Google Analytics Solutions: November 2017

FEATURED

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

Get the most out of Data Studio Community Connectors

November 30, 2017

Data Studio Community Connectors enable direct connections from Data Studio to any internet accessible data source. Anyone can build their own Community Connector or use any available ones. Try out the new Community Connectors in the gallery We have recently added additional Community Connectors to the Data Studio Community Connector gallery from developers including: DataWorx, Digital Inspiration, G4interactive, Kevpedia, Marketing Miner, MarketLytics, Mito, Power My Analytics, ReportGarden, and Supermetrics. These connectors will let you access data from additional external sources, leveraging Data Studio as a free and powerful reporting and analysis solution. You can now use more than 50 Community Connectors from within the Gallery to access all your data. Try out these free Community Connectors: Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook Marketing. Find the connector you need In the Data Studio Community Connector gallery, it is possible for multiple connectors to connect to the same data source. There are also instances where a single connector can connect to multiple data sources. To help users find the connector they need, we have added the Data Sources page where you can search for Data Sources and see what connectors are available to use. The connector list includes native connectors in Data Studio as well as verified and Open Source Community Connectors. You can directly use the connectors by clicking the direct links on the Data Sources page. Vote for your data source If your data source is not available to use through any existing connector, you can Vote for your data source. This will let developers know which Data Sources are most in demand. Developers should also let us know which Community Connector you are building. We will use this information to update the Data Sources page. Tell us your story If you have any interesting connector stories, ideas, or if you’d like to share some amazing reports you’ve created using Community Connectors please let us know by giving us a shout or send us your story at community-connector-feedback@google.com. Posted by Minhaz Kazi, Data Studio Developer Relations Team

Google Analytics for Firebase: New Look and New Features

November 9, 2017

If you use Google Analytics for Firebase to measure your apps, you'll notice something familiar today: a new look and feel that's more consistent with your Google Analytics experience.

These new elements echo some of the changes we made to Google Analytics earlier this year — the updates should help bridge the gap for anyone who uses both Google Analytics and Google Analytics for Firebase. We've also added new reports and cards that will make the Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard more timely and helpful.

Real-Time Data

We are now providing you with more real-time information throughout Google Analytics for Firebase to give you a better read on what’s happening in your app.

Inside the Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard, you’ll now find a real-time card, much like the one on the Google Analytics Home. It shows details on the number of active users in the past 30 minutes. You'll also see the top conversion events logged by the app. You can configure these conversions so you can track app events that are most important to your team.

The new Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard

Google Analytics for Firebase has a brand new stability card that reports on data from Firebase Crash Reporting and Firebase Crashlytics. It displays the percentage of users who have not had their app crash, so you can see just how stable your app is.

Latest Release

The new Latest Release report lets app developers track the adoption and stability of new app versions within a few hours of release.

The report also contains a real-time card with an app version filter that lets you see which users have adopted the latest version of a release and know whether any versions have crashed in the past 30 minutes. It also lets you measure your users’ level of engagement.

Same Great Analytics

The updated experience is more consistent with Google Analytics, but one thing hasn't changed: Google Analytics for Firebase users still get the same great app-centric reporting and analysis they're used to for Android and iOS. Our engineers are working on developments and new features we'll share in the months to come.

To see the new look and updated features, check out your Firebase project now. (Don't have one yet? Sign up!)

Posted by Sukriti Singal, Product Manager, Google Analytics

New tools for managing Google Analytics users

November 8, 2017

Last month we announced new account management tools for businesses using Google Analytics. Today we’re thrilled to introduce another round of improvements. Over the coming months, we’ll centralize user management across a company’s many Google Analytics accounts and launching user groups to simplify the task of managing permissions for multiple teams of users. We've heard feedback from many businesses about the need for simple but powerful tools to manage access to their important analytics data and built these features help to meet these needs.

Centralized user management

Administrators can now centrally manage users across all Google Analytics accounts linked to your organization. If you have many accounts, and need to add users across them, you’ll see huge time savings. For example, if you need to give a new teammate access to 25 accounts, you previously had to visit every account to get them setup. Now you can complete this task from one place.

Centralized user management for an organization

You can also:

View rich cross product and cross account details for your users
Manage a user’s access across many Analytics accounts in one console
See new details about how a user inherits their permissions
Get clear in-product explanations of different access levels and privileges

User details showing access across products and accounts

If you’re just using Google Analytics, and don’t need to manage users across accounts, you’ll see many of these same improvements inside of Google Analytics. All of the navigation and documentation improvements are present in both places.

User Groups in Google Analytics

Organization administrators often need to manage access for hundreds of users. This process can be tedious, especially when dealing with multiple Analytics accounts. Now you can more easily manage large teams of users by creating a group, placing the appropriate people inside it, and granting the groups access to the appropriate Analytics accounts. You can even place a group inside a group if you need to manage a hierarchy of teams. To get started, you’ll need to create an organization. Check out this help center article for more information.

Detail for an example “IT Team” user group

Combined with existing features like the ability to centrally audit and set policies for users, these new features bring enterprise grade controls to your organization. They also pave the way for future enhancements, such as bringing centralized user management and user groups to more products.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Product Manager Google Analytics

Better A/B Testing with Firebase

November 7, 2017

Earlier this year, the Google Optimize and Firebase teams worked together to bring A/B testing functionality to Firebase. Last week, at the Firebase Dev Summit, we announced that A/B testing is now available in beta to all app developers.

This post originally appeared on The Firebase Blog.

Announcing Better A/B Testing with Firebase

If you're like most app developers, you know that small changes can often make a big difference in the long term success of your app. Whether it's the wording that goes into your "Purchase" button, the order in which dialogs appear in your sign-up flow, or how difficult you've made a particular level of a game, that attention to detail can often make the difference between an app that hits the top charts, or one that languishes.

But how do you know you've made the right changes? You can certainly make some educated guesses, ask friends, or run focus groups. But often, the best way to find out how your users will react to changes within your app is to simply try out those changes and see for yourself. And that's the idea behind A/B testing; it lets you release two (or more!) versions of your app simultaneously among randomly selected users to find out which version truly is more successful at getting the results you want.

And while Firebase Remote Config did allow you to perform some simple A/B testing through it's "random percentile" condition, we've gone ahead and added an entirely new experiment layer in Firebase that works with Remote Config and notifications to make it quick and easy to set up and measure sophisticated A/B tests. Let's take a quick tour of how it works!

Getting to Know the New A/B Testing Feature

With the new A/B testing feature, you can create an A/B test that will allow you to play with any combination of values that you can control through Remote Config. Setting up an A/B test allows you to define how the experiment will behave in a number of different ways, including determining how many of your users are involved with the experiment at first…

…how many variants you want to run, and how your app might behave differently for each variant…

...and what the goal of the experiment is.

Different experiments might have different desired goals, and A/B testing supports a number of common outcomes, like increasing overall revenue or retention in your app, reducing the number of crashes, or increasing the occurrence of any event you're measuring in Google Analytics for Firebase, such as finishing your in-app tutorial.

Once you've defined your A/B test, Firebase takes over by delivering these different variations of your app to randomly-selected members of your audience. Firebase will then measure your users' behavior over time, and let you know when an experiment appears to be performing better, based on those goals you've defined earlier. Firebase A/B testing measures these results for you with the same Bayesian statistical models that power Google Optimize, Google's free testing and personalization product for websites.

Using A/B Tests for Better Onboarding: A Case Study

Fabulous, a motivational app for building better habits, recently made improvements to their app's onboarding by using Firebase A/B testing. When the user first starts an app, Fabulous shows them how to complete a habit, presents them with a letter about forming better habits, and then asks them to commit to a simple routine. The team suspected that if they removed a few steps from this onboarding process, more people might complete it.

Some of the screens a typical user encounters when first using Fabulous.

So they ran an A/B test where some users didn't see the letter, others didn't see the request to commit to a simple routine, and others skipped both of those steps. The Fabulous team found that by removing both of these steps from the onboarding process, there was a 7% improvement in the rate of users completing the onboarding flow. More importantly, they confirmed that this shorter onboarding experience didn't have any impact on their app's retention.

Test Your Notifications, Too!

You also have the ability to A/B test your app notification messages through the Firebase Notifications console. You can try out different versions of your notification message and see which ones lead to more users opening up your app from that notification, or which messages lead to users performing some intended goal within your app, like making a purchase.

Getting Started

A/B testing is available in beta to all Firebase developers starting today. If you're excited to get started, you should make sure that your app is wired up to use Remote Config and/or Firebase Cloud Messaging, and that you've updated these libraries to the latest and greatest versions. You can always find out more about A/B testing in our documentation, or check out the A/B Test Like a Pro video series we've been building.

Then, head on over to the Firebase Console and start making your app better — one experiment at a time!

Posted by Todd Kerpelman, Google Firebase team

Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce: A Powerful Combination

November 6, 2017

We often hear from marketers how challenging it is to piece together online and offline customer interactions in order to see a complete view of a customer’s journey. That’s why we’re excited to share that Google and Salesforce are working together to seamlessly connect sales, marketing and advertising data for the first time, giving you the full view of what’s working and what isn’t as customers engage with your ads, websites, apps, emails, call centers, field sales teams and more.

Today at Dreamforce, Google and Salesforce are announcing a strategic partnership to deliver four new, turnkey integrations between Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimization and audience creation
Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a more complete understanding of campaign performance
Audiences created in Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels, including email and SMS
Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists

These new connections between our market-leading digital analytics solution and Salesforce’s market-leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform will change the game for how our clients understand and reach their customers — and how they measure the impact of their marketing. These integrations are fully consistent with our privacy policies and have settings that offer privacy controls and choice on how data is used.

By integrating your customer data, you can see a customer’s path from awareness all the way through to conversion and retention. And with connections to Google’s ad platforms and Salesforce’s marketing platform, you can quickly take action, engaging them at the right moment. You'll see these new integrations begin to arrive in the first half of 2018.

Example of a complete customer journey funnel in Google Analytics 360 joining website data (pageviews, leads submitted) with pipeline data from Sales Cloud (lead and opportunity stages); example also shows a prompt to create a new audience segment to take action

New insights

Until now, businesses have not been able to connect offline interactions, such as an estimate provided by a call center rep or an order closed by a field sales rep, with insights on how customers use digital channels. With the connection between Sales Cloud and Analytics 360, soon you’ll be able to include offline conversions in your attribution modeling when using Google Attribution 360, so you’ll have a more complete view of ROI for each of your marketing channels and even more reason to move away from a last-click attribution method. This integration will also let you see how your most valuable customers engage with your digital properties, answering some important questions like, what are they looking for and are they actually finding what they need?

With the integration allowing data from Analytics 360 to be visible in Marketing Cloud, you’ll gain a more complete understanding of how your marketing campaigns perform. For example, if you send an email campaign to frequent shoppers to promote your fall fashion line, you’ll be able to see right in Marketing Cloud information such as how many pages people visited when they came to your site, the number of times people clicked on product details to learn more, and how many people added items to their shopping cart and converted.

Easy to take action

Today, Google Analytics allows you to create audience lists and goals that you can easily send to AdWords and DoubleClick for digital remarketing and to optimize bids. With the new connection from Sales Cloud to Analytics 360, in addition to unlocking new insights and more data for attribution modeling, you’ll be able to combine Salesforce data (such as sales milestones or conversions) with behavioral data from your digital properties to create richer audiences and for smarter bidding.

For example, if you’re a residential solar panel company and want to find new customers, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people with similar characteristics. Or, create a goal in Analytics 360 based on leads marked as closed in Sales Cloud, and automatically send that goal to AdWords or DoubleClick Search to optimize your bidding and drive more conversions.

With the Analytics 360 connection to Marketing Cloud, you’ll be able to use customer insights to take action in marketing channels beyond Google’s ad platforms, such as email, SMS or push notification. For example, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of customers who bought a TV on your site and came back later to browse for home theater accessories, and use that list in Salesforce to promote new speakers with a timely and relevant email.

Powerful combination

Every day, Google Analytics processes hundreds of billions of customer moments, Salesforce Marketing Cloud sends 1.4 billion emails, and there are over 5 million leads and opportunities created in Salesforce Sales Cloud. These new integrations represent a powerful combination, and we believe they will help marketers take a big step closer to the ultimate dream: providing every customer with a highly relevant experience at each step of their journey.

You’ll see these new joint capabilities become available beginning in 2018, and we'll be sure to keep you updated along the way. Contact us here if you would like to learn more about Analytics 360. We hope you’re as excited as we are!
Posted by Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Product Management, Measurement & Analytics

The Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce integrations are just one part of a broader strategic alliance announced today between Google and Salesforce. Read about new integrations between G Suite and Salesforce and a new partnership between Google Cloud and Salesforce here.

Open Source Community Connectors for Data Studio

November 2, 2017

Data Studio Community ConnectorsDeveloper LaunchOpen Source Community Connectors repository on GitHub Use open source Community Connectorsopen source repository

npm Downloads connector: Fetch download counts for specific npm packages by date

Fusion Tables connector: Fetch data from Google Fusion Tables

Stack Overflow Questions connector: Fetch Stack Overflow Question metadata for specific tags

Learn about best practices

npm Downloads

Fusion Tables

Stack Overflow Questions

Contribute to the communitypull requestdata.worldgetSTATVisit the repositorystart building your own Community Connector Posted by Minhaz Kazi, Google Analytics team

Get the most out of Data Studio Community Connectors

Google Analytics for Firebase: New Look and New Features

New tools for managing Google Analytics users

Better A/B Testing with Firebase

Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce: A Powerful Combination

Open Source Community Connectors for Data Studio

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