Google Analytics Solutions: 2016

KASKUS doubles CTR and triples CPM with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360

December 19, 2016

Want to review a new digital camera, get gift ideas, or buy tickets to the next Morrissey concert? If you're in Indonesia, KASKUS is your place. 28 million unique users buy, sell, talk and share information on the site each month, making it the country's largest user-generated content publisher.

With so many users, KASKUS recently faced a growing challenge: how to serve ads that are relevant to users’ age, gender and interests?

“As KASKUS is the leading digital community and social commerce platform, our vision is to drive data-driven monetization by making our first-party audience data actionable, we want to give advertisers ways to perform better in our sites and increase the effectiveness of our impression-based ads." Ronny W. Sugiadha, Chief Marketing Officer for KASKUS

Sugiadha and his team wanted to create an audience segment that had a high demand among advertisers: users who had shown interest in mobile devices and were more likely to purchase them.

KASKUS turned to Sparkline, a Google Analytics 360 Services and Sales Partner, who worked with them to approach the challenge to serve the most relevant ads. The process went from an advanced Google Analytics 360 implementation, to segmentation analysis and audience sharing with Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP).

Below is a screenshot of the actual segment shared between Google Analytics 360 and DFP. To learn more about the process, read the full case study.

How well did the new audience work compared to its old open-auction inventory in the Doubleclick Ad Exchange (AdX)?

"Using the Google Analytics 360 Audience Segment sharing feature in DFP and AdX, we doubled our CTR and saw a 3.3X CPM uplift on this audience-targeted AdX inventory," reports Ronny Sugiadha. "We are looking forward to even more positive impact moving forward."

To learn more about how KASKUS achieved those results read the full case study.

Posted by Catherine Candano and Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

googleAnalyticsR: A new R package for the Analytics Reporting API V4

December 16, 2016

Hello, I'm Mark Edmondson and I have the honour of being a Google Developer Expert for Google Analytics, a role that looks to help developers get the most out of Google Analytics. My specialities include Google APIs and data programming, which has prompted the creation of googleAnalyticsR, a new R package to interact with the recently released Google Analytics Reporting API V4.

R is increasingly popular with web analysts due to its powerful data processing, statistics and visualisation capabilities. A large part of R’s strength in data analysis comes from its ever increasing range of open source packages. googleAnalyticsR allows you to download your Google Analytics data straight into an R session, which you could then use with other R packages to create insight and action from your data.

As well as v3 API capabilities, googleAnalyticsR also includes features unique to v4:

On the fly calculated metrics
Pivot reports
Histogram data
Multiple and more advanced segments
Multi-date requests
Cohorts
Batched reports

The library will also take advantage of any new aspects of the V4 API as it develops.

Getting started

To start using googleAnalyticsR, make sure you have the latest versions of R and (optionally) the R IDE, RStudio

Start up RStudio, and install the package via:

install.packages("googleAnalyticsR")

This will install the package on your computer plus any dependencies.

After successful installation, you can load the library via library(googleAnalyticsR), and read the documentation within R via ?googleAnalyticsR, or on the package website.

An example API call — calculated metrics

Once installed, you can get your Google Analytics data similarly to the example below, which fetches an on-the-fly calculated metric:

library(googleAnalyticsR)

# authenticate with your Google Analytics login
ga_auth()

# call google analytics v4
ga4 <- google_analytics_4(viewId = 123456,
                         date_range = c("2016-01-01",
                                       "2016-06-01"),
                         metrics = c(calc1='ga:sessions /
                                            ga:users'),
                         dimensions = 'medium')

See more examples on the v4 help page.

Segment Builder RStudio Addin

One of the powerful new features of the v4 API is enhanced segmentation, however they can be complicated to configure. To help with this, an RStudio Addin has been added which gives you a UI within RStudio to configure the segment object. To use, install the library in RStudio then select the segment builder from the Addin menu.

Create your own Google Analytics

Dashboards googleAnalyticsR has been built to be compatible with Shiny, a web application framework for R. It includes functions to make Google Analytics dashboards as easy as possible, along with login functions for your end users.

Example code for you to create your own Shiny dashboards is on the website.

BigQuery Google Analytics 360 exports

In addition to the v4 and v3 API functions, BigQuery exports from Google Analytics 360 can also be directly queried, letting you download millions of rows of unsampled data.

Aimed at analysts familiar with Google Analytics but not SQL, it creates the SQL for you to query common standard metrics and dimensions, using a similar interface as the API calls. See the BigQuery section on the website for more details.

Anti-sampling

To more easily fetch non-sampled data, googleAnalyticsR also features an anti-sampling flag which splits the API calls into self-adjusting time windows that are under the session sampling limit. The approach used is described in more detail here.

Get involved

If you have any suggestions, bug reports or have any ideas you would like to contribute, then you are very welcome to raise an issue or submit a pull request at the googleAnalyticsR Github repository, or ping me on Twitter at @HoloMarkeD.

Posted by Mark Edmondson, Google Developer Expert

Using Surveys to Better Understand the Customer Journey

December 15, 2016

Your organization has plenty of data about customer behavior that tells you what different customers do where and when. You can see when they visit you online, how long they search, and how much they spend.

But too often the “why" behind their actions remains elusive. With the mountains of information you collect, the insights are often difficult to find, take too much time to discern, or require additional data. All this means it takes marketers too long to get important information that could make a real difference to the customer experience — and the bottom line.

“If you want to have a major impact, you need an integrated approach to see what is happening at all customer touch points and understand how effective you are,” says Joerg Niessing, a marketing professor at INSEAD.

The number of sources of marketing and customer data that a company integrates correlates strongly to performance vis-à-vis competitors, according to a recent study published by INSEAD. The study focused on customer and marketing data, including:

Digital analytics, such as optimizing email campaigns, testing content, and analyzing digital pathways to optimize website use and experience.
Customer analytics, including lifetime value and loyalty calculations, response and purchase propensity modeling, and micro segmentation.
Marketing analytics, such as demand forecasting, marketing attribution models, market mix modeling, and media budget optimization.
Sales analytics, including pricing elasticity modeling, assortment planning, and sales territory design.
Consumer analytics, including surveys/questionnaires, customer experience research, and customer satisfaction/advocacy modeling.

The study found that those companies that leverage multiple sources and focus diligently on demand generation have significantly stronger business performance, especially total shareholder return.

Straight to the source

But insights uncovered from many data sources often beg the question, “Why?” To answer that, modern marketers go directly to the source: consumers.

Traditionally, companies that use surveys and field research to try to get at the “why” behind the “what” pay a lot of money for information that is often too complex to understand and too slow to arrive. When it does come in, it is sometimes no longer relevant and leaves organizations trying to solve last month’s or last year’s problem at the expense of current ones. Attempting to get speedier or less costly results risks compromising accuracy.

But innovations in market research are changing the game. Easy-to-use survey tools like Google Surveys help marketers fill out their knowledge of customer behavior much faster than traditional surveying methods.

Companies that make use of these fast, convenient survey solutions gain insight not only into what people actually do, but also what they say they will do — and in that gap there could be opportunities. “Marrying digital and marketing analytics with consumer research from surveys gives marketers deeper insights and opens up the number of hypotheses a company can test,” says Suzanne Mumford, Head of Marketing for the Google Analytics 360 Suite. “Marketing today is in near real time and your data should be, too.”

“Marrying digital and marketing analytics with consumer research from surveys gives marketers deeper insights and opens up the number of hypotheses a company can test.”
—Suzanne Mumford, Head of Marketing, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Say your website analytics reveal that one segment of your visitors are highly engaged with your site content, but their visits aren’t converting into sales. “You can ask them directly why they keep coming back but don’t end up buying. Surveys let you take your data one step further and round out the picture of the customer so you can make informed business decisions and tailor your customer experiences,” says Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager for Google Surveys.

Supporting business decisions with surveys

Surveys are also useful if marketers find themselves in an internal debate about two campaign concepts. Before making a large investment based on subjective opinion, marketing leaders can validate messaging by asking the target audience about their preference.

For modern marketers, surveys have become an essential element in an integrated marketing approach — they produce insights that complement those uncovered by other data sources. “I want to make sure that the customer voice is front and center but that we also surround it with other data — that we can make really good, holistic business decisions,” says Stacey Symonds, Senior Director for Consumer Insights at Orbitz.

So think about what you’d most like to ask your customers — or those who visit your site but don’t buy. Survey solutions like Google Surveys allow businesses to get sophisticated, accurate data in a matter of days, not months. Because these methods are more affordable and quick, they allow businesses to continually iterate to meet customers’ needs.

“Surveys empower organizations to get answers when they matter,” Fields says. “And getting those insights quickly helps marketing stay nimble.”

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” an online Insight Center Collection of articles from Harvard Business Review, to learn how organizations are using market research to gain more consumer insights.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Google Surveys team

Does Your Company Have a Data Science Strategy to Create Customer Value?

December 7, 2016

One of the biggest challenges for marketing leaders today is not finding or hiring analytic talent, according to new research cited in a Harvard Business Review report, but rather it is finding the right ways to move the mountains of data into insights and then into action.

The study concluded that marketing organizations need analytics professionals who understand data and the technologies that collect, house, and integrate it.¹ That’s a given. But beyond that, experts say, executives need to place more emphasis on data science than on data scientists. Put another way: They should pay more attention to analyzing and acting on what they have now because analysis paralysis doesn’t create customer value.

“Data scientists are technicians who are very good at managing and manipulating data,” says Peter Fader, the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage. “But data science is about looking for patterns, coming up with hypotheses, testing them, and acting on the results.”

Machine Learning

That’s where machine learning can speed analysis and augment your analytics team’s work — by crunching massive amounts of data to identify patterns and anomalies.

A type of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms that iteratively learn from data, machine learning can surface insights without being explicitly programmed where to look for them. It makes it more efficient to crunch massive amounts of data, calling out issues before you see them and providing answers to questions you may not have even thought to ask. This speed to insight allows marketers and analysts to do more with the data that comes in and see the whole picture of the customer journey.

Accenture Managing Partner Conor McGovern says, “If you can’t make the rubber hit the road with a disciplined approach to analytics, you will end up with customer experiences that aren’t as effective or engaging as they could be. As with any source of information, you need to embed and ingrain analytics into decision-making processes to obtain the desired results.”

“If you can’t make the rubber hit the road with a disciplined approach to analytics, you will end up with customer experiences that aren’t as effective or engaging as they could be.” —Conor McGovern, Managing Partner, Accenture

How Lenovo Harnessed Data to Create Customer Value

That targeted data science approach can give companies of any size a competitive advantage. Lenovo is a prime example of a marketing team that mastered the use of advanced technology and analytics tools, driving the company to create better value for its customers.

Ajit Sivadasan, Vice President and General Manager of Global E-commerce, realized that customer data was burgeoning and Lenovo needed to harness it. He began by establishing an analytics team in his e-commerce unit that today integrates and analyzes customer and marketing data from more than 60 sources worldwide. By integrating and analyzing Lenovo’s data, Sivadasan found that there are three main drivers of customer satisfaction that correlate to loyalty:

Quality of the online experience. Sivadasan’s team tracks important variables such as how easy it is to find product information and whether Lenovo provides sufficient follow-up on the status of an order.
Meeting commitments. This second driver includes how often the company misses promised ship dates.
Experience with the product itself. By analyzing social media and direct customer feedback, Lenovo’s ecommerce team helps the company improve its products.

Competing on Analytics

In order to pursue an effective analytics strategy, executives have to clearly define business problems and what the questions are that analytics can answer. If executives don’t do this, they risk getting back data that sends the organization in the wrong direction.

For example, companies frequently find themselves puzzling over a dip in conversions among a desired demographic. Organizations need to be able to study the data, ask customers and potential customers the right questions, and experiment with offering different solutions to optimize the customer experience. Answers need to come in quickly so the organization can act quickly — ahead of the competition.

The speed to insight that machine learning offers can help companies act strategically on the data they have, homing in on the insights with impact, allowing executives to make informed decisions.

Says Joerg Niessing, Marketing Professor at INSEAD: “Executives still have to make the same strategic decisions that they have always made. They need to understand market dynamics and what competitors are doing — and then determine how the company should react. The only difference is that we now have a great deal more data and analytics to help make these decisions.”

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights: Turning Data Into Action,” an online Insight Center Collection of articles from Harvard Business Review, to learn more about using analytics to create customer value.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, "Marketing in the Driver's Seat: Using Analytics to Create Customer Value," 2015.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Marketing Analytics Can Improve the Customer Experience

December 1, 2016

Almost every organization today is putting customer experience (CX) at the core of its strategy, aiming to provide products and services that meet customers at every touch point. In a crowded, multichannel marketplace, companies realize that a great customer experience — consistently delivering what customers want, when they want it — can be a powerful differentiator.

But many companies fail to deliver, according to research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS). Although half of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business, just half of them said they perform well in it.

Although half of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business, just half of them said they perform well in it.¹

The problem isn’t access to data; most businesses said they collect mountains of information on their customers. The real obstacle to better customer experience, the research has found, is built into the way organizations share that data, analyze it, and work together.

Improving the customer experience is the end game, but getting there requires more than data. It requires the right data, from multiple channels, integrated to give a holistic picture of the customer journey. And that is where many companies struggle. HBR-AS found that fewer than a quarter of companies integrate customer data across channels to provide a single customer view.

Integrating data for customer value requires getting around organizational silos, which HBR-AS research has identified as the number one problem for companies struggling to improve their total customer experience. These silos prevent organizations from understanding the customers’ expectations at critical moments, and cultural resistance makes it tough to get the collaboration needed to solve the problem. As a result, respondents said the business doesn’t develop the right insights, get the information to the right people, or make the moves that could add real value.

Data-Driven Insight

By contrast, the study found that “best-in-class companies” — those with strong financial performance and competitive customer experiences — are more likely to have broken down those silos than are other organizations. And they use sophisticated analytics in a way that provides insights that open up the customer experience to the whole organization.

For example, at Progressive Insurance, the marketing team collected data on how mobile app users were behaving. These consumers, they discovered, wanted more than just helpful insurance quotes in the mobile app; they wanted to buy insurance on the spot. Progressive responded by giving them exactly what they wanted — the option to buy insurance — which vastly improved the customer experience and delivered a big win for the company. When a company creates customer value, the business benefits naturally follow.

Marketing Takes the Lead

But who is going to break down silos, connect the dots of the customer experience, and drive its improvement?

Today, marketing leaders need to make the case to the company that optimizing the customer experience requires breaking down silos and opening up collaboration, and shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach, says Erich Joachimsthaler, author of Brand Leadership: Building Assets in an Information Economy. For example, a European beverage company assigns marketing groups to consumption moments, such as a night out, instead of brands and channels. The goal is to embed marketers deeply into a particular customer experience and focus them on each step of the customer journey.

“Marketing needs to connect the dots across all customer-facing functions of a company, including partners, in order to deliver real value instead of just communicating the brand,” says Joachimsthaler.

Robust analytics and insights have given marketing teams insight into how customers interact with brands, highlighting product preferences, purchase sequences, and so forth. And they reveal how top of the funnel marketing activities — such as an online display ad or TV commercial — tie in to in-store sales or an online website conversion. Measurement and analytics allow brand marketing and performance marketing to complement each other for the customers’ benefit.

Clearly the stakes are high, and marketing leaders and their teams are challenged to think in new ways. They don’t need more data; they need to find ways to identify and supply their organization with useful insights from that data.

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review Insight Center articles, to learn how companies are using data and marketing analytics to improve customer experience.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Source: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, "Marketing in the Driver's Seat: Using Analytics to Create Customer Value," 2015.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Data Studio: DoubleClick Campaign Manager Connector

November 30, 2016

Google Data Studio (beta) allows users to connect, transform, visualize, and share data no matter where it lives. Today we are happy to announce that DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) customers can pull their data into Data Studio dashboards instantly!

With this new connector, DCM customers no longer need to import data into spreadsheets. Users can now quickly create dashboards with over 50 DCM metrics and dimensions. These dashboards are an effective way to track and optimize campaign performance and share reports with client and agency stakeholders.

Creating a new report with DCM data
Ready to get started? The first step is to connect to your DCM network or advertiser through the Data Sources page.

Next you can create a new report from scratch or use our DCM template. With just a few clicks, the dashboard is populated with your data.

Want to learn more? Looking for a new connector in Data Studio?

To learn more about the new DCM connector, please visit our Help Center or post your questions in the Data Studio community forums.

Is there a specific data service you wish to be able to access and visualize through Data Studio? We welcome your feedback via the connector feedback form — we read all responses and use them to prioritize new connectors.

Happy reporting!

The Data Studio team

Posted by Alon Gotesman, Google Data Studio team

Rethinking Marketing Measurement from the Ground Up

November 29, 2016

From the moment smartphones touched human hands, they began to change how people interact with brands. It happened slowly at first … but today 91 percent of smartphone users turn to their phone for ideas while doing a task.¹

Consumers expect more of marketers now. They expect brands to answer their questions and deliver the exact experiences they want at the moments they need to know, go, do, or buy things. They expect this across all screens and all touch points, over hundreds of interactions on their journeys.

This means there are three questions marketers should be asking:

Is our brand useful to consumers at every touch point?
How can we measure our usefulness?
How can we be even more useful tomorrow?

To deliver, enterprise marketers need a new approach to measurement that shows them the entire customer journey and lets them see what’s working at each step along the way. The problem is that many of our measurement tools and metrics were created for a desktop world at a time when marketing focused on channel performance.

Today we need an understanding of our audiences across devices and channels. That means taking into account the impact of mobile online and offline, quickly spotting insights, and trying new ways to provide better customer experiences.

Breaking Down the Data Silos

A car shopper today can have hundreds of digital interactions — or in this case 900-plus interactions — before buying. Each one of those moments is an opportunity for a brand to be useful. And each one leaves its own data trail.

But companies that look at data channel by channel, in a silo, can miss the forest for the trees. We need to break down measurement and strategy silos and create an integrated view of the consumer’s journey. It’s likely you have found yourself in a debate with colleagues about metrics and campaign results and thought, “It’s not about what matters to channel X — we need to zoom out to see the whole picture and do what’s best for our customers.”

The truth is that the future of enterprise measurement depends on people and departments, tools and systems, all talking to each other and sharing insights in real time about what customers want most.

From Silos to Synthesis

So if we know that one session and one click doesn’t tell the full story … and if we want to connect consumer behavior dots over time … where do we start? The best place is with the classic question “What outcomes are we trying to achieve?” But then instead of saying “How do we reach our goals?” let’s ask: “How do we measure success?”

Key performance indicators (KPIs) have to reflect the new objectives of the mobile-first world. Marketers who link their metrics to business results are three times more likely to hit revenue goals than those who don’t, according to a Forrester report.²

And while more data is always great, what marketers really need are more insights. That’s why the question “What’s working?” is so crucial. If that car buyer sees a TV commercial for a small sedan or pickup truck and searches for reviews and mileage ratings on his or her mobile phone, watches videos about special features, visits a dealer for a test-drive, and then finally buys a month later, marketers must find a way to bridge the gaps between TV airings and search lift, and display ads and video views, to see where the real influence happened.

How much credit should mobile get? How many touch points were there? Marketers need to know. And if the gaps can’t be filled perfectly, we should get comfortable with new proxies that will give us a sturdy estimate instead.

Marketers, Mobile, and Tomorrow

Evolution is a good thing, even if measuring in new ways can be awkward at first. Measurement and marketing go hand in hand — both have to keep pace with the vastly rising expectations of mobile-first consumers. Discomfort means you’re working to stay ahead.

So, take stock of what you measure and how you measure. Ask if those KPIs account for all the ways consumers may engage with your brand. If not, ask yourself why you’re measuring them in the first place. Focus on the outcomes you want and map your new metrics back to your strategy.

Smartphones have already changed how people interact with brands, and they’ll surely alter those interactions even more in years to come. We can’t predict how. But we can say that the brands that measure the results of those changes first will have a major edge over those that don’t. Measurement isn’t what happens at the end; it’s where the smarter and more successful future begins.

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review Insight Center articles, to read more about best practices and case studies on enterprise marketing and analytics.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Source: Google/Ipsos, “Consumers in the Micro-Moment” study, March 2015.

²Source: Forrester, “Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Performance,” March 2016

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director of Marketing, Performance Ads at Google

Falling in Love With Measurement

November 17, 2016

Why aren't more marketers measuring their campaigns?

If Marketing and Measurement had a relationship status in today’s mobile-first world, it would be: "It's complicated." They've been sitting at the same table at lunch, there's been some small talk in the hall … but they haven't really gotten comfortable together.

Which is a shame, because these two are perfect for each other.

Connecting the dots

Consumers often have dozens or even hundreds of digital interactions before they buy something today. The sheer amount of data created is staggering. There are more than enough dots to be connected for full visibility into the customer journey.

But, as much data as marketers collect today, the truth is many still struggle to make sense of it all. In some companies, you could say Marketing and Measurement find themselves sitting at opposite ends of the couch.

Only 5 out of 10 marketers said they think about measurement while developing campaign strategy, a recent survey of marketing decision-makers shows.¹ If you don't define your measurement goals from the beginning, you may not collect the right data — and understand what's working and what isn't.

Marketing and Measurement should get cozier sooner: at the front-end of the campaign process, while developing strategy. Yet, too many marketers said they think about measurement while building materials and assets (nearly 16%), after the campaign has deployed (9%), or even after the campaign has finished (nearly 6%). What’s more, 16% of the survey respondents said they don’t measure their campaigns at all.²

Clearly, it's time for a relationship makeover. If you're ready to play matchmaker in your own organization, try starting a strategic conversation between Marketing and Measurement with these three questions:

Are we measuring the consumer interactions that really matter?
How quickly can we spot the key insights hidden in this data?
How do we turn those insights into better customer experiences?

When we close the gap between Measurement and Marketing, we can not only answer the question “How are we doing?” but also the more important question, “How can we do better?”

Going steady

It doesn't have to be complicated. When Marketing and Measurement go hand-in-hand throughout the customer journey, it can lead to more useful insights, higher revenues, and better experiences for everybody.

As Matt Lawson, Google's Managing Director of Ads Marketing, says, “Measurement isn’t what happens at the end; it’s where the smarter and more successful future begins.”³

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review articles offering best practices and insights on measurement, analytics, and how to turn data into action.

^1-2Source: Google Surveys, "Measurement in Campaign Timeline", Base: 1,092 marketing executives, U.S., August 2016.
³Harvard Business Review, “Rethink Measurement From the Ground Up,” sponsor content from Google Analytics 360 Suite, August 2016.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Introducing the Firebase Demo Project

November 10, 2016

"All genuine learning comes from experience" - John Dewey

Earlier this year we introduced Firebase: a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It includes tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. There are many resources available to learn Firebase, from documentation, guides and free training courses (Android and iOS) we created, to advice from the Firebase community. However, there is nothing quite like learning through practical experience. To address this we’ve launched a fully functional Firebase Demo Project, available to everyone from today (get access here).

The Demo Project includes data from Flood It! (Android and iOS), a real puzzle game in which you have to flood the whole game board with one color in less than the allowed steps. Therefore, the data in the Firebase demo project is typical of what you might see for a gaming app with in-app purchases. It includes the following kinds of information:

Analytics: Attribution data, key events, cohorts and funnel reporting. This includes data about first opens (think of these like installs), in-app purchases, and more.
Remote Config: The parameters that control the app experience as well as the conditions which define which users receive which parameter values.
Test Lab: The automated test results from running the app on numerous device/OS combinations for quality assurance purposes.
Crash: Details on various crashes which have occurred in the app, including callstacks and device information.
Notifications: The notification campaigns that were sent to users to re-engage them. This includes data about the number of messages sent, opened and the number of conversions attributed to each campaign.

Firebase Demo Project: Analytics Dashboard

"Since the launch of Firebase we have been excited to continually build hands-on experience with its many features. Especially with the freely included and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps, Firebase Analytics. The Firebase Demo Project has helped our team do just that and similar to what we've done with the Google Analytics Demo Account, we've incorporated the Firebase Demo Project within our training programs. This plays a critical part in helping our clients maximise their familiarity with Firebase." - Ben Gott, Analytics Director, Periscopix

Self-Learning

The Demo Project is useful for exploring Firebase features and reports. Here are a few things you can do with it:

View all standard Analytics reports populated with real data from the Flood It! app
Dissect Analytics reports by applying a variety of filters
See which ad campaigns are driving the most valuable users to the app
Track crashes and their impact on end users, and understand the steps that led to them
See the full notifications funnel for notifications sent from the Firebase Console
View Remote Config parameters to see how values are varied based on targeting parameters, especially feature flags and percent targeting for staging and Analytics audience targeting for customization
See test results from testing the app on real physical and virtual devices in the Firebase Test Lab

Education Programs
If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Firebase then we encourage you to use the Demo Project within your course. For example, you can create practical exercises that students can complete using the Demo Project.

Access the Demo Project
You can get access to the Demo Project and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help, or have ideas to make the Demo Project more useful, please share it with the Google Analytics Community. We hope the Demo Project gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Firebase.

Happy analyzing!
Posted by Deepak Aujla & Steve Ganem, Google Analytics team

Why Building a Culture of Optimization Improves the Customer Experience

November 8, 2016

How can we be more useful to our customers today?

That's the simple question that drives any marketing organization focused on testing, improvement, and growth.

But answering the question is not always so simple in our data-rich world. The old challenge of gathering enough data has been replaced by a new one: gleaning insights from the mountains of data we’ve collected — and taking action.

In response to this flood of data, many of today's most successful businesses have turned to a new approach: building what's called a culture of growth and optimization.

This growth-minded culture is one where everyone is ready to:

Test everything
Value data over opinion
Keep testing and learning, even from failures

Most companies have a few people who are optimizers by nature, interest, or experience. Some may even have a “growth team.” But what really moves the dial is when everyone in the company is on board and embraces the importance of testing, measuring, and improving the customer experience across all touchpoints.

"We refuse to believe that our customers’ experiences should be limited by our resources." - Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics, APMEX

Why should marketers care?
Because they'll be leading the revolution. 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020, according to a recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit.¹ And a culture of growth and optimization offers an excellent path to major gains in those experiences.

As testing and optimization proves itself, it tends to generate higher-level investments of support, talent, and resources. The payoff arrives in the form of more visitors, more sales, happier customers and a healthier bottom line.

If you're curious about building a culture of optimization in your marketing organization, register for our Nov. 10 webinar, Get Better Every Day: Build a Marketing Culture of Testing and Optimization.

This webinar will cover:

The critical elements of a culture of optimization
Tips for building that culture in your own company
A case study discussion with Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics at APMEX, a retailer that boosted revenues with continuous testing and optimization

This kind of culture doesn't happen by command, but it’s also simple to start building.

We look forward to sharing tips on how you can get started. Happy optimizing!

The Economist Intelligence Unit, "The Path to 2020: Marketers Seize the Customer Experience." Survey and a series of in-depth interviews with senior executives. Survey base: 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, global, 2016.

Posted by Jon Mesh, Product Manager, Google Optimize and Google Optimize 360

Google Tag Manager: Giving Mobile Tagging a Little Extra Love

October 24, 2016

Over the last several months, we have talked about Google Tag Manager’s improvements to enterprise workflows, enhanced our security features, and made great strides to bring more partners into our Vendor Tag Template Program. Tag Manager also launched a new mobile SDK at Google I/O in May that builds on the power of Firebase, Google’s mobile app developer platform. Today, we’re excited to announce our latest efforts to make mobile tagging easier than ever with Google Tag Manager.

Welcoming AMP to the Tag Manager family

We are excited to launch support for ⚡ Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google Tag Manager! AMP is an open-sourced initiative to make the mobile experience better for everyone. Early data shows that AMP pages load 4x faster and use 10x less data than equivalent non AMP pages. Starting today, you can start using Google Tag Manager to simplify your tag deployment on AMP sites.

While implementing measurement solutions on AMP pages has already been possible, it can be confusing and cumbersome for folks who are new to AMP or who have tagging needs beyond tracking a basic page view. That’s why, in addition to Google Analytics, AMP containers in Tag Manager provide support across Google’s ad platforms including AdWords and DoubleClick. You will find more than 20 tag types available out of the box including a variety of 3rd party vendor tags. We also made sure that firing your tags is a breeze with great coverage of AMP’s triggers as readily available built-in Tag Manager triggers:

When setting up tags, it’s common to want to collect additional values such as how far the user has scrolled down the page or the page’s title. AMP Analytics’ variables serve this purpose and are available in Google Tag Manager as built-in variables ready to be integrated into your tags. You can head over to our support pages for a full list of supported tags and information on how to use built-in variables.

Getting started is as easy as it sounds:

Create a new container for your AMP site
Drop the Tag Manager snippet on your AMP pages
Create your first tags
Preview & Publish

AMP containers are built with the familiarity and flexibility that existing Google Tag Manager users already depend on. As with our other solutions in Tag Manager, AMP containers “just work” out of the box.

Improving Tag Manager for mobile apps

When we announced Google Tag Manager’s new SDK at Google I/O, we brought an integration method to Android and iOS apps that builds on the power of Firebase. This integration makes it easier than ever for developers and marketers to manage where their app data is sent, both within Google and to our supported Tag Template Vendors.

New triggers for events Firebase automatically detects

Today, we are making our mobile app containers even more intuitive and easy to use by tapping into the events that Firebase detects automatically. Now, when you are in a Firebase mobile container, you will see several new options when setting up triggers. Whether your container targets Android or iOS, you will see a new section called “Firebase Automatic Events” which contains the supported automatically detected events for the respective platforms. You can also find built-in variables for each of those events’ parameters, so setting up your tags should be a cinch.

Find parameters when you need them

In addition to the events Firebase can detect automatically, developers are encouraged to implement general events for all apps as well as suggested events by app type to help them fully take advantage of Firebase features. Once implemented, you’re able to use the parameters from these events in your tags: just create a new user-defined variable and select “Event Parameter.” With this new feature, you no longer have to remember which parameters are available for which events. Select the event you’re working with, and you get a list of available parameters.

We are dedicated to providing you with best-in-class tag management. As consumers shift to mobile, our priorities include developing simple, easy-to-use solutions for the latest mobile technologies.

Whether you are building mobile apps or adopting the AMP platform, we’ve got you covered.

Posted by Ben Gram, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

How to Apply Holiday Shopping Insights to Your Analytics Strategies

October 24, 2016

The Year of the Supershopper
We all have that friend — the one who somehow knows the latest brands, the season’s must-have products, and where to find the best deals at the snap of a finger. In years past, this friend was an enigma, making us wonder how does he or she do it?

Today, we can all be that friend. With the ability to instantly discover, research, and purchase, shoppers around the world are more informed and more efficient than ever before - they’ve transformed into supershoppers seemingly overnight.

But what defines supershoppers? And what does this mean for retailers trying to win them over this holiday season? Let’s find out.

They Keep Their Options Open
Last year, more than 50% of holiday shoppers said they were open to purchasing from new retailers¹. This is especially true online. More than three-quarters of smartphone shoppers who usually go to the same physical stores when they shop for products are very open to new retailers and brands online². Why? Mobile makes it easy to explore all of your options no matter when or where you’re shopping. In fact, after searching on Google, 76% of mobile shoppers have changed their mind about which retailer or brand to purchase³.

Mobile is Their Muse
It used to be that shoppers would thumb through catalogues or stare longingly at the holiday window displays, but mobile is now the super shopper’s go-to source for inspiration. Sixty-four percent of smartphone shoppers turn to mobile search for ideas about what to buy before heading into a store⁴. And 1 in 4 mobile video viewers in the U.S. have visited YouTube for help with a purchase decision while they were at a store or visiting a store's website⁵.

But shoppers aren’t only making purchase decisions, they’re discovering new brands and products along the way: more than half of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their phones⁶.

They Want the Best - Not the Cheapest
In July we learned that shoppers are on the quest for the best — and this still rings true more than ever today. Last holiday, mobile searches related to “best gift” grew 70% year over year while mobile searches related to cheap or inexpensive gifts grew about 35%⁷. They’re also willing to do the research to the make the best decision: on YouTube, mobile watch time for product review videos has grown 60% year over year⁸.

But supershoppers don’t only want the best - they want personalized, unique, cool gifts. Mobile searches related to “unique gifts” grew more than 65% while mobile searches related to “cool gifts” grew a whopping 80%⁹.

Mobile is Their Door to the Store
Although more and more people are willing to buy on mobile, we know that mobile is still used predominantly as a door to the store. In fact, 76% of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase¹⁰.

Once they’re inside your store, they expect the experience to be a seamless one: more than 40% of smartphone shoppers want retailers to automatically surface relevant information such as the location of the item in the store, a special deal or related products¹¹.

They Shop ‘Til they Drop
Supershoppers live up to their name as the holiday season progresses. From November through mid-December we see online conversion rates increase across devices. Last year, on mobile alone, they jumped 30% on Black Friday and 50% on Cyber Monday when compared to November 1¹².

Tips to Using Analytics to Reach Today’s Shopper
Analytics is a critical marketing tool all year long. But that importance is amplified during the holiday season. Here are five ideas on how you can use analytics to get the most out of the holiday shopping season.

1. Understand which days drive the most sales — be there. 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 strategy — across mobile, desktop, and tablet — that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.
For example, adjust bids for auction-based media and use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier. Use Smart Bidding in AdWords or DoubleClick Search to maximize your performance.

2. Get personal when engaging with window shoppers. The great thing about the holidays is that you can start shopping at any time — and then wait for discounts. Many consumers may already be browsing your site looking for gift ideas. This is an audience that may convert at a higher rate. Use Google Analytics to create remarketing lists including these shoppers, and then customize your marketing campaigns to better suit their needs.

But don’t stop there: Remember, supershoppers crave personalization. Test different variations of your website with this same audience to offer more customized experiences. Try Google Optimize, our free site testing and personalization tool, to get started.

3. Act fast: Create a culture of optimization. Your holiday marketing plans are set long before the holiday season starts. It’s very important to monitor your activities to ensure they’re driving business growth. And if they’re not you need to take action by immediately identifying areas of opportunity and improvement.

Google Analytics offers a number of ways to help simplify reporting, sift through data, and spotlight insights for you. Custom reports, dashboards and shortcuts all let you customize reporting so you spend less time looking for data and more time analyzing important information. Or better yet, try Google Data Studio and create a holiday shopping dashboard for different teams in your organization.

4. Analyze your performance against your competitors. Benchmarking your business against your competitors helps you see the big picture. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking reports. The benefit of using those reports is that they will provide you a comparison between your data and your competitors, using characteristics such as website traffic, country and detailed vertical information.

5. Start developing your New Year marketing strategy. With so many new shoppers entering your stores, sites, and apps, data and analytics are critical to helping you convert first-time shoppers into long-term, loyal customers. Use your website data to create lists of first-time customers during the holidays, and deliver personalized communication across channels to build relationships. With Google Analytics you can create remarketing lists and easily connect with this audience.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Julie Krueger, Retail Managing Director, Google and Casey Carey, Director of Analytics Marketing, Google

Google/ Ipsos, Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study - Total Shoppers Report, Jan 2016, Base: US Holiday Shoppers, n=1,500

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000, Same store shoppers = 801

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google-commissioned Ipsos Brand Building on Mobile Survey, U.S., December 2015 n=1000, 18-54 year olds

Google/Ipsos, "Consumers in the Micro-Moment," Wave 3, U.S., n=1291 online smartphone users 18+, August 2015

Source: Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

YouTube data, U.S., Classification as a “Product Review" video was based on public data such as headlines and tags, and may not account for every such video available on YouTube, Nov - Dec 2014 and Nov - Dec 2015

Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

Google/Purchased Digital Diary: How Consumers Solve Their Needs in the Moment, May 2016, Representative sample of US Smartphone users = 1000. Local searchers = 634, Purchases = 1,140

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google Analytics Shopping category data, Nov 1, 2015–December 14, 2015, United States

Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

October 21, 2016

Google Surveys, a new product from Google Analytics Solutions, launched on Wednesday. Google Surveys makes it easy to get fast, reliable opinions from consumers on mobile devices and across the internet. The goal, as always, is to help you make more informed business decisions, understand your marketing impact, and take the pulse of your brand.

Today we're excited to talk with Dylan Lorimer, Lead Product Manager for Google Surveys, about how this product fits in with the rest of Google Analytics Solutions and what the future looks like.

Q: What is Google Surveys?
Lorimer: Google Surveys is a online market research tool for making fast, informed, data-driven business decisions. It gives businesses access to conduct research against a representative sample of users on the web and on our mobile app, Google Opinion Rewards. It’s the evolution of Google Consumer Surveys, a product that’s been in the market since 2012 and fields 1M surveys a week.

Q: How does Google Surveys differ from Google Surveys 360?
Lorimer: Google Surveys 360 is our enterprise research product; it's a fully-supported research tool that is integrated into the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Users get advanced audience targeting, dedicated support and consolidated billing, all of which make it easy for big organizations to use. Google Surveys has fewer advanced targeting features, but it's a pay-as-you-go product so that anyone can use it. Google Surveys is currently available in U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Google Surveys 360 is available in U.S. and Canada.

Q: How is Google Surveys different from other market research tools?
Lorimer: Traditional market research research often involves long, time-intensive surveys answered by individuals who have signed up to respond to surveys for compensation. The process is typically slow, costly, and out of reach for most businesses who want to make a quick and informed decision. Google Surveys aims to make high-quality research more accessible, and to bring the customer voice into the process of media performance measurement.

Q: Why is Google Surveys now part of Google Analytics Solutions?
Lorimer: Google Analytics Solutions is a set of powerful tools that helps marketers use data to understand their consumers and how they behave. Google Surveys bridges the gap between metrics-based performance measurement and the need many marketers have to get qualitative feedback from their customers on their cross-channel, cross-media marketing campaigns. Google Surveys has grown on its own over the past few years. When we saw the investment Google was making with Google Analytics Solutions to empower the marketer — something we’ve been focused on with Google Consumer Surveys for a few years now — it felt like the obvious choice to provide a missing tool in the portfolio.

Q: What are some examples of how customers are using Google Surveys?
Lorimer: YouVisit, a leading virtual reality company, just used us to find out how many of their clients were aware of virtual reality. They suspected a significant number of consumers were at least aware of the concept, and that some percentage would want to try it. But to convince clients to invest in virtual reality content, YouVisit needed hard facts. How many people wanted to try virtual reality? How many were even aware of it? YouVisit turned to Google Surveys to gather those numbers, and they were pleasantly surprised. A statistically significant sample from Google Surveys let them extrapolate that 23 million Americans had already tried virtual reality. With this data, YouVisit can confidently educate clients on virtual reality’s power to engage consumers.

“Google Surveys empowers YouVisit to accomplish our mission by better understanding what the end customer wants in immersive experience — so we can create those experiences that emotionally engage, that are impactful, that drive a real-life action.”

– Suzanne Sanders, Senior Marketing Communications Manager, YouVisit

Q: What does the future look like for Google Surveys?
Lorimer: The future is bright! We see immense potential and we're excited about new ways we can help marketers and even developers reach their target audience, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure. We're already serving surveys to over 10 million respondents, so in some ways pulling insights from that is a big data challenge for us — which is the kind of puzzle we like to solve best at Google. So there’s a lot we think we can do to be proactive about providing actionable data to our customers. Google Surveys as a research tool is just the beginning.

We hope you found this additional information useful. Ready to get started with Google Surveys? Learn more at g.co/surveys.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Marisa Currie-Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google Surveys

Spotlight on Google Surveys 360: Getting to “Why” is now easier and faster than ever before.

October 20, 2016

Yesterday, we launched Google Surveys 360, a powerful new part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Sometimes it's enough to know what your customers are buying, where they're going, and how they're purchasing. But to really understand their decisions, you want to answer a harder question: Why are they doing it? To get the answer, it turns out you just have to ask.

That’s why we introduced Surveys 360: to provide a quick, cost-effective way to ask why. The new Surveys 360 is designed to help you get more out of market research by making it easy to create online and mobile surveys that help you make more informed business decisions, faster. You ask the questions, and people browsing the web will answer them as they wait to access premium content like news articles or videos, or as they use the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app.

Surveys 360 offers several advanced features that help you reach high-priority audiences, test markets, and gain a better understanding of your impact. They include:

User list to help you measure the effectiveness of your media campaigns by surveying people exposed to your ads and videos
ZIP Code targeting that delivers your surveys to high-priority or test markets
Custom Audience panels that take the pulse of brand perception among key consumer groups
Occupation and industry targeting to help you do business-to-business research with hard-to-reach professional audiences

Surveys 360 quickly analyzes your data and delivers it in easy-to-navigate graphs, demographic segmentations, and cross-tabs. That makes it easy to find fresh insights and help your business thrive.

BuzzFeed improves client campaigns with Google Surveys 360

BuzzFeed is one company using Surveys 360 to measure campaign performance and improve its ad effectiveness.

BuzzFeed is a global news and entertainment company that creates content intended for sharing, and helps advertising clients tell brand stories with engaging video campaigns. Campaign videos are less like advertisements and more like content people want to share. As they get shared, the campaign reach is extended.

To prove the impact of this innovative ad strategy, BuzzFeed turned to Surveys 360. As BuzzFeed launches each video campaign, it also releases surveys across the Google Surveys Publisher Network and the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app. They ask people exactly what their client brands want to know: Are the campaign videos memorable and understandable? What messages mattered most and why? Did they motivate sharing? What do consumers want to know next? BuzzFeed uses the Surveys 360 user list targeting feature to automatically put the right surveys in front of the right respondents: people who have seen or interacted with campaign videos.

Low-cost, high-quality survey data from Surveys 360 lets BuzzFeed give its clients a complete picture of campaign performance, fast. It helps them prove the value of the current campaign and even suggests strategies for the next campaign.

“With Google Surveys 360, we get more timely results. Everybody seems to want to run these studies to get an understanding of how their campaigns are performing … and what things should we do to make it more impactful in the future.”
– Margo Arton, Director of Ad Effectiveness, BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed’s culture of data-driven experimentation creates success for their clients. Watch our BuzzFeed video case study for more details.

This is only the beginning! We'll continue to iterate and offer new features for Surveys 360 in the coming months. It's available for purchase today in the accounts of all Analytics 360 Suite users in the U.S. and Canada. Go to g.co/surveys to learn more.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Michael Cumberbatch, Product Manager, Google Surveys 360

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Does Your Company Have a Data Science Strategy to Create Customer Value?

Marketing Analytics Can Improve the Customer Experience

Data Studio: DoubleClick Campaign Manager Connector

Rethinking Marketing Measurement from the Ground Up

Falling in Love With Measurement

Introducing the Firebase Demo Project

Why Building a Culture of Optimization Improves the Customer Experience

Google Tag Manager: Giving Mobile Tagging a Little Extra Love

How to Apply Holiday Shopping Insights to Your Analytics Strategies

Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

Spotlight on Google Surveys 360: Getting to “Why” is now easier and faster than ever before.

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