Google Analytics Blog

Improvements coming to the Google Analytics desktop UI

2016-10-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

Over the last ten years, Google Analytics has added many new features and reports. For the last few months, we’ve been working to build a simpler Google Analytics while still retaining the key functionality that people frequently use. The changes highlighted in this post are the first part in a series of improvements that you will see in the next few months.

Below is a summary of the changes that all Google Analytics users will begin to see over the next few weeks.

1. Simplified navigation

A brand-new navigation using Google’s Material Design standards
Removal of the “Home Customization Reporting Admin” subheader bar

Admin is now pinned to the bottom of the navigation

Resizeable left navigation to allow for more space in the canvas

2. Customization, all in one place

Previously , reporting customization items were spread out: Dashboards & Shortcuts in the left-nav; Custom Tables, Custom Reports, etc. in the Customization tab; Custom Alerts in a tab in Intelligence Events
Now, all customization elements are contained in a “Customization” left-nav element:

3. Simplified Google Analytics View switching

The old “Home” account/property/view picker page has been replaced by the new picker in the header, which allows you to switch views from any page in the product
Note that for Analytics 360 users, you may need to switch organizations to see the set of accounts you are trying to get to

4. A streamlined login flow

Logging in now automatically takes you to the last Google Analytics View you were looking at the last time you logged in

5. An adjustable default date range

You can now change the default date range that Google Analytics reports load with. This can be changed in your Google Analytics user settings
Setting it to shorter times (like 7 days) has several benefits. For example, many campaign changes, website experiments, etc. will have impacts hidden in a 30-day view but immediately visible on a shorter timeline
Defaults are now set to 7 days for all standard GA users

6. Goodbye to a couple of pages:

Intelligence Events:

Custom alerts have moved to the new Customization section and will continue to function as normal
Automatic Intelligence Events have been removed from Google Analytics, and will soon be replaced by automated insights from Google Analytics Assistant

In-Page Analytics: The In-Page Analytics report has been removed from Google Analytics web UI. You can still access in-page analytics with the official Chrome Extension

All Google Analytics users will begin to see these changes in the next few weeks. We hope these changes improve your Google Analytics experience!
Posted by Ajay Nainani, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Spotlight on Google Tag Manager: Open and Secure Tag Management

2016-10-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

With Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360, we make it easy for marketers to manage tags on their sites and apps for fast, flexible implementation of new marketing technologies. Last week at SMX East, we announced that we’ve added more than 20 new tag templates to Google Tag Manager to empower marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. This is one of a couple recent changes to make Tag Manager more open and more secure.

New third-party tag templates

Google Tag Manager already includes easy-to-use tag templates for many Google and non-Google tools. And, while we support implementing all other tags using a variety of custom tag types, we’re dedicated to expanding the number of third-party tag templates available to you. Tag templates make it easy to add and maintain tags on your sites and apps without code. This means that less technical users can be more involved, errors are less likely, and your sites are ultimately more secure.

To make it easier and safer to deploy third-party tags, we've developed an open format that allows vendors like Microsoft, Twitter, and Nielsen to implement and maintain their own tag templates in Google Tag Manager. For companies whose products depend on tags, having a tag template in Google Tag Manager is a great way to make implementation easier than ever.

"The seamless integration of Digital Content Ratings — a key component of Nielsen's Total Audience measurement framework — into Google Tag Manager will enable easy deployment and rapid adoption of Nielsen measurement with savvy digital clients."
– David Wong, SVP of Product Leadership at Nielsen

Our Vendor Tag Template Program allows tag providers to natively integrate with our tag templating system. Google performs a security review of each tag that is submitted through the program. The resulting tags are integrated into Tag Manager, and displayed with the company’s logo and an easy-to-use form to configure and deploy the tag.

"At Hotjar we're obsessed about giving our users fast and actionable insights about how their visitors are using their site. Our top most priority is making it easy and simple to set up Hotjar. For this reason, we're extremely excited to provide 'out-of-the-box' support for Google Tag Manager."
– David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar

Some recent additions include:

(See the full list of supported tags)

Are you a vendor who would like your tag supported? Learn more about the Vendor Tag Template Program and enroll here.

Secure container loading

At Google, we constantly look to develop products with best in class security. Google Tag Manager already has a host of security features such as user access controls, 2-step verification, malware detection, and tag blacklists. We’ve now also made some changes to the Google Tag Manager container snippet — given out in our user interface and documentation — to improve security and performance even more.

Previously, the Tag Manager container snippet loaded containers in a protocol-relative manner. That is, on pages with an https:// URL, the container would be loaded securely using HTTPS. Our new snippets will always use the secure protocol (HTTPS) by default, regardless of the protocol of the page. This helps protect containers from malicious parties and snooping, and in many cases, will also improve performance.

You’ll also notice that we’ve made a change to how we recommend Tag Manager be implemented, now with the container snippet split into two parts:

A JavaScript snippet that should be implemented as high in the <head> of your page as possible to ensure the best tag performance. This change is especially important if you plan to use Tag Manager to deploy Google Optimize.
An iframe snippet that should be implemented just after the opening <body> tag. This snippet handles firing of image pixels for users with JavaScript disabled, and also enables Google Search Console verification.

To get the best performance, it’s recommended that you implement both container snippets following the latest installation instructions.

What if you already have Google Tag Manager implemented on your site? Not to worry: These changes are optional, and your existing implementations will continue to work without a problem. To get the highest level of security and performance, you can update your implementations at your earliest convenience.

Happy tagging!

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Spotlight on Data Studio: Beautiful Reports and Collaboration Just Got Easier

2016-10-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

We launched Google Data Studio (beta) in the U.S. earlier this year, and last week, we expanded availability to 21 additional countries.* We’re excited to offer Data Studio to companies across the globe so they can easily create and share reports and dashboards, and ultimately use insights and collaboration to make better business decisions.

Organizations today collect an increasingly large amount of data. In a world of web analytics, CRM systems, and third-party sources, data-driven decisions should be easier than ever before. However, all of this data has presented a significant challenge: making it easily accessible and useful.

Having multiple data sources that live in silos within your organization compromises your ability to spot critical business opportunities and issues when they matter most. This is a widespread challenge, with 84% of marketers saying they don’t believe their data sources are well-integrated, according to a 2016 Forrester study.

Data Studio solves this problem by allowing you to easily connect your data and create beautiful, informative reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Create up to five custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing. All for free.

Get started today so you can:

Put all your data to work. Easily access the data sources you need to understand your business and make better decisions.

Transform your data. Quickly transform raw data into easy-to-follow reports and dashboards — no code or queries required.

Build engaging reports and dashboards. Data Studio gives you the ability to create meaningful, shareable charts and graphs that bring your data to life.

Leverage teamwork that works. Work together quickly, from anywhere, by sharing reports via Google Drive.

Not sure where to start? Good news: We’re releasing our first batch of templates today to remove that hurdle. Businesses can use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes.

Get started for free.

Happy reporting!
The Data Studio team

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Data Studio

An Easier Way for Everyone to Improve the Customer Experience: Meet Google Optimize

2016-09-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

Nearly 9 in 10 business leaders in a recent survey said that improving the customer experience is fundamental to their future success and brand reputation.¹

Yet less than half of business leaders say they have actually taken action around their customer experience activities.²

Today, consumers have higher expectations for businesses to deliver more personalized site experiences based on the information they’ve shared. Businesses need to be able to quickly discover useful insights from their data and act on what they’ve learned.

To help those leaders (and everyone else) take action to deliver more personalized site experiences, we're happy to introduce Google Optimize. It's a free version of our popular enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360, which was announced earlier this year.

Google Optimize will start rolling out globally next month. If you’d like to be one of the first to use it, visit our signup page. We'll send you an invitation by email as soon as it is available.

Making it easy …

Google Optimize helps any business test and deliver better website experiences. And to help guide you through the process, we’ve made it easy every step of the way:

It’s easy to implement. Test new and engaging web experiences across your entire site in minutes. Google Optimize is built on top of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager so you can either add a single line of code to your existing Google Analytics implementation, or serve the Google Optimize tag directly using Google Tag Manager.
It's easy to use. Use the Google Optimize WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor, to change just about anything on your site – text, images, layouts, and more – just click to edit! There is no need to recode your site each time you want to test a new experience.
It's easy to understand and act on results. Google Optimize calculates results based on your existing Google Analytics metrics and business objectives. It’s clear to see what you should do next to drive even more impact for your business.

… And powerful

With Google Optimize you can create and deploy a variety of experiment types: Choose from A/B, multivariate, or redirect. For any experiment, Google Optimize offers powerful capabilities:

Native integration with Google Analytics. Test what matters to your business. Because Google Optimize is built on Google Analytics, you can more quickly and easily identify areas of your site that can be improved upon. Then in Google Optimize you can use your existing Google Analytics goals and metrics as your experiment objective.
Advanced statistical modeling. Google Optimize uses Bayesian statistical methods to model the real-world performance of your experiments. We’ll show you how much more effective one variant is over the others, leading to more accurate results that you can trust.
Sophisticated targeting tools. Google Optimize will help you deliver the right experiences to the right customers at the right moments.

Ready to deliver better site experiences?

With Google Optimize, you’ll have all the basic capabilities you need to get started with site testing – making it perfect for any business. Google Optimize is free for anyone to use, so why not give it a try? Visit our signup page today.

And if you are part of a larger enterprise or business with more sophisticated testing and support needs, check out Google Optimize 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. With Google Optimize 360, you’ll be able to take your site experiments even further by delivering custom experiences to your Google Analytics audiences. You’ll also be able to run more experiments across your site at the same time and add additional experiment objectives — even after an experiment has started. Talk to a sales representative to learn more.

Happy testing!

¹"Two Years' Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis." The Storytellers, March 15, 2016. Quoted on eMarketer.com.
²"Data Elevates the Customer Experience." Forbes Insights / SAS, May 2, 2016. Quoted on eMarketer.com.

Posted by Jon Mesh and Dan Cary, Product Managers, Google Optimize

Announcing: Smart, Fast-Acting Analytics — For Everyone

2016-09-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

This past March, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products designed for the needs of enterprise-class marketers in today’s multi-screen world.

Today we have another exciting announcement. Next month we’ll start rolling out a new product: Google Optimize — a free version of our enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360. Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

Businesses of all sizes need tools to measure and succeed

First of all, why this free product now? Because companies big and small face the same challenge today: Consumer expectations are higher than ever in a mobile-first world. How can brands be more useful to people in their moments of need? With ever more data flooding in, marketers need access to the right data so they can uncover useful insights — and act on them quickly.

The companies that are already making this leap from data to action are transforming their businesses by becoming more useful to consumers throughout these micro-moments. How? Analytics and testing are the key. In fact, according to an Econsultancy survey of 4,000 marketers, the top two digital trends in 2020 are going to be a focus on customer experience (24%) and personalization (23%).

That’s what has led to today's announcement. We've made several advancements to the free versions of our analytics products to bring modern measurement to everyone, and help them create happier customers by providing more relevant experiences. Let’s take a closer look.

How can every business deliver personalized customer experiences?
Google Optimize (beta). This free web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool helps businesses improve their customer experiences and business metrics. Because it’s built on top of Google Analytics, businesses can use their existing information to experiment and personalize site experiences with minimal setup requirements. Request an invite.

"With Google Optimize, we’ve been able to provide more engaging content to The Next Web's readers – converting them from new readers to loyal customers."

Martijn Scheijbeler

Director of Marketing - The Next Web

How can everyone access and share powerful data?
Google Data Studio (beta), our free reporting and data visualization product, is now available globally in 21 new countries.* It enables businesses to easily spot and share insights, and collaborate to drive better decisions. Additionally, next month we’re launching report templates, making it even easier to get started. As with templates in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, businesses can create, edit, and use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes. Get started. The enterprise and free versions of Google Data Studio launched earlier this year in the U.S. These updates are also available in Data Studio 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

How can everyone get useful insights, not just more data?
Google Analytics, our free customer analytics product and measurement centerpiece, analyzes customer data from all touchpoints — and soon it’s becoming even smarter. Following the launch of our automated insight stream in the Google Analytics mobile app, we’re excited to announce Session Quality Score: A new metric that incorporates machine learning to predict the likelihood of a visitor making a transaction (purchase) on your site or app. Businesses can use session quality score to provide better customer experiences and / or remarket to their most engaged website visitors. This feature is coming soon in beta and will also be available in Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

How can everyone gain full visibility into customer journeys?
Google Tag Manager empowers marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code), and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows. And today we’re greatly expanding our openness by integrating an additional 20 tags from Quantcast, Twitter, Microsoft Bing, Nielsen, and many more. See the full list of supported tags here. These updates will roll out over the next couple weeks and are also available in Tag Manager 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

Modern measurement for everyone

Put simply, that's our goal with these new free products. As today’s businesses are shifting to compete on customer experience and personalized marketing, we want to give all businesses the tools and access to compete — and ultimately, drive better online consumer experiences.

If you’re interested in learning more, please watch our blog this week and next. We’ll dive deeper into each product announcement and show you how they work. In the meantime, check out the resources below to learn more.

Optimize: Request an invite
Data Studio: Get started for free
Session Quality: Help Center update coming soon!
Tag Manager: Visit the Help Center

As always, you can visit our website to sign-up for our free analytics products.

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

Posted by Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google

How to set up Analytics on your AMP page

2016-09-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

In the digital world, whether you’re writing stories for your loyal readers, creating creative content that your fans love, helping the digital community, or providing items and services for your customer, understanding your audience is at the heart of it all. Key to unlocking that information is access to tools for measuring your audience and understanding their behavior. In addition to making your page load faster, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) provides multiple analytics options without compromising on performance.

You can choose to use a solution like amp-pixel that behaves like a simple tracking pixel. It uses a single URL that allows variable substitutions, so it’s very customizable. See the amp-pixel documentation for more detail.

The amp-analytics component, on the other hand, is a powerful solution that recognizes many types of event triggers to help you collect specific metrics. Since amp-analytics is supported by multiple analytics providers, this means you can use amp-analytics to configure multiple endpoints and data sets. AMP then manages all of the instrumentation to come up with the data specified and shares it with these analytics solution providers.

To use amp-analytics, include the component library in your document's <head>:

And then include the component as follows (for these examples, make sure to specify your own account number instead of the placeholder):

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics">

{

"vars": {

"account": "UA-YYYY-Y"

"triggers": {

"defaultPageview": {

"on": "visible",

"request": "pageview",

"vars": {

"title": "Name of the Article"

}

</script>

</amp-analytics>

The JSON format is super flexible for describing several different types of events and it does not include any JavaScript code which could potentially lead to mistakes.

Expanding the above example, we can add another trigger, clickOnHeader:

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics">

{

"vars": {

"account": "UA-YYYY-Y"

"triggers": {

"defaultPageview": {

"on": "visible",

"request": "pageview",

"vars": {

"title": "Name of the Article"

}

"clickOnHeader": {

"on": "click",

"selector": "#header",

"request": "event",

"vars": {

"eventCategory": "examples",

"eventAction": "clicked-header"

}

</script>

</amp-analytics>

For a detailed description of data sets you can request, as well as the complete list of analytics providers supporting amp-analytics, check out the amp-analytics documentation. You can also see more implementation examples in the Amp By Example site.

If you want to conduct a user experience experiment on your AMP pages, such as an A/B test, you can use the amp-experiment element. Any configurations done in this element will also be exposed to amp-analytics and amp-pixel, so you can easily do a statistical analysis of your experiment.

There are still plenty of ongoing developments for AMP analytics to help you gain insights as you AMPlify the user experience on your site. Visit the AMP Project roadmap to see a summary of what the team is cooking up. If you see some features missing, please file a request on GitHub.

Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, Google AMP Specialist

Improving Google Analytics Events with Unique Events

2016-09-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

Unique Events is a metric that counts the number of events with distinct Event attributes (Event Category, Action, and Label) that occur within a single user session. These events can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load, giving you greater insight into actions taken within or across pages/screens. Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays are all examples of interactions you might want to track as Unique Events.

Some benefits of Unique Events include:

Understanding how many users start/complete some action on your website
Understanding the most popular media types/content consumed on your website
Having an understanding of how many users repeat actions that should only occur once
And many, many, more...

How Unique Events Work

Unique Events is a metric that counts the number of events with distinct Event attributes (Event Category, Action, and Label) that occur within a single user session.

This means that Analytics will increment the count of Unique Events by 1 for each unique combination of event category/action/label we receive the very first time we see them within a session, but will ignore future events with the same category/action/label when computing unique event counts. The metric Total Events will count each event regardless of the uniqueness of the category/action/labels therein.

Unique Events improves upon events in Google Analytics and will help make your measurement better.

Learn more in our Help Center article here.

Posted by Breen Baker, Google Analytics Team

Using Google Analytics with Leadfeeder for B2B Lead Generation

2016-09-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics is an important tool for marketers. It’s used to understand how people come to your website, how different content performs and how to get more conversions. All this is essential for knowing how to drive more high-quality traffic to your website.

For most B2B firms, the main purpose of their website is to generate sales leads by getting visitors to fill in some kind of contact form. But many see that just a fraction of visitors leave their contact information, and as a result, salespeople don’t get enough good quality leads from their website. So what can be done to improve this situation?

This guide will show you the 3 best ways to generate leads with Google Analytics:

1. Using Google Analytics Network report
2. Using a custom Google Analytics report template tool
3. Using Google Analytics with Leadfeeder for lead generation

One way to gain more leads from your website is identifying companies that visit, based on their IP address. With this data, you can have some information about the 98% of visitors that don’t explicitly contact you. When people visit a website using their office network, marketers can identify that someone from a certain company has visited and pinpoint what they have done there. For B2B outbound sales teams, this information can be very valuable.

If you see a company visiting your website, there’s a high probability that they’re in need of- and evaluating your product, which is the perfect time to get in touch with them.

Based on the IP address alone, it’s impossible to know exactly the name of the visitor, but in many cases this information is not needed. For example, if you sell email marketing tools and a company comes to your website and browses product pages, it’s a strong signal they are looking for a new email marketing tool. When you contact them, you want to contact the person who’s responsible for digital marketing, regardless of who visited your website.

For effective lead generation purposes, you should be able to identify real companies that have visited your website and see how they have behaved, to evaluate if they are a good lead.

1. Using Google Analytics Network Report

Using the Network report is the most common way to see which companies have been visiting your website. There have been many blog posts about this topic, for example this LunaMetrics post by Dan Wilkerson from 2012, this how-to article from Anna Lewis and a post by Traian Neacsu on uncovering hidden leads.

But these posts are all now a couple of years old and the Google Analytics interface has changed quite a lot since then. These days (2016) you can find the Network report in Google Analytics under Audience > Technology > Network.

Network report in Google Analytics

In the Network report (seen above) you will see a list of “Service Providers”. What Google Analytics means by “Service Provider” is the network where the visitor has been when they visited your website. Networks are always owned and registered by someone; typically a company, Internet Service Provider or some other organization.

One challenge in using the Network report is that many times the IP is registered by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or some other non-interesting organization. In order to see the real companies, you should filter out ISPs from the list. The easiest way of doing this is to use the advanced search button and select to exclude Service Providers that match the following RegExp (just copy/paste this to the filter):

(not set|customer|internet|broadband|isp|cable com|network|tele|dsl|subscriber|pool|telecom|cable|addresses|telefonica|routed|leased line|communication|comcast|verizon|road runner|service provider|unknown|provider|t-mobile|wifi|telkom|sprint|at-t|residential|province|vodafone|clients|china|dial-up|netblock|wimax|wireless|elisa|sonera|dna oy|at&t|assigned|sl-cgn|block|consumers|kpn|telia|bredband|google|hosting|zscaler|city of|tdc|hubspot)

Now the list of visiting companies should look a lot cleaner. If you wish to filter the results even further, e.g. only companies from a specific country, you should create a segment out of visitors from that country and look at the report again.

By default for each company in the list you can see how many sessions they have had during the selected time interval, how many pages they have visited and other metrics. When you click on one company, you can get to a more detailed report, like this one below.

In this view, select “Page Title” or “Page” as secondary dimension to know which pages the company has visited. This way you know what they have done on your website and what they were interested in. If they were visiting relevant product pages or they spent a lot to time on your site but didn’t contact you, maybe it’s a good lead for your outbound sales team to contact.

Using Network report to see what company did on the website

If you would really like to know what each company and their employees have done on your website, you can go to the brand new User Explorer report under the Audience section in Google Analytics. This report was introduced in Google Analytics in April 2016 and in the report you can dive into individual visitors and their behavior.

To know what a company did on your website, just create a segment where the Service Provider matches the company you are interested in (see below).

Using User Explorer to see visitors from one company

By doing this Google Analytics shows you Client IDs (anonymous and unique IDs of each visitor) from that company and by clicking one client ID (one user) you can see all the behavior of that user on your website. This way you can have a good understanding about what any given person from one specific company did on your website. Pretty powerful stuff, as you can see below.

Using User Explorer to see visits of one user

2. Using a custom Google Analytics report template tool

At Leadfeeder we created a ready-to-use Google Analytics custom report that anyone can take into use for free. Just click the link below and attach it as a custom report to the Google Analytics View you typically use:

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=zAQeJwWfT0yxlk8wfPWaGA

When you click this link, you will be directed to Google Analytics and asked which view you want to attach it to. Remember that by default this custom report will be visible only for you. If other users want to use this report, they should also click the Add to Dashboard link above.

B2B Lead generation report by Leadfeeder

Our custom tool by default shows the most interested companies that have visited your website. To be more precise, this is a list of companies after ISP filtering (using the filter pasted above) sorted by pages / session, with the most interesting visits on top.

Typically companies that have spent a lot of time and loaded many pages are more interested than companies with many short visits. Once you click an interesting company, you can see a list of days on which they have visited. When you click even further into a specific date, you can see a breakdown of all the pages they visited. If page titles are not descriptive enough or not set, you can use “Page” as a secondary dimension to see page URLs (as shows below).

Using B2B Lead generation report by Leadfeeder

In the tool you can see several tabs that you can use (see above). The most interested companies tab is selected by default, but you can also select the second tab – companies with most visitors – that shows companies that have most visits on your website. Many times here you can find ISPs that were not filtered out along with other non-interesting companies. If you like, you can drill into details in the same way as in the first tab.

The 3rd and 4th tabs in the report are selectors that you can use to filter data. For example, if you are only interested in German companies, go to “Selector: Visitor location” tab and select Germany. After that click to the first tab to see the most interested companies from Germany. If you have a sales representative located in Germany searching for German leads, you can automatically have Google Analytics send this lead list by daily or weekly email.

Automating notifications from B2B Lead generation tool by Leadfeeder

Similarly, if your sales team’s responsibilities are divided by product, then sales reps might only be interested in leads that have visited certain product pages. Go to “Selector: Visited page” tab and select the product page each sales rep is interested in. Again, after making the selection, go to the first tab to see the list of the most interested companies visiting that product page and automate lead reports to your sales rep’s mailbox. You can also combine these selectors to create a list of companies from a specific country that have visited a specific product page.

3. Using Google Analytics with Leadfeeder for lead generation

Using the Google Analytics user interface for lead generation is possible as you can see, but not very salesperson-friendly.

In order to better generate leads from your website for your sales department and do much much more, we created an online tool called Leadfeeder. Since Google Analytics is already collecting all the data about your website visitors, Leadfeeder fetches this data from Google Analytics API and does all the data crunching for you.

Leadfeeder lead generation main report

Once you sign up to Leadfeeder, it fetches all visitor data from your Google Analytics for the past 30 days. You don’t need to install any codes or script on your website; all you need to do is permit Leadfeeder to access your Google Analytics.

The web app filters out ISPs (a lot more than the Google Analytics filters shown in this post) handing you a clean list of companies. Once you see an interesting company and click on it, you see visit-by-visit, page-by-page what they have done on your website (as shown below). Leads are also enriched with additional company information such as company branch and size. With all this information it’s easier to determine whether the lead is interesting and whether they should be contacted.

Leadfeeder showing which pages a company has visited

Not all website visitors are interesting, so you can use custom feeds to filter out bounces and view only companies that have behaved in a way you find interesting. For example, you can define a custom feed rule to only show companies from a certain country, from a specific industry, companies that have visited a set number of pages and have visited a specific page but haven’t contacted you.

Using this kind of custom feed you can get a much more relevant list of leads for your sales team. In many companies sales responsibilities are divided by region or product so it’s good practice to make custom feeds for individual sales reps for only their areas of responsibility. Salespeople can subscribe to their personal custom feed to get daily or weekly email notifications about new companies that visit their website and match the set criteria. Understanding the online behaviour of your website visitors combined with knowing the location of the company visit gives sales reps powerful weapons for successful follow-up.

Using custom feeds in Leadfeeder to filter lead list

Seeing a qualified list of interested companies is already powerful, but this sales intelligence should fit within your existing sales process to be really useful. We know it’s the dream of many sales reps to have good leads magically appear in their CRM without the need to do anything, so that’s why at Leadfeeder we have built integrations to sync visitor data with your CRM.

The integration to Pipedrive and WebCRM are made two-way, which means that in Leadfeeder you can see CRM data for the visiting company, while in your CRM you can see all the website visits the company has made, once it’s been connected.

This makes it easier for sales reps to distinguish between new and old clients in Leadfeeder, create accounts and opportunities in their CRM with one click from Leadfeeder, and see in their CRM how prospects are interacting with their website.

Using CRM integration to sending leads from Leadfeeder to CRM

If you are not using a CRM at all, leads can also be sent to sales reps by email or you can assign leads for them to see inside Leadfeeder. It’s good practice to invite the whole sales team to use Leadfeeder with their own user profiles and it’s free to add users.

In addition, if you are using Mailchimp for email marketing, you can connect it to Leadfeeder to see in Leadfeeder what individuals do on your website when they click through from one of your MailChimp campaigns. This is possible because Mailchimp tags links uniquely for all recipients and Leadfeeder can transform these unique links into email addresses. This way you can know exactly who the visitor was on your website.

Leadfeeder offers a free 30-day trial with no credit card required, so if you are in B2B business and would like to get more sales leads, go and sign up at www.leadfeeder.com.

Conclusions

Web analytics has made marketing a lot more intelligent during the last 10 years, but similar development hasn’t transferred to sales.

Web analytics has enabled email tools to evolve into marketing automation by tracking what email clickers do on your website and triggering follow-up emails. Display marketing, similarly, has evolved into very efficient remarketing, where ads are shown to those who have completed action on your website.

In short, there are a lot of digital signals potential customers are giving all the time, but those haven’t been utilized well in sales so far. Many sales reps come to work, open their CRM and start calling through a lead list someone has given them. Meanwhile there are lots of potential customers browsing their website but sales reps aren’t aware of who they are. Our aim at Leadfeeder is to make sales more intelligent by providing salespeople actionable web analytics intelligence about potential customers, thereby making sales more effective.

Posted by Pekka Koskinen, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Google Consumer Surveys Launches Weekly U.S. Election Poll in Google Data Studio

2016-09-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

With the U.S. presidential election less than 50 days away, the candidates are running full force to capture as many votes as possible. Worldwide, people are waiting anxiously to see whom the American people will pick as the 45th president. Now more than ever, the media is turning to polls to make sense of all the campaign activity.

Google Consumer Surveys — named as one of the “most accurate [polling] firms” by FiveThirtyEight in the 2012 election — has recently launched its 2016 U.S. Election Poll.

The 2016 election poll surveys more than 20,000 respondents each week from across the United States, demonstrating how Google Consumer Surveys can quickly collect thousands of representative responses. (Find out more about the poll methodology on page 3 of the polling report.)

Google Consumer Surveys, an online market research solution used to gain insights to inform important business decisions, has recently grown its footprint in politics with usage from groups such as NY Times Upshot, IJ Review, and Echelon Insights. Google’s survey platform and other online polling tools have gained popularity due to their accuracy, scalability, quick results, and low costs.

The election poll results from Google Consumer Surveys are displayed in an interactive data visualization in Google Data Studio, and voter preferences are updated weekly. This customized dashboard and report allows users to filter results by state, gender, and candidate to see different cuts of the data — and the report can easily be shared.

Check out the Google Consumer Surveys U.S. Election Poll for weekly updates as the American public gets closer to choosing its next president. Whether in politics or business, surveys are a powerful tool to get the public’s opinion. And spur lively discussions.

Happy Surveying!

More on Google Consumer Surveys

Many users, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, use Google Consumer Surveys today to run studies on consumer research, brand tracking, and ad effectiveness. Google also offers an enterprise survey solution with advanced targeting features such as user list and zip code targeting.

Respondents answer questions on 1,000+ publisher sites to gain access to premium content. The publishers make money each time someone answers a question on their site. Google Consumer Surveys also has an app, Google Opinion Rewards, where people can answer survey questions for Google Play credit. There are over 10M potential respondents available to survey everyday.

Posted by Justin Cohen, Product Marketing Manager, Google Consumer Surveys

Jackpot: APMEX Doubles New User Revenue with Google Optimize 360

2016-09-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

A few months ago we shared a spotlight post on Google Optimize 360 (beta), a new testing and personalization solution in the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Today we’d like to share how one of our customers, APMEX, uses Optimize 360 to deliver an online shopping experience that matches the personal touch its customers get over the phone.

Built with full native integration for all the data that matters to your business, Optimize 360 let the APMEX team use their Analytics 360 goals and audiences to deliver better online experiences for their customers.

APMEX Case Study

"Investments you hold" is the motto of APMEX, one of the nation's largest precious metals retailers. From the gold Maple Leafs of the Royal Canadian Mint to the platinum bars of Credit Suisse, APMEX offers thousands of bullion and numismatic products for easy sale online.

While APMEX is a large company, its marketing resources are limited. But APMEX works hard to give its online customers a concierge-level customer experience — the same personal experience customers get over the phone. "We refuse to believe that our customers’ experiences should be limited by our resources," says Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics at APMEX.

APMEX relies on Optimize 360 to help it bring a personal concierge-level touch to its website users. "We test everything," says Duffle. "Creative versus non-creative, the impacts of SEO content on engagement, conversion rate optimization on low-performing pages, new user experiences, and even the price sensitivity of different products."

"One of our goals was to capture conversions on pages that were otherwise being used as educational resources," says Andy Mueller, Manager of Business Intelligence at APMEX. "We thought if people were checking the price of metals, they might respond to offers that really reflected their interests." In one test, new users coming to APMEX to check silver prices were given limited-time offers on United States Silver Eagles. If they're interested enough to check prices, the theory went, they might appreciate a chance to buy.

Before

After

The results were excellent, says Mueller: "We found the sessions that included an offer resulted in a median rate of 112% more revenue per session, with a 100% probability to beat baseline." The experiment did more than boost revenue: It also increased APMEX’s new customer counts. "We saw a 9% increase in new customer acquisition. Our customers have a long lifespan, so giving up a little margin on the first sale to the right customer is worth it to us."

Some of APMEX’s other tests have also produced astounding results. In one, the team used Analytics 360 to build an audience of people who had put Silver Buffalo coins in their shopping cart and then abandoned the cart. Those who returned to APMEX in the next few days saw the Silver Buffalo first thing on their homepage. As a result, the conversion rate for the coin doubled with this audience.

"With all the data that Optimize 360 puts at our fingertips, we use it daily to build and evolve our customer relationships," says Duffle.

For more, read the full case study with APMEX.

Posted by Tiffany Siu, Product Marketing Manager, Google Optimize 360

Improved Analytics Administration via Property Moving

2016-09-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

To meet our mission of providing world class digital analytics data, we’re pleased to announce the release of a feature we know many of you have been eager to use - the ability to move a Google Analytics or Analytics 360 property between accounts! It’s critical that we continually improve the core of Google Analytics, and we anticipate this will be a very helpful feature to improve users’ organization of Analytics accounts and get more power out of advanced features.

Benefits
Cleaner Accounts

With Google Analytics now over a decade old, it’s been a while since many of our customers created their first Analytics accounts. And until now, every time a property was created, it was housed permanently in its account. With the introduction of property moving, you are now able to simplify your accounts, and group properties together in a way that makes the most sense for your current business needs.

Enhancing Features like Rollup Reporting

There are many features in Google Analytics that work well across properties within a single account, but not across multiple Analytics accounts. With property moving, you can now consolidate properties in the individual accounts that make the most sense, and enjoy feature parity across all of those properties.

Roll-Up Reporting (available only in Analytics 360) lets you aggregate data from multiple properties within a single account; property moving lets you consolidate related properties within a single account. These two features combine to let you organize your data and reporting structure in the ways that are most relevant to your business.

Consolidating properties within a single account offers additional benefits:

You can apply the same set of filters to the views in all of those properties
You can easily manage users for the properties and views in a single account
You can use Change History to see all events from all properties in the same account

Ownership Transfers

Many customers may have had a third party (eg. an agency) create a property for their website inside the third party’s Analytics account. This effectively housed the property into an account that someone else owns & controls. With property moving, it’s now possible to move such a property outside of its original account and into a new one so that the property owner can have full control of their property.

How it works
No Retagging Required

We know how expensive it can be to retag a website, so we took special care to ensure moving a property does not require any retagging. Moving a property can be completed entirely within Google Analytics’ Admin section.

Moving a Property

In order to move a property from one Google Analytics account (called the “source account”) to another (called the “destination account”), you must have full access to both accounts. This means you must have Edit and Manage Users permissions for both the source and destination accounts. We have these high requirements to ensure only properly authorized users can perform this powerful action; and, in case a mistake is made, the user can move the property back to the source account. Learn More

To get started, login to your Google Analytics account, and visit the Admin section. Visit the “Property Settings” page for the property you’d like to move, and select the “Move Property” button in the top right corner. Here’s what the process looks like:

Make use of this feature whenever you need it. This is simply one example of many features we are building to constantly make Analytics work better for you, our loyal customers!

Posted by Tim Cao & Matt Matyas, Google Analytics team

Google Data Studio for Publishers

2016-09-07T04:00:00.002-07:00

As we have seen in a previous post, Google Data Studio (beta) is a great solution for visualizing Ecommerce data. But if you are a publisher and your website is supported by ads, you might be wondering if it would work well for you...wonder no more! In this post we will look at a sample report with real-world data from a publisher.

The report below was created for Online Behavior, an ad-supported content website. The ads are delivered using DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), an ad management solution that helps publishers sell, schedule, deliver, and measure their digital ad inventory. On top of that, the website uses DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX), which provides a vast global inventory in real time.

With the configurations above in mind, you will notice that the main conversion shown in the Data Studio report below is the metric Publisher Revenue - this represents all revenue coming from DFP and DFP Backfill (in this case, AdX). Please note that this metric is not available by default on Data Studio, if you have the same settings you can create this metric using a calculated field to sum DFP Revenue and DFP Backfill Revenue. In addition to this metric, the website also uses Newsletter Signups as a secondary goal. A typical publisher!

Let’s take a look at some of the elements shown in the report above:

Scorecard strip: in order to highlight the overall metrics for traffic volume (Users, Sessions, Impressions) and outcomes (CTR, Revenue, Signups) we created a grey strip in the top of the chart. They show the last 28 days values, and right below them you will see a comparison to last period (green is good, red is bad).
Line charts: while the total metric value is very important, it is also critical to keep track of the trends. The two line charts in the report will help the viewer understand if there are any sudden spikes or declines that require additional attention. In this case we chose the main volume metric (Impressions) and the main outcome metric (Revenue).
Donut charts: who doesn’t love donuts?! Those charts are used to provide an overview of the most important Channels when it comes to the two conversion metrics: Publisher Revenue and Newsletter Signups. In summary, Organic brings a lot of Revenue and Display brings a lot of Signups.
Tables: there is no chart that can beat a table when it comes to presenting detailed data. The two tables in the bottom left corner of the report show, for each article and author (author name is sent to Google Analytics through a Custom Dimension), how many impressions, the CTR, and the total Revenue. Using bar charts and heatmaps in a table greatly improves its readability.
Bar charts: in the bottom right corner two bar charts were added to add more info about new and returning users and the devices used.

If you are a Publisher, we hope this will bring some inspiration! You can check out the full report above using this link.

Please note that in order to report DFP data in Google Analytics you will need to use Google Analytics 360 integration with DFP (learn more). Happy visualizing!

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Enterprise-Class Tag Management: A look back on recent features

2016-09-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

We built Google Tag Manager with the goal of solving tagging problems for our customers: decreasing implementation time so you can focus on the things that matter most to you, reducing errors so you can have more confidence in your data, and speeding up your tags to make your users’ experiences faster, and make the web a better place.

Last week, we launched workspaces to improve collaboration and enterprise workflows in Google Tag Manager. This is just the latest in a series of improvements designed to better meet the needs of our enterprise customers. In case you haven’t been keeping up with all of our many updates, here are some things you may have missed:

Testing & Security:

Environments – Building on our strong preview and debugging capabilities, Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 now also support publishing changes to specific testing environments (e.g. Dev, Staging, QA). You can set up as many environments as you need for your organization and name them whatever makes sense for you. When you go to publish, simply choose the environment you’d like to publish your changes to. It’s never been easier to test your tags to make sure your upcoming tag changes align with your upcoming site changes, and that you get things right the first time.
Malware detection – To protect the safety and security of your users, Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 will now automatically detect when tags deployed through your containers point to sites where we’ve found malware. You’ll be notified that there’s a problem, and the culprit tags will be paused so you can track down the issue without risk to your website and your users.

Organization:

Folders – As your containers grow over time, it can become difficult to keep track of all of your tags, triggers, and variables. With folders, you can organize these items into logical groupings, making them easier to work with for yourself and your team members.
Tag sequencing – Not all tags work independently. Sometimes it’s important for your tags to fire in a specific order. With tag sequencing you can specify tags to fire immediately before or after a given tag to ensure that things happen just the way you expect.

Mobile:

Mobile app tag management – Google Tag Manager for mobile apps has been rewritten to be simpler, smaller, and faster. It is now integrated with Firebase, Google’s new mobile app developer platform, which provides end-to-end development tools and analytics.

Services & Support:

Tag Manager 360 – Launched earlier this year as part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, Tag Manager 360 includes services and support to help you get up and running faster, service level agreements (SLAs) to guarantee that you’ll be able to work on your tags as needed and that they’ll consistently fire based on your configuration, and integration with the 360 Suite for centralized account access and user management.

Interested in Google Tag Manager 360? Visit our website to learn more.
Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Explore important insights from your data — automatically

2016-09-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

For marketers, business owners, and product designers, it’s important to be connected to data at all times. However, data by itself rarely provides the insight needed to truly drive a business forward. It can take hours of analysis to come up with just one or two key insights and even longer to share and act on that new understanding. In a constantly-connected world, where customers can make purchases anywhere, anytime from their mobile devices, this lag in time-to-insight is costly.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce that we’re providing a new stream of automated insights in the Google Analytics mobile app. Available on the Assistant screen, this addition to Google Analytics lets you see in 5 minutes what might have taken hours to discover previously. Even better: it gets smarter over time as it learns about your business and your needs. It’s available now in our mobile app on Android and iOS, so you can easily grab insights on the go.

To enable this functionality, we use Google machine intelligence to find critical insights among the thousands of metric and dimension combinations that can be reported in Google Analytics. It helps make analytics data universally accessible and useful as it:

Combs through your data to give you meaningful insights and recommendations.
Offers quick tips on how to improve your Google Analytics data.
Gets smarter over time by reacting to your feedback and how you use it.
Helps you share insights so your whole team can take action.

Go beyond simple reporting to view findings and insights automatically, in language you can read: our insight stream enables faster, more informed decision-making that can have real impact on your business.

For example, the holiday season drives a huge portion of annual sales for many retailers. During this busy time of the year, retailers face questions that can be the difference between making their numbers for the year or falling short: Which products are going to be popular this season? Where should we advertise? How are our customers hearing about us and purchasing from us? Answering just one of these questions and acting on that information can take analysts and marketers hours or even days.

Data insights in Google Analytics automate the first steps of answering these questions by instantaneously surfacing opportunities and anomalies hiding in the data. For example, they can tell you which products are experiencing higher than normal sales growth, which advertising channels are driving the most conversions and the best returns, and on which devices customers engage with your brand. This moment-to-moment information gives retailers the power to make nimble, smart decisions that directly impact performance.

You can view your automated insights in the Assistant tab in the official Google Analytics mobile app on Android and iOS for all English-speaking users. We're working to bring this exciting functionality to the web version of Google Analytics and to expand availability to other languages.

We plan on improving with your feedback, so please try the app and then let us know what insights you’d like to see automated.
Posted by Ajay Nainani, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Enterprise Class Administration in the Google Analytics 360 Suite

2016-09-01T15:22:00.000-07:00

If you're in marketing or analytics, you know consumer behavior has shifted dramatically — mobile has created new opportunities for businesses to reach customers at the right moment with the right message at every step in the buyer journey. That’s why earlier this year, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers and data analysts.

Since this launch, we’re now excited to announce a series of improvements available to Suite customers. The Google Analytics 360 Suite houses vital data for marketers to understand how their marketing programs, websites, and apps are performing; carefully controlling access to this data and monitoring what happens with it is a top priority, and we’ve made solid improvements.

User management for your Organization

Managing users’ access to your data and Suite assets is critical, and must be done in the context of your organization. The first step towards controlling your data access is to let us know which accounts your organization manages. Organization administrators can do this in the new Suite Home product: http://360suite.google.com/. Administrators will see an “Admin” tab, and underneath it lies the ability to link and verify all of your accounts with the Suite’s products to your organization:

Linked accounts must be verified before user management features will apply to them.

Centralized User Auditing

Once you have linked and verified all of your accounts within Suite products, we compile a powerful user-auditing report for you. This report lists all users that have access to any of the accounts you linked across all Suite products. This is the only place where you can find a cross-product and cross-account list of users.

For each user in this report, we list rich data to help you make informed decisions about who has access to your corporate accounts. We show the user’s name and picture (when available), their Suite roles, and which products within your organization the user has access to. For all linked Google Analytics accounts, we show the last time the user accessed data from any of them.

Even more details can be loaded per user to show a summary of all the data that user has access to, such as how many properties or containers the user can access, whether the user is licensed for Data Studio, etc.

Filtering

You can use advanced filters to restrict data shown on screen; for example, you can show only users who haven’t accessed Analytics data over the last 6 months:

Remove Stale Users

Combining all of the actions above, you can complete an important task: identifying and removing stale users from your Analytics accounts (other Suite products to come in the future.) After you filter for only users who haven’t logged in recently, you can visit the details pane for those users and remove them from Analytics:

Change History

Suite Change History lets you keep track of when a change was made, who made the change, and what was changed. For example, you can easily see when someone linked a new account to your organization, added or removed users, changed the service level for an object, or changed the end date on an order. Having a record of these changes eliminates confusion over something like an increase in billing. Instead of wondering, you can search your change history to see that one of your administrators changed the service level for a property from Standard to 360, or made changes to the billing parameters. Access to change history is restricted to Owners.

Get Started: Complete your Suite Setup to Use these Features

Organization administrators can login to 360suite.google.com to complete their Suite setup and start using these features right now; contact your account manager if you’re not sure who your organization administrators are. Verify all accounts linked to your organization, then visit your Organization page in Suite Admin to enable the Suite experience today.

Put all these powerful administration features to use right now for your organization to tightly monitor & control access to your valuable data. We have many more improvements planned for the future; so stay tuned as we launch more, and truly bring an enterprise-grade experience to life in the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Magicbricks Stays Up and Running With Real-Time Monitoring From Google Analytics 360

2016-09-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Magicbricks is India’s top high-end property portal. The website caters to a global market with its unique services and novel online features for both buyers and sellers. Given their commitment to user experience and performance across their site’s global operations, they needed a real-time solution to monitor and optimize against their key digital KPIs.

The company worked with Tatvic Analytics Private Limited, a Google Analytics 360 Certified Partner, to develop a way to reduce website downtime and promptly alert management when outages would occur. Using this real-time anomaly alerts platform, the company would clearly see variances in KPIs and move quickly to troubleshoot and fix them.

The results of this real-time monitoring solution were impressive – response time for detecting errors and unexpected behavior has improved by 70%.

“As a No.1 property portal, Magicbricks aims to provide our users with an outstanding experience to help them make confident property decisions. Google Analytics 360 helped us measure various unexpected website behaviors which were hampering user experience. The response time for detecting errors, unexpected behavior, and monitoring performance improved by 70% after we deployed this anomaly detection solution.” Sudhir Pai, CEO of Magicbricks

How did they go about building their real-time monitoring solution? First, they defined key metrics for real-time anomaly detection checks. Second, they created their real-time monitoring platform using Google Analytics 360 data processed through Real Time and Management APIs. Third, they applied an anomaly algorithm to data to calculate deviations in real time. Fourth, alerts were sent via SMS to different leaders within the company when variances in KPIs occurred. Learn more about the details in the full case study.

The automated SMS alert system has been improved to detect outages, determine severity, and provide real-time performance updates to senior and middle managers throughout Magicbricks. Today the full Magicbricks team can make the most of these real-time insights to keep the site up and running―and earning more every day.

Posted by Cathy Candano and Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team.

Google Analytics adopts Privacy Shield

2016-08-29T14:20:00.002-07:00

Today, we’re glad to announce that we have self-certified our adherence to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework.

The Privacy Shield establishes a new framework for transfers of personal data from Europe to the United States. It is a significant milestone for the protection of Europeans’ personal data, legal certainty of transatlantic businesses, and trust in the digital economy.

From now on, Google has committed to applying the Privacy Shield’s principles and safeguards to EU-U.S. transfers of personal data, by default. No action is required on our customers’ part. Google’s certificate will soon be accessible here.

UPDATE - Friday 23 September: Google's certificate is now accessible here.

Enterprise-Class Tag Management: Announcing Workspaces

2016-08-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

Companies of all sizes use Google Tag Manager, but larger organizations often have very different needs than others. That’s why, over the past year, we’ve launched Google Tag Manager 360, and have been working to build features that better address the needs of enterprise customers.

Today, we’re excited to announce one of these new features: workspaces in Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360!

Until now, all tag changes were prepared in a single container draft before being versioned and published. This sometimes led to complicated workflows and workarounds for multi-user teams and their agencies. Workspaces give you more than one space to do your work. Teammates can now easily work on tags at the same time, or make quick changes without publishing everything that’s in the works. Simply create a new workspace, make your changes, and hit publish. Tags, triggers, and variables being worked on in other workspaces will remain unaffected.

The new workspaces are essentially places to work on sets of changes that will become versions. When a workspace is versioned or published, its name, notes and list of changes will be carried over to the version, so you have a full history of what’s changed in your container and when.

What happens if tags you’re working on in one workspace are changed in another? Not to worry. Tag Manager will let you know if there are conflicts when a new version is created. Then it will guide you through merging them into your workspace with an easy-to-use conflict resolution tool!

You’ll also notice that we've made the Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 interfaces faster and easier to use. Need to enable a built-in variable while working on a tag? Sliding screens let you configure related tags, triggers, and variables without dropping out of your current editing flow. Want to know which tags a certain trigger is applied to? Trigger and variable screens now tell you exactly where they’re being used. Not sure what type of variable to use to grab a value from your site? Configuration screens are now easier to read and include more in-line guidance.

Starting today, Tag Manager 360 customers will be able to create unlimited workspaces in their containers! Having unlimited workspaces is ideal for the large organizations and complex collaboration efforts that Tag Manager 360 was designed for. If you’re a Tag Manager 360 customer, or a customer of another Google Analytics 360 Suite product, reach out to your Account Manager to learn more.

Users of the standard version of Tag Manager will also benefit. All containers will be enabled for up to three concurrent workspaces (a default workspace—similar to the container draft today—and two additional custom workspaces). The enhanced interface will also give you greater visibility into exactly what changes are being made when you hit publish.

We'll keep thinking about how to make tagging easier for you. We already have improvements planned for workspaces and other areas of Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 to make our products even more powerful and easy to use. We’ll have more to share soon!

Interested in Google Tag Manager 360? Visit our website to learn more.

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

AccuWeather delivers enhanced value to advertisers with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360

2016-08-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Challenge

Publishers use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to manage and serve ads across their sites and apps, and use Google Analytics 360 to understand user behavior on their sites. DFP reports on the ads and ad units on the site, while Analytics 360 reports on the pages on the site.

Each platform on its own doesn’t provide insight into the intersection of data with the other. And with two platforms speaking two different languages, it hasn't always been easy for publishers to understand how user behavior influences revenue and how ads influence user behavior.

That’s why last year we launched an integration between DFP and Analytics 360.

The Solution

Through the integration, publishers using Analytics 360 can see DFP metrics like impressions, clicks, and revenue within the Analytics 360 interface. This enables publishers to combine revenue data with user behavior insights—for example, the number of ad impressions or revenue each page of their site generates. AccuWeather is one such publisher.

AccuWeather Case Study

AccuWeather brings real-time weather news and information to more than a billion people worldwide through its website and popular suite of apps. The company knew that if it could better understand the needs of those visitors and match them with more relevant messages from advertisers, it could provide more value to advertisers and boost its own ad revenues. By linking its DFP and Analytics 360 accounts, AccuWeather could see how the behavior of its website visitors affected revenue.

With DFP metrics now in Analytics 360, AccuWeather could see that average revenue per 1,000 sessions rose by 45% on a country-level basis when two new companies began advertising on accuweather.com. This revenue increase was driven by users who were actively in-market to travel and were looking at weather in “exotic” locations such as Turks & Caicos and Barbados. With insights like these, the team has been able to create highly tailored advertising packages with high-value, unique audience segments that sales teams can sell directly or through programmatic marketplaces like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

“The integration of DoubleClick for Publishers and Analytics 360 gives AccuWeather real-time visibility to the next level of campaign performance insights and is helping us make better advertising decisions. We’re now creating new behavior-based ad products that are being very well received by our advertisers,” says Steve Mummey, Director of Ad Strategy & Audience Development, AccuWeather.

For more, read the full case study with AccuWeather.

Even More Capabilities Available for Publishers

In addition to seeing DFP metrics in Analytics 360, publishers will be able to use a consolidated reporting section, see DFP ad unit data together with Analytics 360 data, and do deeper analysis on their DFP data in Google BigQuery.

Reporting

DFP metrics are consolidated into a reporting section in Analytics 360, making it easy for publishers to understand how their online content impacts revenue.

The figures in the above image are for illustration only and do not represent actual data in AccuWeather’s DFP or Analytics 360 accounts.

Ad Units

Publishers sell their online ad inventory based on the thousands or millions of ad units they have available on their properties. Individual ad slots can be grouped together into ad units so that publishers can create a hierarchy of ad units that represents the structure of their website. Then, publishers can match each advertiser’s message with the right ad slot.

Through this integration, publishers can now see their Analytics 360 data through the lens of their ad units. DFP ad unit hierarchy is mapped to Analytics 360 along with related metrics such as impressions, clicks, and dollars.

And now that analyst and ad operations teams can speak the same language, publishers are able to analyze DFP data through the lens of demographic and interest data in Analytics 360—and they can identify things like which affinity category or user lifestyle is driving the most revenue per 1,000 sessions by ad unit.

The figures in the above image are for illustration only and do not represent actual data in AccuWeather’s DFP or Analytics 360 accounts.

Google BigQuery

Now that DFP metrics are available in Analytics 360, they can be exported to BigQuery. This means more metrics, more exports, and more data sources. Publishers can run their own revenue models and explore in more detail the intersection of revenue and user behavior.

Stay tuned for more updates from Analytics 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities!

Posted by Abhishek Aggarwal, Dan Cary, and Tiffany Siu on behalf of the Google Analytics team

Which TV Ads Made the Podium During the 2016 Olympics?

2016-08-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

Note: Now that the 2016 Games are over, we've updated the analysis from the original opening ceremonies post to look at TV ad performance for the entire Olympics.

When the 2016 Olympics kicked off almost three weeks ago, many TV advertisers were crossing their fingers that their strategy would pay off. Reaching as many as an estimated 27.9 million total viewers in the U.S., they were hoping their ads delivered relevant and compelling creative to the right audiences. To answer the pay-off question, advertisers will predominately look at three specific areas of performance:

Which ads were noticed by the audience?
Which ads drove interest, shifted perception, and increased intent?
And, which ads drove actual consumer response?

To get some insights into these questions, Google evaluated the top 12 brands totaling over 3.5 billion impressions that aired ads during the NBC broadcasts of the event. The analysis is based on a combination of consumer surveys and second-screen (mobile, desktop, and tablet) response data. Presented in a live Google Data Studio dashboard, the result is a unique view into the full-funnel performance of the ads evaluated.

See

Commercials during large, live sporting events like the Olympics are often uniquely created to leverage both the scale of the audience and the context of the event. Whether it is telling the personal story of an athlete or playing to our passions like patriotism, they are intended to strike an emotional connection, entertain us, or make us stand up and take notice.

Nike's "Unlimited" ads were the big winner with almost 35% of respondents having remembered seeing the ads when prompted. Including an ad with the first quadruple amputee to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, Nike's powerful ads outpaced typical recall rates in the 20%-25% range. Coca Cola was a close second with their "That's gold" ads which mixed Olympic competition with everyday moments. Tide, McDonald's, and Samsung rounded out the top five with respectable recall rates. On overage, ad recall rates for the top five improved 3% percentage points from the initial analysis following the opening ceremonies.

Almost 35% of respondents remembered seeing the Nike ads.

Additionally, of those respondents recalling the ad, only 37% could recall the specific product or service featured in the ad. The net is that only about 13% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement. Tide's"Small can be powerful" ad with Simone Biles had the highest product recall rate at just over 50%.

Think

Advertisers also want the ad to shift perceptions and create interest in the product or service featured. By surveying both viewers who did not see the ad (unexposed) and those who did see the ad (exposed), we are able to get insights into the impact of each ad’s messaging and creative. Overall, the results were impressive. On average, respondents who saw the ads were 27% more positive about the associated brands than those who did not. Likewise, respondents who saw the ads were 32% more likely to find out more and/or purchase the product being advertised.

Compared to the lift measured during the opening ceremonies, both favorability and intent increased significantly over the span of the Olympics increasing ten and twelve percentage points respectively.

Consumers who saw the ads, were on average, 25% more positive about the brand and were 28% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ads.

Interestingly, the baseline favorability and purchase intent for both non-sponsors and Olympic sponsors are relatively equal. However, non-sponsors saw a greater lift than sponsors with three more percentage points for favorability and seven more percentage points for intent.

Do

These commercials don’t just make us laugh or make us feel better about the brand — they also make us search and visit websites. Second-screen searching—whether it’s to re-engage with the ad or to learn more about the product — is a powerful indication of desire. By measuring incremental search queries on Google during the broadcast that are specific and modeled to be attributable to ads shown, we are now able to include responses in our analysis. During the broadcasts, TV ad driven searches were almost exclusively on mobile — 83% compared to an average of 55% for those brands when the ads were not airing. For brands, that means a presence on the TV screen isn’t complete without a strategy for small screens, as well.

"83% of searches on Google as a result of seeing the ads occurred on phones and another 10% occurred on tablets making a second screen strategy key to TV advertising."

BMW featured multiple products including a "Performance wheelchair" and garnered the top spot on the podium with a response strength index of 3.21. McDonald’s and Samsung fought it out for the silver and bronze with 2.01 and 1.57 respectively. The answer to the question “Do emotional ads work as well as product ads?” is, in this instance, “Yes.” Both emotional and product ad creatives drove 50% more searches on average. Also interestingly, ads by non-sponsors drove 17% more searches than their sponsor counterparts.

Compared to the average of the top 12 ads studied, BMW drove 3.2 times more searches.

Finally, Coca Cola was the overall winner with strong full-funnel performance placing in the top three across all three funnel stages.

Whether people are tuning into the Olympics or their favorite TV show, they use their smartphones to search for information triggered by what they’re seeing. In these micro-moments, advertisers need to be there, be useful, and be accountable. That means if you advertise on TV, you can now get a new view of performance across each stage of the funnel — using a combination of consumer surveys and digital response, all in a matter of days. Armed with these new insights, advertisers are now able to better understand and improve the performance of these investments in concert with their digital media.

Sourcing

Using Google Consumer Surveys to provide consumer ad awareness and interest research, an online survey was conducted in the United States during the period 8/19 - 8/21/16 using a validated, representative sample with a minimum of 700 respondents. Response data is based on incremental TV ad-driven search queries (Google) during the course of the broadcast that are specific to the ad shown and are modeled by Google Attribution 360 to be attributable to the airings of the commercials. Response data is normalized for total ad impressions during the broadcast for each advertiser.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Data Studio: New Google Cloud SQL and MySQL connector

2016-08-22T11:17:00.003-07:00

Our vision for Google Data Studio is to enable customers to access, visualize, and share all their data, regardless of where that data resides. Today we are adding support for the popular Google Cloud SQL and MySQL databases. This is the beginning of making your first party data available through Data Studio.

Using the new Google Cloud SQL and MySQL connector, you can now access the data in your database to create amazing reports and dashboards.

Example report accessing sales data by sales person from MySQL database

To use the connector, select one of our new connectors.

List of connectors now includes Cloud SQL and MySQL

Specify your database name, URL, username, and password, and click connect.

Configuration screen to access your SQL database

Visualizing data has never been easier! These new connectors are now available to all Data Studio users. Learn more about the connector in our MySQL Connector and Google Cloud SQL Connector help documentation.

Need a new connector in Data Studio?
Is there a specific data service you wish to be able to access and visualize through Data Studio? Let us know through this Data Studio connector feedback form so we can prioritize and make it happen!

Posted by Anand Shah and Nick Mihailovski, Product Managers

Which TV Ads Made the Podium During the 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremonies?

2016-08-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

When the 2016 Olympics kicked off last Friday, many TV advertisers were crossing their fingers that their strategy would pay off. Reaching an estimated 26.5 million total viewers in the U.S., they were hoping their ads delivered relevant and compelling creative to the right audiences. To answer the pay-off question, advertisers will predominately look at three specific areas of performance:

Which ads were noticed by the audience?
Which ads drove interest, shifted perception, and increased intent?
And, which ads drove actual consumer response?

To get some insights into these questions, Google evaluated the top 10 brands (based on total ad minutes) that aired ads during the live broadcast of the opening ceremonies. The analysis is based on a combination of consumer surveys and second-screen (mobile, desktop, and tablet) response data. Presented in a live Google Data Studio dashboard, the result is a unique view into the full-funnel performance of the ads evaluated.

Awareness

35% of respondents remembered seeing the Coca Cola ad.

Additionally, of those respondents recalling the ad, only 40% could recall the specific product or service featured in the ad. The net is that only about 8% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement. For many of the ads this was the first airing and it is reasonable to expect these numbers to improve substantially with increased exposure over the next couple of weeks.

Interest

Advertisers also want the ad to shift perceptions and create interest in the product or service featured. By surveying both viewers who saw the ad (exposed) and those who did not (unexposed), we are able to get insights into the impact of each ad’s messaging and creative. Overall, the results were impressive. On average, respondents who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the associated brands than those who did not. Likewise, respondents who saw the ads were 16% more likely to find out more and/or purchase the product being advertised.

Consumers who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the brand and were 16% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ad.

Interestingly, the baseline favorability and purchase intentions for both non-sponsors and Olympic sponsors are relatively equal. And for the most part, the ad’s impact on both factors was the same across non-sponsors and sponsors.

Desire

These commercials don’t just make us laugh or make us feel better about the brand—they also make us search and visit websites. Second-screen searching—whether it’s to re-engage with the ad or to learn more about the product—is a powerful indication of desire. By measuring incremental search queries on Google and YouTube during the broadcast that are specific and modeled to be attributable to ads shown, we are now able to include responses in our analysis. During the opening ceremonies, TV ad driven searches were almost exclusively on mobile—94% compared to an average of 56% for those brands when the ads were not airing. For brands, that means a presence on the TV screen isn’t complete without a strategy for small screens, as well.

"94% of searches on Google and YouTube as a result of seeing the ads occurred on mobile devices."

McDonald’s took the top spot on the podium with 42% more searches than the average. BMW and Samsung fought it out for second and third with 14% and 12% respectively. The answer to the question “Do emotional and inspiring ads work?” is, in this instance, “Yes.” But so do product-featured ads. Both inspiring and product ad creatives drove 10% more searches on average. Also, ads by sponsors drove 14% more searches than their non-sponsor counterparts.

Compared to the average of the top 10 ads studied, McDonald’s drove 42% more searches.

Finally, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 ad was the overall winner with strong full-funnel performance placing in the top three across all three funnel stages. Whether people are tuning into the Olympics or their favorite TV show, they use their smartphones to search for information triggered by what they’re seeing. That means if you advertise on TV, you can now get a new view of performance across each stage of the funnel—using a combination of consumer surveys and digital response, all in a matter of days. Armed with these new insights, advertisers are now able to better understand and improve the performance of these investments in concert with their digital media.

Sourcing

Using Google Consumer Surveys to provide consumer ad awareness and interest research, an online survey was conducted in the United States during the period 8/6 - 8/9/16 using a validated, representative sample with a minimum of 750 respondents. Response data is based on incremental TV ad-driven search queries (Google and YouTube) during the course of the broadcast that are specific to the ad shown and are modeled by Google Attribution 360 to be attributable to the airings of the commercials. Response data is normalized for total commercial air time during the broadcast for each advertiser and indexed to the average.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Data Exploration with Google Data Studio

2016-08-08T06:23:00.001-07:00

If you analyze and visualize data often enough, there are good chances that at some point you felt the “analyst’s block” (a less famous version of the writer’s block). We thought you might feel that way at times, so we provide here some ideas for you to explore and build great Reports in Data Studio.

In this post we will use a sample dataset from the U.S. Census Bureau. The data is about annual operating expenses of U.S. Retail, Accommodation, and Food Services between 2006 and 2014. The dataset is not complex, just 10 types of businesses and their expenses in that time period. Here is the Google Sheet data that was connected to Data Studio.

Now the important question: what should you do first when opening a blank canvas? Below is a set of three charts that will often give you some insight into the nature of data, they will help you to explore the data and build an insightful report. You will probably also have requests coming from your audience, but those can be helpful both for your own understanding and for enhancing those requests.

Below is a quick explanation of each chart and how they can bring insights into your data:

Line chart: this is extremely useful if you have time series data, it will help you quickly identify trends over time. It is recommended you use not only the time dimensions (which would aggregate all other dimensions), but also segment the data by a second dimension, to see how different groups behave over time. In this case we are using the Business Type to segment the main trend. Once you do that, you will see one line per value (see legend above the chart) - as you can see, 10 lines is a bit crowded, so you might want to use 6-8 lines only
Table: it is hard to find a better way to get a feeling for the data than tabular data! To help visualize the stats, you can also use bar charts and heatmaps inside the tables (see blue bars on second column and red heatmap on third column), they are pretty helpful visual clues especially in tables with lots of data.
Scatter chart: the scatter charts are great to understand how two metrics correlate. In the screenshot above you will also note that there is a trend line (green) in the chart; it shows that as the expense grows, the YoY Change has a lower value, meaning that it decreases quicker.

Hopefully those three charts will help you get a feeling for the data. You can also take a look at the Report at https://goo.gl/QqNFWn

Happy visualizing!

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Introducing the Google Analytics Demo Account

2016-08-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not - Albert Einstein

There are many resources available to learn Google Analytics, from the courses and training we offer, to advice from the community, or from the many books, guides, and articles written about Google Analytics. However, we’ve heard many of you would also like a resource so you can learn through practical experience and to apply your theoretical analytics knowledge. It can be difficult to gain practical experience since not everyone has access to a fully-implemented Google Analytics account. To fix this we’re introducing a fully functional Google Analytics Demo Account, available to everyone (get access here).

The Demo Account includes data from the Google Merchandise Store, an active Ecommerce site that sells Google branded merchandise. The ongoing Google Analytics implementation which will be completed this month already includes all the major features you would typically implement, like AdWords linking, Goals and Enhanced Ecommerce. The result is a fully functional account, with real business data.

Demo Account: Checkout Behavior Analysis Report

“Have you wondered why you've always gravitated towards people with real-world experience rather than on-paper experiences? The real-world part :) So while it hurts my feelings a bit to say that my best selling analytics books are not enough, I'm massively excited that the GA team has figured out a solution for the entire universe to get real-world experience. Get the access, download my awesome bundle of segments, dashboards and custom reports, and really start your learning experience!”
- Avinash Kaushik, Author - Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics : An Hour a Day

Self-Learning

You can use the Demo Account to learn about Google Analytics features and functionality, for example:

Access all the Standard reports to see which ones are useful to you
Get inspiration from predefined dashboards and segments imported from the Solutions Gallery to create your own
Alter reports by adding table filters and secondary dimensions, and by changing the report type
Learn how to compare audience, acquisition, behavior and conversion performance to a previous date range period
Create your own personal assets such as custom reports, annotations, shortcuts and custom alerts
Become familiar with the predefined attribution models and even create your own
Determine whether features you don't haven’t implemented could be beneficial to you e.g. AdWords and Search Console integrations
Use it as a companion when following a training course

Education Programs

If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Google Analytics then we encourage you to use the Demo Account as a tool. You can use it to create tests, quizzes, and other learning materials for your students. In fact, we’re excited to announce that some organizations are already starting to integrate it into their learning materials.

General Assembly offers courses both online and at their campuses around the world that will help you master new skills in design, marketing, technology, and data. Their Digital Marketing course includes a unit covering Marketing Analytics that utilizes the Demo Account.

Google Analytics Partners, including E-Nor and Loves Data, use the Demo Account to provide online and classroom style trainings to cater to beginners and advanced analytics users. Their specialists will provide actionable training to create and improve your analytics configuration, implementation and marketing performance.

Access the Demo account

You can get access to the Demo Account and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help please let us know within the FAQs post and share any feature requests or ideas to make the Demo Account more useful within the Feature Requests post. We hope the Demo Account gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Google Analytics.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Deepak Aujla, Program Manager, Google Analytics

Autotrack turns 1.0

2016-08-02T14:47:00.002-07:00

The following was originally posted on the Google Developers Blog.

Autotrack is a JavaScript library built for use with analytics.jsthat provides developers with a wide range of plugins to track the most common user interactions relevant to today's modern web.
The first version of autotrack for analytics.js was released on Github earlier this year, and since then the response and adoption from developers has been amazing. The project has been starred over a thousand times, and sites using autotrack are sending millions of hits to Google Analytics every single day.
Today I'm happy to announce that we've released autotrack version 1.0, which includes several new plugins, improvements to the existing plugins, and tons of new ways to customize autotrack to meet your needs.
Note: autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for Google Analytics 360 support. It is maintained by members of the Google Analytics developer platform team and is primarily intended for a developer audience.

New plugins

Based on the feedback and numerous feature requests we received from developers over the past few months, we've added the following new autotrack plugins:

Impression Tracker

The impression tracker plugin allows you to track when an element is visible within the browser viewport. This lets you much more reliably determine whether a particular advertisement or call-to-action button was seen by the user.
Impression tracking has been historically tricky to implement on the web, particularly in a way that doesn't degrade the performance of your site. This plugin leverages new browser APIs that are specifically designed to track these kinds of interactions in a highly performant way.

Clean URL Tracker

If your analytics implementation sends pageviews to Google Analytics without modifying the URL, then you've probably experienced the problem of seeing multiple different page paths in your reports that all point to the same place. Here's an example:

/contact
/contact/
/contact?hl=en
/contact/index.html

The clean URL tracker plugin avoids this problem by letting you set your preferred URL format (e.g. strip trailing slashes, remove index.html filenames, remove query parameters, etc.), and the plugin automatically updates all page URLs based on your preference before sending them to Google Analytics.
Note: setting up View Filters in your Google Analytics view settings is another way to modify the URLs sent to Google Analytics.

Page Visibility Tracker

It's becoming increasingly common for users to visit sites on the web and then leave them open in an inactive browser tab for hours or even days. And when users return to your site, they often won't reload the page, especially if your site fetches new content in the background.
If your site implements just the default javascript tracking snippet, these types of interactions will never be captured.
The page visibility tracker plugin takes a more modern approach to what should constitute a pageview. In addition to tracking when a page gets loaded, it also tracks when the visibility state of the page changes (i.e. when the tab goes into or comes out of the background). These additional interaction events give you more insight into how users behave on your site.

Updates and improvements

In addition to the new plugins added to autotrack, the existing plugins have undergone some significant improvements, most notably in the ability to customize them to your needs.
All plugins that send data to Google Analytics now give you 100% control over precisely what fieldsget sent, allowing you to set, modify, or remove anything you want. This gives advanced users the ability to set their own custom dimensions on hits or change the interaction setting to better reflect how they choose to measure bounce rate.
Users upgrading from previous versions of autotrack should refer to the upgrade guide for a complete list of changes (note: some of the changes are incompatible with previous versions).

Who should use autotrack

Perhaps the most common question we received after the initial release of autotrack is who should use it. This was especially true of Google Tag Managerusers who wanted to take advantage of some of the more advanced autotrack features.
Autotrack is a developer project intended to demonstrate and streamline some advanced tracking techniques with Google Analytics, and it's primarily intended for a developer audience. Autotrack will be a good fit for small to medium sized developer teams who already have analytics.js on their website or who prefer to manage their tracking implementation in code.
Large teams and organizations, those with more complex collaboration and testing needs, and those with tagging needs beyond just Google Analytics should instead consider using Google Tag Manager. While Google Tag Manager does not currently support custom analytics.js plugins like those that are part of autotrack, many of the same tracking techniques are easy to achieve with Tag Manager’s built-in triggers, and others may be achieved by pushing data layer events based on custom code on your site or in Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager. Read Google Analytics Events in the Google Tag Manager help center to learn more about automatic event tracking based on clicks and form submissions.

Next steps

If you're not already using autotrack but would like to, check out the installation and usage section of the documentation. If you already use autotrack and want to upgrade to the latest version, be sure to read the upgrade guide first.
To get a sense of what the data captured by autotrack looks like, the Google Analytics Demos & Tools site includes several reports displaying its own autotrack usage data. If you want to go deeper, the autotrack library is open source and can be a great learning resource. Have a read through the plugin source code to get a better understanding of how some of the advanced analytics.js features work.
Lastly, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know. You can report bugs or submit any issues on Github.

Posted by Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer