Google Analytics Solutions: 2014

Keeping the GA Web Experience Modern

2014. gada 12. decembris

We're continuing to bring you new features and technologies in the design of Google Analytics to provide the best a user experience. With this in mind, starting January 31, 2015 we will no longer support official compatibility of Google Analytics with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). While you can continue to use IE9 after we discontinue support, some features may not work properly going forward. This update maintains our practice of supporting the newest browsers while discontinuing support for the third-oldest version, as we previously announced in September 2013.

We will continue to support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 10 or higher, Safari and other modern browsers. Of course, you will still be able to measure visits from users of all browsers, including IE 9. We will send further reminders prior to the deprecation, but do advise you begin preparing and implementing plans for this change at your earliest convenience.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Refreshing “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase” - New Insights into Marketing Channels

2014. gada 11. decembris

Last year we introduced “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase” -- a tool that helped marketers visualize the roles played by marketing channels like paid search, email and display ads in their customers' journeys.

The goal was to help marketers learn more about the customer journeys for their industries. If social makes your customers aware, and email makes them convert -- or vice versa -- you can make sure you're in both places with the right kind of message.

Today we're happy to introduce a new improved version of the Customer Journey to Online Purchase, with a few key enhancements. We’ve refreshed the data based on millions of consumer interactions, updated the industry classifications, and we’ve split out paid search so you can see the influence of brand and generic search terms on the purchase decision.

In each industry you can now see journeys for small, medium and large companies, which can often be quite different.

Click to enlarge image

For instance, the above image shows the journey for customers of small businesses in the shopping industry. Note that organic search is very often an "assist" interaction for these customers.

Click to enlarge image

Now here's the same journey for large shopping businesses. Note that display clicks and social are strongly assisting interactions -- while display didn’t even appear for the small businesses above. For both small and large businesses, a direct website visit is most likely to be the last interaction. Across industries, the differences from small to large businesses illustrate how different marketing strategies and customer profiles may lead to different buying behavior.

And there's more! Now you can drill down into each marketing channel for a closer look at the role it plays based on its position in the purchase path. Channels that occur more frequently in the beginning of the path are more likely to help generate awareness for your product, while the end of the path is closer to the customer’s purchase decision.

Click to enlarge image

In these charts, for example, we see the different roles that different channels play in the Shopping industry. One interesting insight is that all channels -- even those traditionally thought of as “upper funnel” or “lower funnel” -- occur throughout the purchase path, but a given channel may be more common at particular stages depending on its role (and depending on the industry).

Each marketing campaign and channel may have a different impact on customers depending on when they interact with it. Using what you learn from this tool, you can help adapt your marketing messaging to be more relevant and useful for your customers.

Try the Customer Journey to Online Purchase today. And for more helpful marketing insights, check out Measure What Matters Most: our new guide chock-full of suggestions on how to measure the impact of your marketing -- across channels -- to complement what you learn from the Customer Journey tool and take action to improve your marketing.

Happy analyzing!

The Customer Journey to Online Purchase »

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

Google Analytics in AdMob helps mobile app developer Eltsoft go global

2014. gada 9. decembris

Cross-posted on the Inside AdMob Blog

Since March 2014, Google Analytics has been fully available in AdMob, and now app developers are increasingly seeing results by combining data from both platforms. Here’s one story that illustrates the power of AdMob and Google Analytics together.

Passion for languages and learning

Jason Byrne, and business partner Robert Diem, are passionate about making a difference in education. They came together during their time as professors in Japan to found Eltsoft LLC, a company that builds mobile language learning apps for iOS and Android. Together, they started creating a series of fun tools that allow users to study whenever they want, wherever they are.

Global expansion

Their most popular app is English Grammar, which has been downloaded by more than a million people looking to sharpen their English-language skills in nearly 120 countries.

All of the company’s apps are available for free or as paid versions. To increase revenue, they chose AdMob to earn money from the free versions of their apps with advertising. “AdMob monetization is central to our success because it delivers high-quality, appropriate ads to our audience in their native languages, wherever they live,” says Jason.

The Google Analytics data within AdMob helped them understand more about their users. "Our app, English Grammar, has users from all around the world, so we turned to data from Google Analytics and AdMob to understand which languages we should consider for localization. For example, we knew we had to prioritize German and French, but we discovered other languages that we didn't expect, such as Russian and Japanese."

A data-driven approach to marketing

Eltsoft uses data to focus their marketing campaigns and assess where to use their resources most effectively. “Google Analytics keeps making campaign analysis simpler and clearer,” Jason says. “Data from various sources - Google Analytics and Google Play, for instance - are now all in one place. That helps me understand what’s happening with our ad campaigns.”

While data analysis helped Eltsoft validate some of their hypotheses, it also uncovered opportunities according to Jason: “The greatest takeaway for me is that the results are never really what I expect. I am often surprised. Analytics has given us great insights into who our users are, and has provided a very important lesson in the value of surveying our user base. Our simple assumptions are often inaccurate.”

Replicating successful strategies

Eltsoft has developed a way to calculate the value of users by using a combination of AdMob metrics (like ad request values) and Analytics metrics (like user counts and sessions per user). Having Google Analytics in AdMob has unlocked such analysis because the data is available in the same interface.

As a result, Eltsoft can now understand what works best for their users. “For example, we’ve made changes to our apps, and Analytics has really helped us to track the effectiveness of those changes. I would say six months ago, that our success was a mystery. The data said we were doing well, but the whys were not clear. Therefore, we couldn’t replicate or push forward. But today, we understand what’s happening and can project our future success. We have not only the data, but can control certain variables allowing us to understand that data.”

“Google Analytics data is literally a goldmine,” says Jason.

If you want to learn more about how Eltsoft is using Google Analytics and AdMob, download the full case study.

Want to learn how to get the most from Analytics in AdMob? Sign up for our free online course, Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals.

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Ringing in the New Year - Behavior Trends and Insights

2014. gada 8. decembris

Last month we published an analysis of how people behave before and during the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. We saw the most important days of the year for retailers, how to take advantage of the top transaction days, and when to take action.

Today we are looking at the patterns of behavior over the holidays and into the new year with the objective of understanding how digital marketers can prepare for 2015.

After looking at data from the previous three years, we found two interesting insights:

User behavior is significantly different from country to country, but very consistent from year to year within a particular country.
The beginning of January can be a great time to offer new deals outside of the US.

Read on to learn more about the analysis we performed and how to take advantage of the trends we found, it will help you get a head start on 2015!

User Behavior Trends

Patterns can tell us a lot about data, they are intuitive and show us a lot of information at a glance. With that in mind, we produced the charts below to show how people behave around Christmas and New Year’s Eve. We wanted to understand the differences between cultures, so we focused on the trends from three large economies: US, UK and France. All the charts show data from December 11 to January 14 for the last three years and the two vertical grey areas represent Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.

United States: the transactions trend clearly shows that users purchase mostly up to a week before Christmas Day and no improvement is seen in early January, although sessions do return to normal quickly after New Year’s Eve. Publishers should take advantage of this rebound in sessions, while retailers may want to wait on providing deals until sales bounce back fully.

United Kingdom: transactions decline sharply until Christmas and then start rising sharply from December 26, and about a week after New Year’s Eve it raises to levels about the same or higher than pre-holiday, so you might consider creating marketing campaigns and promotions to take advantage of January’s rise. Sessions follow a similar pattern.

France: transactions and sessions follow a similar pattern as in the UK, but with a significant decline during New Year’s Eve. As you can see, there is a major spike in the second Wednesday of January every year, that’s the day Winter sales begin in France! Unlike in the US, January is an important month for French retailers, should we say the French Cyber Wednesday?

Get a head start on 2015

So how can you take advantage of those trends to be more successful during the coming year? Here are some ideas for you to act upon right now:

Look at your own data for previous years to understand the patterns for your existing and previous customers.

Check your Benchmarking reports to learn more about how other websites of your size and in your vertical performed.

Use Google Trends to check trends from previous years related to your vertical and country.

Make sure you match your marketing efforts to your local post-holiday trend.

About the Data & Charts

In order to perform this analysis, we looked at billions of sessions from authorized Google Analytics users who have shared their website data anonymously (read more).

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg

With Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick: Matalan increases conversion rate 28%

2014. gada 1. decembris

This post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser blog as part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

As one of the UK's leading family clothing retailers, Matalan must be nimble -- faster decisions mean better customer engagement and more sales. So they worked with Morpheus Media to implement Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Google Analytics' powerful insights helped Matalan make better business decisions, faster.

Matalan was already using DoubleClick Campaign Manager to centralize their digital marketing and reports. Adding Google Analytics Premium side-by-side showed them campaign effectiveness even more clearly, allowing them to uncover the hidden value of their digital marketing efforts, like transactions where digital advertising had assisted a conversion on another channel.

“It’s really helpful to be able to see 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,” says Lee Pinnington, Matalan's Multi-Channel Marketing Director.

With a complete view of their digital marketing ROI thanks to the integration of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics Premium, Matalan was able to put their marketing dollars where they would truly be most effective. And the results were dramatic: a 28% rise in conversion rate and significant growth in both site visits and revenue.

To learn more about Matalan's approach, check out the full case study.

Google Analytics Demos & Tools

2014. gada 20. novembris

As a member of the Google Analytics Developer Relations team, I often hear from our community that they want to do more with GA but don't always know how. They know the basics but want to see full examples and demos that show how things should be built.

Well, we've been listening, and today I'm proud to announce the launch Google Analytics Demos & Tools, a new website geared toward helping Google Analytics developers tackle the challenges they face most often.

The site aims to make experienced developers more productive (we use it internally all the time) and to show new users what's possible and inspire them to leverage the platform to improve their business through advanced measurement and analysis.

Some highlights of the site include a full-featured Enhanced Ecommerce demo with code samples for both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, a new Account Explorer tool to help you quickly find the IDs you need for various Google Analytics services and 3rd party integrations, several examples of easy-to-build custom dashboards, and some old favorites like the Query Explorer.

Google Analytics Demos & Tools not only shows off Google Analytics technologies, it also uses them under the hood. All pages that require authorization use the Embed API to log users in, and usage statistics, including outbound link clicks, authorization status, client-side exceptions, and numerous other user interaction events are measured using analytics.js.

Every page that makes use of a Google Analytics technology lists that information in the footer, making it easy for developers to see how all the pieces fit together. In addition, the entire site is open sourced and available on Github, so you can dive in and see exactly how everything works.

Feedback is welcome and appreciated!

By: Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer

Get a deeper view of your iOS app installs

2014. gada 13. novembris

If you use AdMob or other mobile ad networks to drive installs of iOS apps, here's some good news: iOS install tracking is coming as a Public Beta in a few weeks to all Google Analytics accounts. This detailed view of iOS install campaigns will be available right in your Google Analytics interface.

Optimize your iOS install marketing programs

Install metrics are a useful way to measure your marketing campaign performance. However, not all marketing efforts create the same volume and quality of users. With these new reports, you'll see how one source performs compared to another, so you can optimize your marketing spend. You can even dive deeper into the same marketing channel to see how one campaign or ad is performing compared to another.

For instance: If users coming from source X tend to use your app once and abandon it, while users from source Y tend to use it for eight months and generate $68 each in value, you'll know. And with Google Analytics' powerful segmentation, you can combine post-download metrics with your acquisition channels across all Google Analytics reports, to make even better decisions for your marketing programs.

New iOS install tracking report (click image for full-size).

Beyond the install

Google Analytics Certified partner InfoTrust is already finding that the feature helps them measure and optimize install campaign performance.

"Many of our customers have mobile apps that generate more traffic and engagement than their desktop properties. Their goals are to bring users back to the app consistently and drive more engagement through more relevant articles and products, and increasing subscriptions or purchases. Seeing which marketing campaigns drive iOS users to app installs, and what users do after the install, is critical when determining where to use marketing spend."

Amin Shawki, Analytics Manager

InfoTrust, LLC

Mobile ad networks integrated with the new reporting include Aarki, AdMob, AppLovin, Millennial Media, MdotM, Taptica and Tapjoy, with more to come soon. These iOS integrations join our existing Android campaign measurement tools.

Getting started

Learn more and get started easily with this step-by-step guide.

We hope this iOS integration helps you make even better choices for your business and for your customers. Happy mobile analyzing!

Posted by Rahul Oak, Product Manager, Google Analytics for Apps

Introducing Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals on Analytics Academy

2014. gada 12. novembris

So you’ve built an app? Awesome! But how are you tracking success? Does anyone know about your app? Do you have a good monetization plan?

Today we’re excited to officially announce our newest Analytics Academy course, Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals, designed to help you answer these questions and more.

Whether you’re an app developer or an experienced marketer in the mobile app space, knowing the fundamentals of mobile app measurement can help you improve your app marketing and monetization efforts. In this course, you’ll learn how to identify your most valuable users, how to find more of them, and how to tailor your monetization experience for different groups of users.

How it works

In this free online course, instructor Fontaine Foxworth will lead you through a series of conceptual training videos and interactive exercises to teach you about Mobile App Analytics. Throughout the course, she’ll use an example online gaming app called Go Fish!, which will demonstrate common Analytics use cases and help you apply what you learn to your own mobile app.

After the course opens, you’ll have four weeks to earn a certificate of completion while working alongside a worldwide community of Analytics enthusiasts. In total, the course should take between two to four hours to complete.

Ready to sign up? Register now and join us when the course begins on Tuesday, November 18th.

We look forward to your participation in the course!

Post By: Christina Macholan & The Google Analytics Education Team

Measure What Matters Most: A Marketer’s Guide

2014. gada 6. novembris

It’s no secret that it takes many marketing touchpoints to connect with a customer, find a quality lead, or make a sale. But how do you know the right message to deliver at each point in that journey? How do you ensure that your investments are working, and that you’re not wasting money and resources, or worse, alienating your customers?

Better measurement is the answer. It’s the key to understanding and making the most of these interconnected touchpoints, but it's not always top of mind when building marketing campaigns.

Today, we’re releasing Measure What Matters Most: A Marketer’s Guide to help marketers make sense of today’s complex customer journey by laying a solid measurement foundation.

In this brief guide, we’ll look at four crucial tenets of measurement-focused marketing:

Focus on the right metrics. Set yourself up for success by identifying clear metrics that you want to affect before launching a campaign.
Value your best customers. Instead of measuring transactions alone, model the lifetime value you derive from your customers.
Attribute value across the journey. To find out what’s working in your marketing and what’s not, identify the role of each touchpoint along the customer’s journey.
Prove marketing impact. Use controlled experimentation to understand what happened only because of a given marketing spend change (and would not have happened without it).

Collectively, these points show how better measurement can improve campaign effectiveness, help you get the credit you deserve for your programs and, most importantly, ensure a better return on investment for all of your marketing. Download “Measure What Matters Most: A Marketer’s Guide” to find out how.

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

Brian Gavin Diamonds Sees 60% Increase in Customer Checkout with Enhanced Ecommerce

2014. gada 5. novembris

"Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics made it extremely easy to analyze the metrics that are important to an ecommerce site and garner the insights to make smart changes to our website, driving significant improvements in performance!"

-- Danny Gavin, VP and Director of Marketing at Brian Gavin Diamonds

Our Enhanced Ecommerce features in Google Analytics are officially out of beta today, complete with brand new tools like Product Attribution. Combined with our new Shopping Campaigns report, Google Analytics provides our retail clients with an integrated view of their customers. As part of today’s announcements, we’re also excited to highlight partnerships with Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper. Using Enhanced Ecommerce in conjunction with our partners’ products simplifies the implementation process and gives you a full set of tools to create and optimize your ecommerce site. Please see the end of this post for more information about our partners’ solutions.

Understand customer behavior

Enhanced Ecommerce provides insight into the customer’s path to purchase, like when customers added items to cart, started the checkout process, and completed a purchase. Importantly, Enhanced Ecommerce gives you the ability to identify segments of customers who are falling out of the shopping funnel. You can then focus on these high intent-to-purchase customers with remarketing or by optimizing your checkout flow. Brian Gavin Diamonds, a Texas-based jewelry design house that is renowned for its signature hearts and arrows diamonds and custom jewelry design, used Enhanced Ecommerce to discover that in a single month they had missed out on more than half a million dollars in sales due to cart abandonment at the customer login page. The company worked quickly to optimize their checkout flow with guest checkout functionality and immediately realized a 60% increase in customers completing the checkout process to payment. You can read more about Brian Gavin Diamonds’ success with Enhanced Ecommerce in our case study.

Optimize online merchandising to increase sales

Once you’ve gotten users to your site, Enhanced Ecommerce allows you to optimize the onsite experience to drive sales. By using Product Lists, you can identify how customers are discovering and interacting with products before purchasing them. Armed with this information, you can analyze your onsite promotions in order to build a more effective merchandising strategy, or use the product attribution functionality to understand which product lists drive conversions.

In an increasingly mobile world, this information is critically important since screen real estate is limited and must be used wisely. For retailers with mobile apps, the Google Analytics SDK fully supports Enhanced Ecommerce, so you can do rich analysis of product performance and customer behavior across all sales channels. Across both desktop and mobile, Enhanced Ecommerce delivers the information you need to increase sales on your site.

Drive revenue with Shopping Campaign reports

Today, we’re also introducing a new Shopping Campaigns report as part of the AdWords reporting section in Google Analytics. This feature will be rolled out over the next few weeks and will allow you to analyze the performance of your shopping campaigns. With this functionality, you’ll have the ability to understand the product categories/types that are driving site engagement and revenue and use this information to optimize your bids. So, how can you get started? If you have already linked your Adwords and your Google Analytics accounts, this report will automatically appear in the Adwords reporting section of your Analytics account. Not linked yet? Simply follow these instructions to link the two accounts.

Get Enhanced Ecommerce with our partner integrations

Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper have partnered with us to integrate Enhanced Ecommerce as part of their ecommerce solutions. If you’re using one of these platforms, you can take advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce by enabling one of these pre-built integrations. Shopify and Blue Acorn's solutions are available today while solutions for Prestashop and mShopper will be available in the coming week. To learn more about our featured partners, please visit our partner page.

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is built to help you understand your customers and optimize your sales conversions. Combined with Shopping Campaign reports, Google Analytics is a complete solution for ecommerce businesses. For more information about how to implement this feature in your Google Analytics account, please see the documentation available in our help center.

Posted by Marcia Jung, Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics team

More about our partners

Shopify

Shopify is a commerce platform that allows anyone to easily sell online, at their retail location, and everywhere in between. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, a point of sale system to power retail sales and a card reader to process credit card transactions through a mobile phone. Shopify currently powers over 120,000 retailers in 150 different countries, including: Tesla Motors, Gatorade, Google, Wikipedia, LA Lakers, CrossFit, and many more.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a world industry leader in Open Source solutions for ecommerce, whose mission is to challenge ecommerce limits by developing a powerful solution that is accessible to anyone, anywhere. Through the Open Source software, PrestaShop allows everyone to create online stores quickly, easily and for free. The company currently counts more than 200,000 online stores worldwide, 700,000 community members and over 4 million software downloads.

Blue Acorn

Blue Acorn is a premium eCommerce agency dedicated to helping retailers and brands achieve revenue growth through a comprehensive, data-driven approach. In order to best support this approach, they became the first Magento Solution Partner in the world to also hold certified partnerships with Google and Optimizely. By integrating data and testing throughout their services, they are able to help their clients make the best decisions possible and further support their best-in-class design, development, and optimization capabilities.

mShopper

mShopper is a leading mobile commerce platform that allows retailers to create custom, mobile-optimized e-commerce sites designed specifically to increase sales on mobile devices. The integration with Enhanced Ecommerce will provide a dramatic impact on mobile commerce conversions for retailers by delivering superior insight on product sales and overall campaign performance. mShopper recently launched mStore® v4.1 with marketing tools and a performance dashboard to drive conversions and improve sales for customers using mobile devices as well.

DAA SF Presents ‘Getting Data Right: Optimizing Performance Using Quantitative & Qualitative Practices’

2014. gada 27. oktobris

This year the annual Digital Analytics Association (DAA) San Francisco Symposium is taking place on Thursday November 13^th and will be hosted at University of San Francisco. The theme is "optimizing performance using quantitative and qualitative practices". The DAA SF chapter has lined up industry leaders who will be sharing their thoughts and experiences. We are expecting a great afternoon of discussion followed by a networking reception. Following are the event details:

Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting real-world solutions to the optimization challenges we all face everyday. They will be discussing the principles of qualitative data collection, optimization and the relation to quantitative data they've put into practice. This year we are piloting a new, more interactive format: 15 minutes of content from speakers followed by 10 min of Q&A from the audience, so come ready to participate in a day of analytics sharing and learning, and leave with ideas to put into practice. Our lineup includes:

Sarah Cho, Survey Monkey
Jason Conrad, Foresee
Joe Megibow, Chief Digital Officer, American Eagle
Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google
Jim Sterne, Founder, eMetrics
Rahul Todkar, Intuit
Jimmy Wong, LinkedIn
Ryan Zander, Sport Vision

By attending you will:

Learn how industry leaders use quantitative AND qualitative data to improve their businesses
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 optimization best practices from practitioners and vendors

Theme: Optimizing performance using Quantitative AND Qualitative practices

When: November 13th, registration starts at 12:30, program 1:00pm to to 5:30pm, followed by a networking reception

Where: University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117

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

Event website and registration: register here.

Space is limited so register early!

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

Online Retailers: The Secret to Seasonal Success in 2014

2014. gada 16. oktobris

Plan ahead.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the holiday rush begin earlier and earlier. And we’ve also noticed that the shopping frenzy is extending beyond the traditional season, with transaction rates in 2013 boasting lifts even after Christmas. These trends make for a lot of opportunity for online retailers, but you need to play your cards right. The most important thing you can do to ensure seasonal success is to plan your digital strategy now. We’ve analyzed transaction behavior from a portion of our Google Analytics accounts over the 2013 holiday season to develop a guide for seasonal success.

Which days drive the most transactions?

In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft a strategy that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.

As digital retailers are well aware, Cyber Monday is THE digital shopping day of the year. It generates the most transactions of any single day and, in 2013, saw a transaction rate lift of 170% over average. In second place is Black Friday, a day that has increased in digital importance over the last three years. By 2013, the transaction rate on Black Friday was 114% higher than average. Beyond these two stars, the table below shows you the top days in 2013 by transaction volume and the lift in transactions rates on each day.

In general, beyond Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the Mondays and Tuesdays before Christmas in December tend to generate the highest volume of transactions. Interestingly, the highest transaction days are not correlated to the days with the most sessions (traffic to your site), so avoid using the top session days as a proxy for the top transaction days.

How can I drive sales on the top transaction days?

The holiday season generates some of the highest transaction rate spikes and the lowest dips for the entire year. In order to drive digital sales successfully, it’s important that you adjust your bids for auction-based media, such as search ads, appropriately to account for higher transaction rates on key dates and throughout the season. As you navigate the holiday season, use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier for auction-based media (learn more about bid adjustments). This adjustment schedule reflects the increased value of clicks that are more likely to convert, and helps ensure that you stay ahead of competitors and get in front of the right consumers. The transaction rate lift for the top days are shown in the table above, while the chart below gives you an idea of the lift for the weeks surrounding the holiday season.

As you can see, the top days generate some of the biggest transaction rate lifts, but there’s also plenty of upside in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving as well as right before Christmas. A smart retailer will generate a bid schedule for the entire season, starting 4-5 weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Marketing to consumers is notoriously tricky and often trend-driven, making the holiday season a difficult and uncertain time for retailers. However, with proper pre-season preparation, digital retailers can set themselves up for seasonal success in 2014. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach to your business, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking tool. For more strategies for the holiday season, check out our holiday tips blog post and best practices checklist.

About the Data

In order to perform this analysis, we looked at billions of sessions across millions of Google Analytics accounts. We used session and transaction trends; and we looked at the percentage of sessions that included a transaction to calculate transaction rates. The data includes only accounts that have authorized Google to share website data in an anonymous way (read more). For questions, comments, or praise please contact us at gaqi@google.com

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg from the Google Analytics team.

Making tag management more accessible and powerful

2014. gada 15. oktobris

Today we are happy to introduce improvements to Google Tag Manager that will make both marketing and IT teams happy:

New APIs that tailor the power of Google Tag Manager to your unique needs
A new intuitive interface to help you launch and edit tags even faster
More 3rd-party templates to make tagging easier

Many large enterprises use Google Tag Manager to streamline and simplify website and mobile app tagging. It helps marketers control the end-to-end process of adding website tags, while IT departments save time they can spend on more strategic projects. InsureandGo has been using Google Tag Manager for all their tagging needs:

“Before, we missed opportunities because tag changes required a website release. Since we’ve enabled Google Tag Manager on the site, it’s enabled the marketing team to measure more on-site actions. For example, using Google Tag Manager to track on-page events such as specific clicks and form submissions helps us understand more granular customer actions, how to market and what to sell. We can make decisions much quicker and see within a few weeks whether the strategy has worked, whereas before it would have taken six to nine months.” Simon Everett, Head of Marketing

Let's look at the new features.

Introducing Google Tag Manager API

Sometimes you just want things your own way. We understand! The new full-featured Google Tag Manager API lets you customize the infrastructure to suit your needs, whether that means building your own tools or better integrations with your existing workflow. From creating and managing users to previewing and publishing containers and tags, the API provides all the power of the web interface.

For example, the new API makes it easy to manage user access in bulk. It's easy to set permissions for many users at once, or set up your own role-based permissions and let the API give the right level of access to the right people in your organization.

Agencies can use the API to easily manage large tagging setups for their clients: create a master container template, specify variations (such as the domain, or the ad campaign ID) in a Google Sheets doc, and use the API to automatically deploy to multiple containers and keep those containers in sync.

Our partner Novartis has been able to scale more easily by using Google Tag Manager APIs:

We have a strong data-driven culture at Novartis and thus in the digital space we’re naturally interested in using data and insights to improve the usability and experience of our websites. With many brands and websites across the globe, collecting web analytics data can become time consuming. Two challenges we have faced are data consistency and tagging implementation across many sites. We developed a process where we use the Google Tag Manager API to eliminate a manual, error-prone, process and thus were able to shift our attention from several low-value tasks to determining how to create a great digital experience for our customers.

Angela Grammatas - Digital Analytics Manager for Novartis

More coverage for 3rd-party tags

Starting in the next few weeks, you'll see more 3rd-party templates in the tag creation flow. We've made it easier for marketers to add tags and minimize errors while doing so. When adding a new tag of your own, you'll select from a list of 3rd-party providers and be underway in just a few clicks. We now offer support for tags from AdRoll, Marin, Comscore, Bizo, Clicktale, Neustar, Distillery, Turn, Mediaplex, VisualDNA, quantcast, Criteo and many more to come soon. Don't see the tag you need? No problem: you can add it immediately as a custom HTML tag. You can also ask to have a new tag template included in future releases, as Tag Manager will continue to add new tag templates. You'll find the full list of tag templates in our help center.

Creating a new tag (click image for full-size).

A more intuitive interface

We think tag management should be easy even for non-technical users. Even if you're new to Google Tag Manager, you'll be using the improved interface within minutes. Tasks are intuitive and structured much the same way as in AdWords and Google Analytics. Our new updates include:

A default workflow that's simpler and clearer
Instant search and autocomplete that can help you find anything in your Google Tag Manager containers
New keyboard shortcuts to simplify life for power users

The goal: enable marketing managers to easily add and update tags.

The new container overview page (click image for full-size).

We are confident you'll find the new Google Tag Manager easier to use and a more powerful solution for your web and app tagging needs. If you are already using Google Tag Manager, you can try out the new user interface today by logging in your accounts and following the instructions. New to Google Tag Manager? Get started today!

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager Google Tag Manager

Dynamic remarketing now available to advertisers across all verticals

2014. gada 1. oktobris

This post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Over the next few weeks we are rolling out dynamic remarketing to all verticals including hotels, flights, real estate, classifieds, jobs, auto, finance and education. Since we launched dynamic remarketing for retailers, many advertisers like Bebe Stores, Netshoes, and Build Direct have been driving better results and more profits from their remarketing campaigns.

Highlighting what matters most to your customers

Dynamic remarketing shows site visitors tailored ads that feature the products they viewed on your website, and related products they might be interested in. Let’s say you sell cars and offer hundreds of makes and models in multiple cities. With dynamic remarketing, you can build one ad that will dynamically show tailored messaging to your site visitors, like the cars they engaged with on your site, and similar cars in that city and price range. Beta clients across multiple verticals reported a 2x increase in conversion rates and 60% reduction in CPA, on average, when they added dynamic ads to their remarketing campaigns.*

Display ads built for mobile, optimized for conversion value

When advertisers add mobile targeting to their remarketing campaigns, we’ve seen conversion volume increase by 15% on average at the same price. That's why all our dynamic remarketing templates are mobile-optimized to deliver ads seamlessly across screens. Learn more.
Dynamic remarketing with automated bidding can boost performance by calculating optimal bids for each impression in real-time. This means if you sell an $800 camera and a $20 flashlight, AdWords will automatically prioritize winning more of the $800 conversions than the $20 conversions. This helps to maximize the total value of your conversions, not just the number of conversions. Learn more.

Customers driving success with dynamic remarketing

In travel, Hotel Urbano built a single dynamic ad that showed each prospective traveler the package, hotel or cruise most relevant to them. Dynamic ads improved their return on ad spend by 38%, and drove 415% more revenue compared to standard remarketing. Mariana Filippo, senior marketing analyst at Hotel Urbano, says it made business more efficient “since we don’t have to change creatives every day across over 4,000 packages across 183 different countries. It keeps up with our frequency so we can deliver the right ad with the right user.”

In flights, Jet Airways customized ads based on where and when people were looking to fly, so someone browsing flights from New York to London could see a special offer on business class tickets on the exact day they’re looking to fly. They doubled conversions at a 65% lower CPA by adding dynamic ads to their remarketing strategy.

In local deals, India's largest online B2B marketplace IndiaMART used dynamic remarketing to recommend new suppliers to existing customers, increasing lead volume by 400% at a 60% lower CPA. Saugata Halder, product marketing manager at IndiaMART offers this advice: "For marketplaces like us, it’s imperative to showcase the wide range of products available to our buyers. Dynamic remarketing allowed us to reach a larger segment of our customers with personalized ads and to maximize the impact of our marketing efforts.”

Join us for a Hangout on Air

Learn how you can get started with Dynamic Remarketing. Join us for a live Hangout on Air with Google product managers and experts on Thursday, October 9th at 9:00am PT/ RSVP here.

For more information visit the AdWords Help Center. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can visit the Google Analytics Help Center to learn how to use your existing tags to get started with dynamic remarketing.

Posted by Jyoti Vaidee, Product Manager Dynamic Display Ads

*Campaign results may vary across advertisers

The Top 3 Google Analytics Configuration Issues Impacting your Data (and How to Fix Them)

2014. gada 23. septembris

Good data is important. How important? Studies show that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of companies. In fact, the average company loses 12% of its revenue due to bad data. As you know, Google Analytics is a powerful product with a wealth of features to help you optimize your results online. However, to unleash the power of Google Analytics’ marketing tools, you must ensure the data collected is complete and of the highest quality. The insights that fuel action in Analytics depend on good data, especially for some of our advanced algorithmic marketing functionalities like data driven attribution.

Since its release two months ago, our popular new diagnostics tool is working hard to ensure you’re getting the best results. Today, we’d like to share insights into some of the most common account errors along with likely causes and suggested solutions. In particular, we’ll look at some solutions for when our diagnostics tool is telling you the following: “Bad Default URL,” “Clicks and Sessions Discrepancy,” and “No Goal Conversions.” Read on to understand the impact of these issues as well as their common causes.

Bad Default URL

“Data without quality is useless.”

João Correia, Analytics Strategist at Blast Analytics & Marketing

When you create a Google Analytics account for website tracking, one of the first questions we ask is for a default URL. This is generally the homepage of your website. Diagnostics ensures that you have tagged your default URL correctly for this property, and warns you if this is not the case. Having a properly tagged website is an essential step towards being able to understand consumer behavior.

This warning is generally caused by either missing or malformed tracking code installed on your default URL, or more simply a typo in the URL that was input. If the default URL is incorrect, simply login to your Google Analytics account, click the “Admin” button in the header, and click “Property Settings” to adjust your default URL. If the tracking code is flawed, you’ll want to talk to your webmaster and ask to have the tracking code correctly installed.

Beyond the default URL, we also check for tracking code health across your site. We look for pages that have missing or malformed tags. And we continually run these checks, ensuring new pages you launch in the future also are properly tagged.

Clicks / Session Discrepancies

"Diagnostics helped me identify and fix an AdWords data discrepancy in my account. Without the tool, I may have never even realized that my data was inconsistent. This is a great tool!"

Monika Rut-Koroglu, Digital Analytics and Optimization at FXCM

Google Analytics offers rich capabilities that help users share data with linked AdWords accounts and gain unique and powerful marketing insights. It’s common to expect the number of clicks you see in AdWords to match the number of sessions you see in Analytics; but this is not always the case. This discrepancy can slow down meaningful analysis, and is a situation that can and should be rectified.

The most common causes of this issue have to do with your configuration settings. For example, when you send ad clicks through a third party that redirects to your site; the third party will often times drop vital tagging parameters which are mandatory for Analytics and AdWords to associate clicks and sessions. Other examples are having AdWords auto-tagging disabled, and redirecting users to mobile sites while unintentionally dropping tagging parameters.

Fixes for these issues can vary; we have a detailed guide to walk users through this or you can follow prompts in Google Analytics when we identify specific actions for you to take. If you have a third party who uses redirects and drops parameters, talk to them to resolve the issue. If auto-tagging is disabled on your AdWords accounts, consider enabling it.

No Goal Conversions

“[Google Analytics Diagnostics] is a great idea... Just discovered it the other day on my iPad. Helpful to let me redefine my goals better and find out what's not working.”

Sherri Matthew, Harpist and Small Business Owner

Google Analytics goals offer valuable ways to identify, track, and help you drive more valuable outcomes. Sometimes goals can break, and stop this critical stream of insights from reaching you. We run diagnostic checks to ensure your goals continually identify a steady flow of high value customers, and we warn you if this flow breaks.

The most common cause for goal breakage is when a goal is based on a URL that changes. If your webmaster updates the URLs on your site, and the URLs in the goal settings aren’t updated accordingly, this will cause your goal to stop tracking. The second most common cause for goals breaking is if the event tracking on your site changes and the events listed in the goal aren’t updated accordingly.

If you’ve had a goal break for these reasons, visit the “Admin” section via a link in the header of your Google Analytics account, and click “Goals” to correct your goal configurations.

More About Diagnostics

Google Analytics Diagnostics scans for problems every day (with some exceptions). It inspects your site tagging, account configuration, and reporting data for potential data-quality issues. Only users with Edit permission can see and respond to diagnostics messages. Diagnostics honors the first response to a message; for example, when a user ignores a message, it is ignored for all users.

The tool currently scans for dozens of issues, and dozens more are planned. Just keep an eye on your account over time - it will notify you if and when new issues or opportunities are detected.

- Frank Kieviet and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Enhanced Google Analytics Audience Capabilities Come to Apps

2014. gada 17. septembris

Good news for mobile app developers: Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting and Remarketing are now available for apps in Google Analytics. Just one of the improvements for audience segmentation and remarketing we're announcing today, these changes should make it even easier for all our advertisers to reach their high-value customer segments.

In-App Audience Demographics Reporting and Remarketing

Good analytics are especially important to app developers. At Google I/O, Hovhannes Avoyan, the CEO and Founder of PicsArt , had this to say:

“We need analytics to help us understand who our users are, how they interact with our application, how our application performs. With all that knowledge, we want to apply different monetization strategies to different kinds of users.”

Now developers can see just how different user segments engage and monetize with In-App Audience Demographics Reporting.

And it's more than just data. Analysts and developers can blend audience demographic and behavior data into detailed audience lists to be targeted with in app remarketing campaigns. In short, all the great remarketing capabilities for Google Analytics users on the web are now available for apps as well.

New In-App Audience Demographics Reporting

Segmentation and remarketing lists get an upgrade

Creating remarketing lists for apps and web is now even easier with recent upgrades to both segmentation and audience building. A streamlined creation flow for creating audiences allows users to go from segment to audience within clicks (plus a few bonus admin features like list renaming and automatic list sizing).

New Audience Builder Experience, now supporting App lists

If you prefer to stand on the shoulders of remarketing giants, Analytics power users have developed and shared audience definitions that import via template links or from the solutions gallery. This simplifies things dramatically for new users. A process that could be complicated and time-consuming can now be done with 6 clicks in under 1 minute. Give it a try: import our Engagement Pack of Core Remarketing Lists.

On the segmentation side, users have told us they wanted segments to be more discoverable, easier to manage, and more intuitive to build. We've been listening, and have made interface improvements, adding a simple “Add Segment” button within reports, a new segment-selection interface, hover-over segment definitions, and a 1-click action dialogue to Share, Edit, Copy, Remove, or Remarket to a segment.

New Segmentation Experience: fewer errors for better analysis

Measure remarketing performance with the new Display Targeting report

Once you’ve found a segment, created an audience, and activated your remarketing campaign, close the loop by measuring the performance of those audiences across all remarketing campaigns . Enter the new Adwords Display Targeting report in the Acquisition section to see all your active remarketing lists, along with impressions, spend, behavior, and conversion rates under the “Interests and Remarketing” tab.

New Remarketing List Performance in Display Targeting Report

You can learn how to update your SDK to enable these features in our Help Center or get started now by creating some remarketing lists. We hope that these improvements make your audience segmentation and remarketing-- in apps and on the web-- more intuitive and more effective. We’d love to hear from you! Please leave questions or feedback in the comments, and stay tuned for more audience-related improvements.

Posted by Dan Stone, Product Manager, and Kanu Singhal, Technical Lead from the Google Analytics Audience Team

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Enhanced Google Analytics Audience Capabilities Come to Apps

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