerce experience.

Businesses can now gain clear insight into new important metrics about shopper behavior and conversion including: product detail views, ‘add to cart’ actions, internal campaign clicks, the success of internal merchandising tools, the checkout process, and purchase. Merchants will be able to understand how far along users get in the buying process and where they are dropping off. For a complete overview of new features, have a look at our Help Center.

For marketers and Ecommerce managers looking to hone their analytic skills, we are also announcing a new Analytics Academy course titled Ecommerce Analytics: From Data to Decisions. Students will be guided through interactive examples of analyses for a fictional retail company to practice techniques they can apply to their own business. You can sign-up to be notified when this course opens on the Analytics Academy site.

Flexible and Scalable Reporting

Today’s marketers and analysts are looking to multiple data sets to gain deeper insights. We’re working on a number of new features to make it simple for businesses to work with different types of data in Google Analytics.

We unveiled Unified Channel Groupings to ensure all traffic that comes to the your site are classified in-line with your unique channel definitions. This is especially valuable for attribution, so marketers can interpret and report on the consumer journey based on their unique view of acquisition channels.

We’ve expanded the functionality of Google Analytics Dimension Widening, now called ‘Data Import’, to enable customers to import more of their own data into Google Analytics. This could include specific product details, information about returned products, insights about your customers’ preferences, and more. Imported data can be used with almost all of the standard Google Analytics features. For a complete list of the types of data you can import please see our article in the help center (linked above).

For Google Analytics Premium users, we’re introducing Custom Tables. This powerful feature enables users to retrieve unsampled data using customized tables that best fit their business’ needs. Once configured, fresh data will be available daily for unsampled analysis and segmentation.

Enterprise-Class Features

Today, smart marketers are increasingly tying measurement to media execution. We’re excited to announce a seamless integration between Google Analytics Premium, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Google Analytics Premium is uniquely positioned to help today’s advertiser understand how customers, and potential customers, interact with advertising media trafficked on the DoubleClick platform. In addition to understanding impression level data, advertisers can now send remarketing lists from Google Analytics to DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.

-Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

Additionally, for enterprise customers, service providers, or developers that manage many accounts we are offering 4 new APIs to help you save you time and increase productivity: the new Provisioning API to create new GA accounts (invite only), the AdWords and Filters API to manage configurations, and the Embed API to surface key reports and dashboards. We’ve also re-launched the App Gallery as the Partner Gallery, the new destination to find services by Google Analytics Certified Partners and apps by Google Analytics Technology Partners. The new gallery will rollout to all users over the coming week.

Stay tuned in the next several days for deep-dives about our various new tools and features. You can also sign-up for the whitelist of several of the features listed above here. Thank you to our partners, developers, and customers for all the great feedback over the year. We hope to continue developing and launches capabilities that matters to you most.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Google Analytics Premium launches executive-level business reporting

May 27, 2014

“Prior to using roll-up reporting we had no way to see all of our sites in a single Google Analytics view. Now we can easily compare our nine sites and react to trends in real time. This means that a product manager with a hunch about a new traffic pattern can quickly prove/disprove a theory without wasting hours of time pulling numbers for every site.” - Jesse Knight, VICE Media Group

Google Analytics already helps you gather deep insights into one website or app at a time. But what if you want to understand the overall performance and interactions of all your company’s digital properties? In today’s multi-touchpoint consumer world, this is a much greater priority.

Today we’re launching Roll-Up Reporting in Google Analytics Premium to help address this need. Roll-Up Reporting is a single interface that moves your aggregate business data much closer to your high-level business decisions.

The Executive Dashboard

One spot with aggregate data for all your sites and apps? Check. Key summaries with no compromises on data accuracy and segmentation? Check. Everything available in real time? Check. With Roll-Up Reporting, there's no need to export from dozens of properties and collate data offline. It's all built in.

Spot Overperforming Business Units

Suppose you want to compare the performance of the sites and apps for your company’s various brands, franchises or regional subsidiaries. The new Source Properties Report has you covered, with at-a-glance views of business units that are outperforming or underperforming. To compare specific segments, try using the new Source Property Display Name dimension in advanced segments, in custom reports, or as a secondary dimension.

A Single View of Your Customer Journey

In many cases, Roll-Up Reporting can de-duplicate unique visitors across your websites and apps, so you can see the total unique-visitor reach of all your digital properties. You can also use segments to study the overlap and pathing of visitors who traverse several of your sites and apps. If your business owns multiple brands or franchises that target similar consumer populations, or if you expect the same consumer to interact with multiple marketing or landing sites over time, be sure to try this out.

This is also a great way to tie together platform and device touchpoints. Google Analytics already provides powerful features, like cross device reports and single-view app and web data, to help you report on multiple types together. With Roll-Up Reporting, you’re no longer restricted to reporting on those tied to the same Google Analytics Property. That means more agile setups and more powerful analysis.

Fast Setup:

Roll-Up Reporting is made possible by Roll-Up Properties, a special type of Google Analytics property whose hit data comes exclusively from other Analytics properties. Setting up a Roll-Up Property is straightforward: no tagging changes needed. Simply select the Google Analytics properties that need to be reported on together, and Google Analytics will configure each selected property, called a Source Property, to forward a modified copy of all future hits it receives to the Roll-Up Property.

To get started with Roll-Up Reporting, contact your Google Analytics Premium Account Manager to request your new Roll-Up Properties.

To learn even more about Google Analytics Premium, contact your Google Account Manager or visit google.com/analytics/premium.

Posted by Yi Han, on behalf of the Google Analytics Premium team

Google Analytics Conference Nordic in Stockholm, Sweden

May 19, 2014

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

The event takes place August 28-29 in Stockholm, Sweden. You can expect to hear expert tips on how to get maximum value out of Google Analytics, and learn from other organizations using the tool.

Started based on an initiative by Outfox, who gathered the other Google Analytics Certified Partners, the conference is now returning for the fourth consecutive year.

Our Stockholm conference includes:

• Clinics led by Google Analytics Certified Partners

• Case studies from businesses and other organizations

• Opportunities to interact with peers and experts

• ...much more!

The conference is being visited by two top speakers from Google, Daniel Waisberg and Kerri Jacobs.

Daniel Waisberg is the Analytics Advocate at Google, where he is responsible for fostering Google Analytics by educating and inspiring Online Marketing professionals. Both at Google and his previous positions, Daniel has worked with some of the biggest Internet brands to measure and optimize online behavior.

Before kickstarting the Google Analytics Premium sales team, Kerri Jacobs was a Sales Manager for the DoubleClick publisher, agency and marketer product portfolio. Kerri has been a leader in the online sales world since the early days.

Besides meeting Google, you’ll meet Google Analytics Certified Partners Outfox, iProspect, Knowit, MediaAnalys, Netbooster, Klikki and Web Guide Partner. You will also meet and learn from several end users who use Google Analytics on a daily basis.

To join us in Stockholm August 28-29, visit the conference site and secure your ticket before it's sold out again.

Posted by Lars Johansson, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Join us for a conversation on the future of digital advertising

May 13, 2014

Digital is no longer just another marketing channel. It’s a medium that’s changing the art of storytelling and reinventing the way companies connect with consumers.
How will digital advertising evolve next? You’re invited to tune in live as industry leaders tackle the question at DoubleClick’s annual event on digital trends.
Speakers include:

Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation

Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google

Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google

Register now for the live stream Wednesday, June 4 9:30 am PDT - 10:45 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT - 1:45 pm EDT
Time not convenient? When you register you’ll receive a link to watch the recording on demand.
We hope you can join!
Here’s footage from last year’s event to give you a taste of the 2014 live stream: Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics team

Introducing Content Grouping in the Behavior Flow

May 12, 2014

Many of you have shared with us that it’s difficult to identify traffic patterns from Behavior Flows that include a large number of pages. That’s why we're pleased to announce that we’re adding support for Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow.

Content Groupings let you group pages and content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. The Behavior Flow view provides a graphical representation of how visitors flow through your site by traffic source (or any other dimension) so you can see their journeys, as well as where they dropped off. Now, you can select Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow to see how visitors flow through Content Groupings that you have defined. This can help you answer questions like “Where do users who read my sports pages go next? Do they view more sports articles or do they switch to another section? Or, do they simply drop off?”

The more time you spend setting up your Content Groupings, the more information you will be able to discover from viewing them in the Behavior Flow. Watch the video to learn more about setting up Content Groupings.

Visit our Help Center to learn how to get started with Content Groupings, or read this article about using the Behavior Flow once you have set up your Content Groupings.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Matthew Anderson, Google Analytics Team

The Power Of Segmentation And Mobile App Analytics

May 1, 2014

A few weeks ago I presented at the Google Developer Summit in London, where members of the Google Developer Relations team discussed several ways to use our tools to their best.

In my presentation (below), I discussed the power of segmentation and proposed a way to look at it in two different ways:

Mission Driven Segmentation: some of the features in Google Analytics depend on implementation, and they start working from the moment you implement/configure them, so they are important for repetitive segmentation tasks. Examples are creating views for specific traffic sources / GEO locations or creating custom dimensions to measure attributes of customer engagement.
On The Fly Segmentation: segmentation can’t always be planned, sometimes you might have special requests that you need to do “right now”. For this purpose, you can create new segments, which are extremely important for exploratory analyses.

Spoiler: I used two Lego building case studies to exemplify the two types of segmentation.

Below is the full presentation (thanks for the intro Richard Hyndman!), if you would like to watch all presentations from the event, here is a playlist.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate