Analytics Blog: January 2016

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Announcing GA Support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Analytics

January 28, 2016

When Google was a few years old, we wrote up a list of Ten things we know to be true. The list includes items like “Focus on the user and all else will follow” as well as “Fast is better than slow.” It would be tough to say that much of the mobile web has adhered to these principles. Users often get frustrated by poor experiences in which sites load slowly or will lock up trying to load resources that clog their data connections.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an open source initiative that aims to address these problems by enabling content to load instantaneously and provide a better web experience for all. AMP introduces a new format that is a flavor of HTML. It’s built to prioritize speed and a fantastic user experience. One way that AMP provides reliably good page loading performance is by restricting the ability to add custom JavaScript to pages and instead relying on built in, reusable components.

Today, the AMP team announced the launch of an analytics component that will enable measurement on AMP pages. The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users measure their content wherever it appears. So, for publishers looking to use AMP to provide an improved user experience, we’ve released Google Analytics measurement capabilities for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP support in Google Analytics makes it easy to identify your best content and optimize your user experience.

How Google Analytics Support Works

Analytics on AMP is handled by an open source, reusable component that the Google Analytics team helped build. The <amp-analytics> component can be configured with Google Analytics specific configuration parameters to record pageviews, events, and even custom dimensions. That configuration works hand in hand with a global event listener that automatically detects triggers like button presses. As a result, there’s no need to scatter custom JavaScript throughout your page to detect actions that should trigger events and hits. Instead, you can define which actions should trigger hits within the configuration section and let the magic of AMP do the rest.

How to Get Started

Before you get started with AMP Analytics, you’ll need to get started with AMP itself. The AMP website contains a great introduction to getting started. Once you have an AMP page up, it’s time to start thinking about how you’d like to measure its performance.

We recommend that you use a separate Google Analytics property to measure your AMP pages. AMP is a new technology that’s going to mature over time. As such, some of the functionality that you’re used to in web analytics won’t immediately be available in AMP analytics right away. AMP pages can appear in multiple contexts, including through different syndication caches. Because of that, a single user that visits an AMP version of a page and a HTML version of a page can end up being treated as two distinct users. Using a separate Google Analytics property to measure AMP pages makes it easier to handle these issues.

Once you have your AMP page and new Google Analytics property set up, you’ll want to reference the requirements for using Analytics on AMP pages as well as the developers guide for instrumenting measurement.

What’s Next

Multiple technology partners, including Google Search, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have announced that they’ll start surfacing AMP pages in the coming months. The Google Analytics team is excited to support AMP from day one and look forward to growing our offering as AMP’s capabilities expand.

Posted by Dan Cary, Product Manager and Avi Mehta, Software Engineer

Google

Labels: Announcements , Mobile

Data-Driven CMOs: Leaving the Information Age

January 14, 2016

Originally Posted on the Adometry M2R Blog

Remember the so-called “Information Age”? Once a catch all for all things technological, over time the term came to refer to the transition to a society in which individuals had access to a wealth of information to aid in decision-making – a global democratization of knowledge. From a marketing perspective, the Information Age also came to represent a fundamental shift for data-driven CMOs away from simple push tactics to a dynamic, real-time ebb and flow of information between brands and customers.

With this transition has come all sorts of complexity. An argument can be made that demands on marketers have never been higher; yet, in some respects the evolution towards data-driven marketing has simplified or even solved some of the profession’s biggest pain points, such as:

Gaining an ability to track performance at a granular level
Understanding consumer behaviors within the marketing funnel
Gleaning insights about how marketing impacts consumers’ inclination to make a purchase decision

In short, the Information Age now has less to do with access to information as it does with the ability to utilize it effectively.

Moving from Information to Insights

In a previous interview with CMO.com, I was asked what I now know that I wish I had known earlier in my marketing career. My response?

“Today’s marketing leaders are a combination of creative, technologist, analyst and strategist. Success in modern marketing is predicated on being agile, having great vision and being able to effectively manage change across the organization. To be clear, the advice would not be to blindly chase shiny new objects. Rather, it would be to proactively set aside the time and resources to foresee, evaluate and test opportunities on the horizon.”

So how do marketers manage change across their organizations? It starts identifying where marketing can offer unique value by transforming raw information into insights.

“Big data really isn't the end unto itself. It’s actually big insights from big data. It’s throwing away 99.999% of that data to find things that are actionable.”

The comment above was made previously by Bob Borchers, Chief Marketing Officer for Dolby Laboratories, at a Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. It should go without saying...but to reiterate; data isn't the same as knowledge. Data without context is no more useful than knowing your current driving speed without understanding which direction the car is headed.

Another way to think about this is to consider the difference between building a data-driven marketing culture and a truly data-driven organization. We’re already witnessing this maturation happening within organizations that were early adopters of “big data”. Led by marketers who invested in foundational elements – attribution measurement and analytics, cross-channel allocation and alignment, etc. – these organizations are now taking the next step to integrate marketing with other disciplines, such as finance. In doing so, discussions about marketing performance start to sound less like functional assessments of campaign efficacy and more like part of a strategic, holistic business plan. Now impression and click-stream data can be discussed through the lens of media costs (online and offline) and supplier value, linked directly to sales.

Using a data-driven attribution measurement solution offers additional clarity by showing exactly how individual channels, publishers and creatives contributed to revenues. By looking beyond simple metrics and getting a more complete view of performance across channels, marketers suddenly have a sense for how to proactively manage towards overarching business objective (e.g. top-line growth) while also maintaining a sense for costs and ROI.

So is this still the Information Age or something else? What’s clear is that simply gathering and organizing information is no longer the endgame, it’s only the beginning.

Posted by Casey Carey, Google Analytics team

Google

Labels: Attribution

Google Apps Script: Tracking add-on usage with Google Analytics

January 7, 2016

The following was originally published on the Google Developers Blog.

Editor's note: Posted by Romain Vialard, a Google Developer Expert and developer of Yet Another Mail Merge, a Google Sheets add-on.

Google Apps Script makes it easy to create and publish add-ons for Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms. There are now hundreds of add-ons available and many are reaching hundreds of thousands of users. Google Analytics is one of the best tools to learn what keeps those users engaged and what should be improved to make an add-on more successful.

Cookies and User Identification

Add-ons run inside Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms where they can display content in dialogs or sidebars. These custom interfaces are served by the Apps Script HTML service, which offers client-side HTML, CSS, and JS with a few limitations.

Among those limitations, cookies aren’t persistent. The Google Analytics cookie will be recreated each time a user re-opens your dialog or sidebar, with a new client ID every time. So, Analytics will see each new session as if initiated by a new user, meaning the number of sessions and number of users should be very similar.

Fortunately, it’s possible to use localStorage to store the client ID — a better way to persist user information instead of cookies. After this change, your user metrics should be far more accurate.

Add-ons can also run via triggers, executing code at a recurring interval or when a user performs an action like opening a document or responding to a Google Form. In those cases, there’s no dialog or sidebar, so you should use the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol (see policies on the use of this service) to send user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers via the UrlFetch service in Google Apps Script.

A Client ID is also required in that case, so I recommend using the Apps Script User properties service. Most examples on the web show how to generate a unique Client ID for every call to Analytics but this won’t give you an accurate user count.

You can also send the client ID generated on client side to the server so as to use the same client ID for both client and server calls to Analytics, but at this stage, it is best to rely on the optional User ID in Google Analytics. While the client ID represents a client / device, the User ID is unique to each user and can easily be used in add-ons as users are authenticated. You can generate a User ID on the server side, store it among the user properties, and reuse it for every call to Analytics (both on the client and the server side).

Custom Dimensions & Metrics

In add-ons, we usually rely on event tracking and not page views. It is possible to add different parameters on each event thanks to categories, actions, labels and value, but it’s also possible to add much more info by using custom dimensions & metrics.

For example, the Yet Another Mail Merge add-on is mostly used to send emails, and we have added many custom dimensions to better understand how it is used. For each new campaign (batch of emails sent), we record data linked to the user (e.g. free or paying customer, gmail.com or Google for Work / EDU user) and data linked to the campaign (e.g. email size, email tracking activated or not). You can then reuse those custom dimensions inside custom reports & dashboards.

Click for full-size version

Once you begin to leverage all that, you can get very insightful data. Until October 2015, Yet Another Mail Merge let you send up to 100 emails per day for free. But we’ve discovered with Analytics that most people sending more than 50 emails in one campaign were actually sending 100 emails - all the free quota they could get - but we failed to motivate them to switch to our paid plan.

Click for full-size version

As a result of this insight, we have reduced this free plan to 50 emails/day and at the same time introduced a referral program, letting users get more quota for free (they still don’t pay but they invite more users so it’s interesting for us). With this change, we have greatly improved our revenue and scaled user growth.

Or course, we also use Google Analytics to track the efficiency of our referral program.

To help you get started in giving you more insight into your add-ons, below are some relevant pages from our documentation on the tools described in this post. We hope this information will help your apps become more successful:

Google Analytics: Using localStorage to store the client ID
Google Analytics: Measurement Protocol
Apps Script: UrlFetch service
Apps Script: Properties service
Google Analytics: User ID
Google Analytics: About Events tracking
Google Analytics: Custom Dimensions & Metrics

Posted by Romain Vialard, Google Developer Expert. After some years spent as a Google Apps consultant, he is now focused on products for Google Apps users, including add-ons such as Yet Another Mail Merge and Form Publisher.