Analytics Blog: Analytics 360

Ask a question, get an answer in Google Analytics

July 18, 2017

What if getting answers about your key business metrics was as easy as asking a question in plain English? What if you could simply say, "How many new users did we have from organic search on mobile last week?" ― and get an answer right away?

Today, Google Analytics is taking a step toward that future. Know what data you need and want it quickly? Just ask Google Analytics and get your answer.

This feature, which uses the same natural language processing technology available across Google products like Android and Search, is rolling out now and will become available in English to all Google Analytics users over the next few weeks.

The ability to ask questions is part of Analytics Intelligence, a set of features in Google Analytics that use machine learning to help you better understand and act on your analytics data. Analytics Intelligence also includes existing machine learning capabilities like automated insights (now available on both web and the mobile app), smart lists, smart goals, and session quality.

How it Works
We've talked to web analysts who say they spend half their time answering basic analytics questions for other people in their organization. In fact, a recent report from Forrester found that 57% of marketers find it difficult to give their stakeholders in different functions access to their data and insights. Asking questions in Analytics Intelligence can help everyone get their answers directly in the product ― so team members get what they need faster, and analysts can spend their valuable time on deeper research and discovery.
Try it! This short video will give you a feel for how it works:

“Analytics Intelligence enables those users who aren’t too familiar with Google Analytics to access and make use of the data within their business’ account. Democratising data in this way can only be a good thing for everyone involved in Google Analytics!”
Joe Whitehead, Analytics Consultant, Merkle | Periscopix

Beyond answering your questions, Analytics Intelligence also surfaces new opportunities for you through automated insights, now available in the web interface as well as in the mobile app. These insights can show spikes or drops in metrics like revenue or session duration, tipping you off to issues that you may need to investigate further. Insights may also present opportunities to improve key metrics by following specific recommendations. For example, a chance to improve bounce rate by reducing a page's load time, or the potential to boost conversion rate by adding a new keyword to your AdWords campaign.

To ask questions and get automated insights from Analytics Intelligence in our web interface, click the Intelligence button to open a side panel. In the Google Analytics mobile app for Android and iOS, tap the Intelligence icon in the upper right-hand corner of most screens. Check out this article to learn more about the types of questions you can ask today.

Help us Learn
Our Intelligence system gets even smarter over time as it learns which questions and insights users are interested in. In that spirit, we need your help: After you ask questions or look at insights, please leave feedback at the bottom of the card.

Your answers will help us train Analytics Intelligence to be more useful.

Our goal is to help you get more insights to more people, faster. That way everyone can get to the good stuff: creating amazing experiences that make customers happier and help you grow your business.
Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Annissa Alusi, Ajay Nainani, and the Google Analytics team

MercadoLibre uses unique audience insights from Analytics 360 to raise ad RPMs by 60%

June 14, 2017

Washing machines and welding masks, comic books and baby strollers: just about everything is for sale on MercadoLibre. It's one of Latin America's biggest e-commerce sites, with 130 million registered users and an average of 4.6 purchases made every second of the day. What better place for an advertiser to reach a huge audience with sure-fire purchase intent?

To help their advertisers improve their programmatic direct campaigns, MercadoLibre used Google Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, to turn their first-party data into tailored audience segments.

"We want to help our advertisers do well," says Valeria Vinitski, Advertising Business Unit Director at MercadoLibre. "So we made use of our biggest media asset: our data. With over 150 million users, we have unique insights into the shopper journey. Integrating with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360 helped us create precise audience segments that are perfect for our clients' campaigns."

MercadoLibre started by creating audience segments for popular product lines like cell phones, cameras, and cars, and then made those Analytics 360 segments available to advertisers. Advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager could then negotiate the impression volumes they wanted at fixed CPMs for each of their priority segments.

With these Programmatic Guaranteed deals, advertisers are guaranteed reach and precision, as their ads are targeted to well-defined audiences that are more likely to buy their products. Ads can be tailored for each segment, boosting their effectiveness even more.

The results have been a win-win all around. The new campaigns have produced revenue per 1,000 sessions (RPMs) that are 60% higher than standard campaigns. Thanks to this new premium audience strategy, programmatic deals now account for 35% of MercadoLibre’s programmatic revenue.

MercadoLibre’s clients are also seeing great results. Magazine Luiza — one of the largest retailers in Brazil — found during a recent multi-publisher campaign that 23% of all its conversions could be attributed to MercadoLibre, and more than 25% of all revenue generated was from audiences exposed to the targeted Programmatic Guaranteed ads on MercadoLibre. The campaign drove a great deal of new customer acquisition for Magazine Luiza, with 40% of those new customers being first-time visitors.

"If we want to deliver better ad experiences, we need to use all our capabilities, data, and ad formats, no matter the sales channel," says Valeria. "Programmatic deals help us optimize our resources and save time while reaching marketing budgets from main brands that we otherwise wouldn't be able to gain."

Your site may not have 150 million users (yet), but whatever its size, Analytics 360 can help you boost revenues. Curious to learn more? See the full MercadoLibre story.

Posted by The Google Analytics 360 Suite team

Firebase Analytics Gets New Features and a Familiar New Name

May 17, 2017

Can it be just a year since we announced the expansion of Firebase to become Google's integrated app developer platform at I/O 2016? That Firebase launch came complete with brand new app analytics reporting and features, developed in conjunction with the Google Analytics team.

Now, at I/O 2017, we're delighted to announce some exciting new features and integrations that will help take our app analytics to the next level. But first, we’d like to highlight a bit of housekeeping. As of today, we are retiring the name Firebase Analytics. Going forward, all app analytics reports will fall under the Google Analytics brand.

This latest generation of app analytics has always, and will continue to be, available in both the Firebase console and in Google Analytics. We think that unifying app analytics under the Google Analytics banner will better communicate that our users are getting the same great app data in both places. In Firebase and related documentation, you'll see app analytics referred to as Google Analytics for Firebase. Read on to the end of this post for more details about this change.

One other note: The launches highlighted below apply to our latest generation of app analytics – you need to be using the Firebase SDK to get these new features.

Now let’s take a look at what’s new.

Integration with AdMob
App analytics is now fully integrated with AdMob. Revenue, impression and click data from AdMob can now be connected with the rest of your event data collected by the Firebase SDK, all of it available in the latest Google Analytics app reports and / or in the Firebase console.

For app companies, this means that ad revenue can be factored into analytics data, so Analytics reports can capture each app’s performance. The integration combines AdMob data with Analytics data at the event level to produce brand new metrics, and to facilitate deep dives into existing metrics. You can answer questions like:

What is the true lifetime value for a given segment, factoring in both ad revenue and purchase revenue?
How do rewarded ads impact user engagement and LTV?
On which screens are users being exposed to advertising the most or the least?

With this change, you can now have a complete picture of the most important metrics for your business ― all in one place.

Custom parameter reporting
"What's the average amount of time users spend in my game before they make their first purchase?" Many of you have asked us for the ability to report on specific data points like these that are important to your business.

Custom parameter reporting is here to make that possible. You can now register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports.

If you supply numeric parameters you’ll see a graph of the average and the sum of that parameter.
If you supply textual parameters you’ll see a breakdown of the most popular values.

As with the rest of your Analytics reports, you can also apply Audience and User Property filters to your custom parameter reports to identify trends among different segments of your userbase.

To start using custom parameter reporting for one of your events, look for it in the detail report for that event. You'll see instructions for setting things up there.

Integration with DoubleClick and third-parties – Now in Beta
We're also pleased to announce a new integration with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Firebase-tracked install (first open) and post-install events can now easily be imported back into DoubleClick as conversions.

This is a boost for app marketers who want a clearer view of the effect their display and video marketing has on customer app behavior. Advertisers can make better decisions (for all kinds of ads, programmatic included) as they integrate app analytics seamlessly with their buying, targeting and optimization choices in DoubleClick.

We also know that some of you use advertising platforms beyond AdWords and DoubleClick, so we continue to invest in integrating more third-party networks into our system. (We're now at 50 networks and growing). The goal: to allow app data from all your networks to come together in Google Analytics, so you can make even better advertising choices using all the data you collect. Learn more.

Real-time analytics for everyone
Google Analytics pioneered real-time reporting, so we know how important it is for our customers to have access to data as it happens. That’s why we’re so excited by the real-time capabilities we’ve introduced into our latest app reports. To refresh an announcement we made in March: StreamView and DebugView are now available to the general public. These features allow you to see how real-world users are interacting and performing with your app right now.

StreamView visualizes events as they flow into our app reporting to give you a sense of how people around the world are using your app, right down to the city level. Then Snapshot lets you zoom-into a randomly selected individual user’s stream of events. And DebugView uses real-time reporting to help you improve your implementation – making it easy for you to make sure you’re measuring what you want how you want. DebugView is a terrific tool for app builders that shows you events, parameters and user properties for any individual development device. It can also highlight any events that contain invalid parameters.

Same product, familiar new name
As mentioned above, we're rebranding Firebase Analytics to make it plain that it's our recommended app analytics solution, and is fully a part of the Google Analytics family.

Our latest reports represent a new approach to app analytics, which we believe better reflects the way that users interact with apps. This means that these reports have different concepts and functionality when compared to the original app analytics reports in Google Analytics.

If you're used to using the original app analytics reports in Google Analytics, don’t worry: they're not going anywhere. But we recommend considering implementing the Firebase SDK with your next app update so you can start getting the latest features for app analytics.

Good data is one thing everyone can agree on: developers and marketers, global firms and fresh new start-ups. We've always been committed to app-centric reports, because analytics and data are the essential beginning to any long-term app strategy. We hope that these new features will give you more of what you need to build a successful future for your own apps.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Google Analytics is Enhancing Support for AMP

May 16, 2017

Over the past year, developers have adopted the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology to build faster-loading pages for all types of sites, ranging from news to recipes to e-commerce. Billions of AMP pages have been published to date and Google Analytics continues its commitment to supporting our customers who have adopted AMP.

However, we have heard feedback from Google Analytics customers around challenges in understanding the full customer journey due to site visitors being identified inconsistently across AMP and non-AMP pages. So we're announcing today that we are rolling out an enhancement that will give you an even more accurate understanding of how people are engaging with your business across AMP and non-AMP pages of your website.

How will this work?
This change brings consistency to users across AMP and non-AMP pages served from your domain. It will have the effect of improving user analysis going forward by unifying your users across the two page formats. It does not affect AMP pages served from the Google AMP Cache or any other AMP cache.

When will this happen?
We expect these improvements to be complete, across all Google Analytics accounts, over the next few weeks.

Are there any other implications of this change?
As we unify your AMP and non-AMP users when they visit your site in the future, you may see changes in your user and session counts, including changes to related metrics. User and session counts will go down over time as we recognize that two formerly distinct IDs are in fact the same user; however, at the time this change commences, the metric New Users may rise temporarily as IDs are reset.

In addition, metrics like time on site, page views per session, and bounce rate will rise consistent with sessions with AMP and non-AMP pageviews no longer being treated as multiple sessions. This is a one-time effect that will continue until all your users who have viewed AMP pages in the past are unified (this can take a short or long period of time depending on how quickly your users return to your site/app).

Is there anything I need to do to get this update?
There is no action required on your part, these changes will be automatically rolled out.

Will there be changes to unify users who view my pages both on my domain and in other contexts?
Some AMP pages are not visited directly on the domain where the content is originally hosted but instead via AMP caches or in platform experiences. However we decided to focus on fixing the publisher domain case first as this was the fastest way we could add value for our clients.

We are committed to ensuring the best quality data for user journey analysis across AMP and non-AMP pages alike and this change makes that easy for AMP pages served on your domain. We hope you enjoy these improvements - and as always, happy analyzing!

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Real-time just got real: Google Analytics 360 offers fresher insight

March 1, 2017

You’ve just launched a website or feature. Your toe is already tapping. Wait, wait, wait — you can hardly wait one hour to see exactly how it’s performing. Sound familiar? If you’ve been there, we have exciting news for you.

Google Analytics 360 can now provide updated insights as quickly as every 10 minutes. We’re proud to give our customers the fastest access to the freshest first party data Google Analytics has ever offered.

What did you just say?!
If you need to know how your sites, microsites, or digital engagements are doing right now, we’ve got you covered. Most first-party data in Analytics 360 can now be collected, processed, and available — via our UI, API, and BigQuery integration (coming soon) — in as fast as 10 minutes. This means you can move faster to:

Fix things when they’re broken
Detect trends and react when things are popular
Understand and take action on the impact of cultural events or social memes

To see how fresh the data is in your report at any time, just look for this icon in the upper right:

When you see this icon, it means you’re looking at today’s data and the report is supported and super fresh. Hover over the icon to see how fresh the data is!

This new level of freshness is only available to Analytics 360 users. To learn more about which reports, views, and properties support fresher data, and the factors affecting data freshness, check out our help center.

Some site owners just can’t wait
Brands and sites in the business of capitalizing on momentary consumer attention are excited about fresher insights. Take the case of publishers and retailers as an example.

Publishers strive to put the richest, most interesting content in front of users at any given point in time. The trick is understanding what’s rich and interesting right now — and that’s a constantly moving target.

Publishers have long referenced our real-time Google Analytics reports to make decisions, but sometimes they’re looking for deeper insight than what is provided in those reports. Fresher insights across additional Google Analytics reports help our publishers make even more informed content decisions, paving the way to better user acquisition, user engagement, and a stronger relationship between content consumer and publisher brand.

Online retailers are in the same boat. When celebrities wear a product or mention a brand on social media, product interest may spike. Retailers may have just minutes to capitalize on purchase intent before it wanes.

When a product’s popularity is on the rise, retailers can react by upping its prominence to capture interest, running focused promotions or recommending related products to expand consideration. With fresh insights available as soon as every 10 minutes, retailers move faster and turn trending interest into sales.

Speed is good, but safety comes first
As you know, Google Analytics has the ability to pull in data from other sources like AdWords and DoubleClick. We refer to these as “integration sources” and these sources operate with additional requirements, like fraud detection, that mean that the data in these reports are exempt from our enhanced freshness capabilities.

For example, any report with Ads data, including a dimension widened by an Ads integration, will continue to be made available within hours. For further details on which reports are supported or not supported, please read the help center article here.

Posted by Breen Baker, on behalf of the Google Analytics team

Making Google Analytics Account Recovery Easier

January 30, 2017

A frequent feature request we receive is to make it easier to recover lost or orphaned accounts. Loss of administrative access can occur, for example, when an account administrator leaves the company without first assigning another administrator. The account continues to collect data, and users with non-administrative access are still able to log in and use the account per their assigned permissions, but the account remains in administrative limbo.

Of course, we hope brands have the right onboarding and offboarding processes in place to ensure this doesn’t occur, but we understand this isn’t always possible. If you lose administrative access to an Analytics account that is linked to an organization, you can have the organization Owner restore that access. Administrative access to Analytics consists of having Manage Users and Edit permission.

If you need to regain administrative access to your Analytics account, contact your organization Owner.

If you are an organization Owner who needs to restore access to an Analytics account:

1. Visit http://360suite.google.com
2. Open Products > Analytics.
3. Select the account to which you want to restore access.
4. In the right pane, under User Management, click ACCESS PRODUCT.

The User Management page for that Analytics account opens.

5. Under Add permissions for, enter the email address for the Google account you want to give administrative access.
6. Select the Manage Users and Edit permissions.
7. Optionally, remove any stale administrators from the account.

Please view our Help Center document on this feature for more information.

This is one of many user and account management improvements we’ve launched; we’re working on more, so stay tuned for future updates.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Google Analytics team

Using the Customer Voice to Speed Up Decision Making

January 10, 2017

Making important business decisions is often a slow process, regardless of industry or company size. In a world where innovation is increasingly important, speed is a necessity. But how does an organization streamline its decision-making process? For many companies, the answer is data. In fact, highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely than others to report significant improvement in decision-making, according to PwC research.¹

When looking for meaningful insights to drive innovation and growth, market research is often a go-to data source. The problem many companies face is that market research can feel like a roadblock because it can take months to get the data.

At Lenovo, the leading PC manufacturer worldwide, constantly evolving and improving products is required to remain competitive. “We have to make decisions today for products two years from now,” says Sarah Kennedy, User Experience Researcher at Lenovo. To keep the decision-making process moving, Sarah’s team uses Google Surveys 360 for fast and accurate data. Bringing consumer insights to the table in the early stages of product development helps her team get buy-in from senior stakeholders at a faster pace. “Within seven days, we can get results that would normally take us a month,” says Sarah.

"We put an emphasis on innovation. Collecting competitive data and industry benchmarks is critical to do this. Surveys 360 helps us get data on the current state of the market. The results are reliable and delivered at the speed we need so our teams can continue developing the best products without delay."

– Corinna Proctor, ‎Director of User & Design Research, Lenovo

See the Lenovo story here.

Google Surveys 360 provides businesses with the data they need quickly, accurately, and affordably. Choose your target audience, write your survey, and get answers in as little as three days. Get started today.

Happy surveying!
¹PwC's Global Data and Analytics Survey, Big Decisions™, Base: 1,135 senior executives, Global, May 2016

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

Data Studio: DoubleClick Campaign Manager Connector

November 30, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reporting!

The Data Studio team

Posted by Alon Gotesman, Google Data Studio team

Explore important insights from your data — automatically

September 2, 2016

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

September 1, 2016

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

September 1, 2016

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.

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

August 25, 2016

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

Spotlight: Smarter Marketing with Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite

April 7, 2016

On the Google Analytics team, we believe a primary goal of analytics is to make your marketing smarter. It should help you understand your customer’s journey, gain and share insights, and create an engaging experience for your audience.

But just as your organization can’t achieve these goals in a silo, neither can your website analytics data. Your customer’s journey includes both their experience with your marketing campaigns as well as their experience on your sites and apps. So you need complete data, connected from marketing through to site experience, to actually gain insight and deliver a great customer experience.

Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, is proud to provide this type of end-to-end understanding with our existing AdWords integrations. Beginning today, we are now offering this same capability with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. In addition to our existing integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager*, you can now view user engagement information for users acquired through DoubleClick Bid Manager* and DoubleClick Search* campaigns directly within Analytics 360. It’s super easy to connect your Analytics 360 account to DoubleClick Digital Marketing and there’s no implementation work needed (e.g. no site or campaign re-tagging).
*Note: Must be a Google Analytics 360 customer to view these links.

With these new capabilities, marketers using Analytics 360 are better able to see the customer journey from when a customer was exposed to their marketing campaigns all the way through to that customer’s eventual purchase on their site (or lack thereof). User engagement with your site can be analyzed for both users who viewed an ad (view-through) and for users who clicked on an ad (click-through). View-through information is especially important for display, video, and mobile because users often view these ads and then visit the website later rather than clicking directly on the ad.

Companies like Panasonic are already using our integrations with marketing media to improve their return on investment (ROI) from digital marketing campaigns. With the Analytics 360 ads integrations, Panasonic was able to aggregate all digital campaign data into one platform to gain insight about their customers. They then shared these insights back to their media tools to better find engaged audiences and provide those audiences with the right experience at the right moment, driving an ROI increase of 30%.

In light of these latest integrations with Google ad technologies, we wanted to take a moment to discuss the two capabilities we enable across all our ads integrations that help you achieve smarter marketing: 1) understanding the customer and their journey and 2) creating relevant experiences for users.

Understanding the customer and their journey

They saw and / or clicked on your ad and arrived on your site. But who are they? What happened next? Did they bounce immediately? Did they research specific products? Did they sign up for your newsletter? What were the users who interacted with your digital marketing doing on your site? Ads integrations with Analytics 360 can help you answer these questions and more, for example:

You are launching a new product and start running display and search advertising campaigns to attract customers. You find that one campaign has a low conversion rate and you’re considering deprecating it. But you review your site analytics data for this campaign and find that some specific ad exchanges and certain keywords are driving many new users to your site. And some of these exchanges and keywords are driving new users who are highly engaged — they view a lot of product detail pages and spend a lot of time on your site. So, instead of shutting down the campaign, you refine the targeting for the ads in this campaign to focus more on the ad exchanges and the keywords that drive engaged new users to your site. Then, you create a remarketing campaign to bring these engaged new users back to your site for purchase.

One of your campaigns drives a lot of click and view-throughs, but has a low conversion rate. Analysis in Analytics 360 reveals that most users bounce immediately, but a certain segment who click on or view that ad (e.g. women aged 18-35) have a really high conversion rate. You refine the messaging and creative in your ads, adjust where these ads are served, and bid higher in order to find and attract more of this high-performing audience.

Creating relevant experiences for users
User behavior on your site can tell you a lot about them and what they’re interested in. Shouldn’t you use that information to inform your marketing strategy? Some examples:

You run a shopping site and have users who spend a lot of time looking at an item or even put that item in their cart, but don’t end up purchasing. At the end of the season, the clothes on your site go on sale. You create remarketing campaigns to these users who showed interest but never purchased letting them know that the item they were interested in is now on sale.

You are a cable company and you’d like to offer your new online streaming HDTV service to existing customers who subscribe to your high speed Internet plan. You create remarketing ads for customers who have the high speed plan, driving higher lifetime value for these customers.

These are just a few examples of how analytics data can blend with campaign data to create real value for both companies and for their customers. It's a win-win — customers get marketing that is truly relevant to them, and companies put their marketing dollars to work with the customers who are most likely to be interested.

Visit the Google Analytics 360 Suite Help Center to learn more about our new integrations with DoubleClick Bid Manager* and DoubleClick Search*. You can also learn about our existing integrations DoubleClick Campaign Manager* and with AdWords. Stay tuned for more updates from Analytics 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities. Happy analyzing!
*Note: Must be a Google Analytics 360 customer to view these links.
Posted by Abhi Aggarwal and Jocelyn Whittenburg, Google Analytics team

Spotlight on Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite

March 30, 2016

The Google Analytics 360 Suite has launched, and we hope you're are as excited as we are about everything it offers. Today we'd like to dive a little deeper into what the Analytics 360 Suite means for the Analytics 360 product specifically.

For those who missed it, Analytics 360 is the new name for Google Analytics Premium, and it's now part of the larger Google Analytics 360 Suite. There are no immediate changes that will impact your use of the product, but a new look and feel consistent with the Google Analytics 360 Suite user experience will roll out in the coming months.

Analytics 360 is the measurement foundation for the Google Analytics 360 Suite, so we're actively investing in deepening its functionality. In particular, we're continuing to build out its capacity to understand the customer journey, deliver intelligent insights, and help you deeply understand your customers and your business. We also want to help you take action on what you learn.

Analytics 360 can be used on its own and will continue to provide all the functionality that our users know and love today. But it can now also be used with the other 360 Suite products that are available for purchase. Let us give you an example of how Analytics 360 and our other 360 Suite products can work together.

Say you find a high-performing segment in Analytics 360 — such as customers who spend 50% more than average. As a marketer, you naturally want to cultivate this audience and find more people like them. Now you can share this segment with Audience Center 360, our data management platform, to learn even more about these customers (e.g. demographics) using 3rd-party and Google data. Then you can build new audiences with the same characteristics and reach them with programmatic ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager and other 3rd-party DSPs.

Now that you're serving tailored, relevant ads to attract this audience, you want to give them the same tailored experience while they’re browsing your site. So you share the same high-performing segment you found in Analytics 360 with Optimize 360, our testing and personalization tool, to deploy personalized content and site experiences that are a perfect fit for those users.

For many advertisers this campaign would be just one of many advertising campaigns marketing is running. Fortunately, because all your performance data flows into Attribution 360, our marketing attribution solution, you can evaluate how the campaign aimed at your high-performing segment is performing relative to all your other marketing. With this broad context, you can optimize your marketing across the board and focus on areas of biggest impact.

With all these insights in hand, you're ready to present a business case to your boss for the material marketing changes you’re recommending. That’s where Data Studio 360, our new data visualization tool, plays an important role. It integrates with data from the 360 Suite products and other sources to help you quickly create beautiful stories and bring to life your strategic recommendations. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with Google Drive, so it continues to up-level workplace productivity, team sharing and collaboration.

As you can see, the customer understanding you gain with Analytics 360 becomes the starting point for sharing insights across your organization and building a more engaging experience for customers. Using Analytics 360 in conjunction with the other 360 Suite products helps you make your analytics insights more impactful to your business.

We’ll be highlighting each of our 360 Suite products in the upcoming weeks. If you’d like to learn more about Analytics 360 specifically, please check out our new solution sheet.
Posted by Jocelyn Whittenburg, Product Marketing Manager

Progressive improves the mobile experience with the Google Analytics 360 Suite

March 16, 2016

What if improved analytics showed you a sales opportunity that you didn't even know you were missing?

As you'll see in this video, that's one of the things Progressive Insurance learned from using Google Analytics 360 Suite. The Progressive team discovered that their mobile app visitors wanted more than just helpful insurance quotes; they wanted to buy on the spot. The company responded by improving the customer experience and giving them exactly what they want — the option to buy insurance. The results have been more than satisfactory.

“We sell insurance, but if you think about it, our product is actually data,” says Pawan Divakarla, Progressive's Data & Analytics Business Leader. “Organizing data is crucial for us.” Perhaps your own company is finding that data management is becoming more important to success in today's multi-screen world? If so, watch the video for more of the Progressive story.

To learn more about the Analytics 360 Suite, visit our website.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford Head of Marketing, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite

March 15, 2016

An enterprise-class solution for a multi-screen world

Our lives are filled with micro-moments: intent-rich moments when we turn to the nearest device to find a store, buy a product or look for answers to all kinds of wants and needs. In these moments, today's consumers decide what to do, where to go, and what to buy.

If you're in marketing or analytics, you know this consumer behavior brings new opportunities to reach your customer in the right moment with the right message. At the same time, it's harder than ever to get a complete view of the consumer journey and then make sense of it all.

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers. It all starts with understanding consumer behavior in the moment — getting the right insights, and then making your brand useful to consumers.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight,” - Pawan Divakarla, Analytics Leader at Progressive.

Modern measurement tools that are simple to use

Sophisticated marketers who use analytics platforms are three times more likely to outperform their peers in achieving revenue goals. It’s no wonder enterprise-class marketers have been telling us they need more from their marketing analytics tools. Many toolsets can't cope: They're too hard to use, lack sufficient collaboration capabilities, are poorly integrated, and require hard-to-find expertise.

Several years ago, Google engineers set out to simplify marketing analytics in the same way we simplified web search with Google.com. With infrastructure that allows us to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — we set out to give enterprise marketers the same utility.

As we built the system, enterprise marketers shared what they needed with us:

See the complete customer journey. Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels.

Useful insights, not just more data. Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.

Enable better sharing within your organization. Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.

Deliver engaging experiences to the right people. Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.

The Google Analytics 360 Suite is built to address these needs. Its powerful set products are unified, providing a consistent user experience and cross product data integrations, plus services. Simply put: it’s a complete measurement platform.

“Using the integrations in the Google Analytics 360 Suite, we are able to manage everything in one seamless platform,”- Khoi Truong, Director of Analytics and Media at L'Oréal Canada.

Loaded with six products, four of which are brand-new, the Google Analytics 360 Suite offers easy-to-use tools that enable sharing of data and insights throughout an organization.

Google Audience Center 360 (beta). This powerful data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it's open to third party data providers, DSPs and more.

Google Optimize 360 (beta). This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.

Google Data Studio 360 (beta). A new data analysis and visualization product that integrates data across all suite products and other data sources ― turning it into beautiful, interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.

Google Tag Manager 360. Built from our industry-leading tag management product, it empowers enterprise 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.

Google Analytics 360, formerly known as GA Premium, will roll out exciting new capabilities throughout the next couple of months as investments continue to grow. It will serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touch-points and integrating with our ad products to drive marketing effectiveness.

Google Attribution 360, formerly known as Adometry, has been rebuilt from the ground up to help advertisers value marketing investments and allocate budgets with confidence. Marketers can analyze performance across all channels, devices, and systems to achieve their most effective marketing mix.

Achieve more with your Google media

The Google Analytics 360 Suite offers integrations with many third party data providers and platforms. It also plugs right into Google AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketing, our core ad technology. That means marketers can turn analytics into action by combining their own data from multiple sources ― website data, audience data, and customer data (e.g. CRM) and more ― and using it to make ads more relevant for people.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite has a native integration with DoubleClick — that’s a game-changer. Now I can personalize my media based on website user behaviors, such as what they purchase,” - Khoi Truong, Director of Media and Data Optimization at L’Oreal Canada.

When will the Google Analytics 360 Suite launch?

The new products -- Audience Center 360, Optimize 360, Data Studio 360, and Tag Manager 360 -- are available today in limited BETA. If you're a Google Analytics Premium or Adometry customer, you will see the products renamed in the coming months, and we'll let you know when you're eligible to join the new betas.

This is just the beginning of our ongoing innovation in enterprise marketing analytics -- we can’t wait to share more. In the meantime, visit our website for more details or hear from directly from our customers below.

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the capabilities and benefits of all the new products on the newly refreshed and renamed Google Analytics Solutions blog, and on our Google+ and Twitter pages. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by, Paul Muret, Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products, Google

¹Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Results
*Launching March 15, 2016

Engagement Jumps 30% for Wyndham Vacation Rentals With Help from Google Analytics Premium

November 24, 2015

Wyndham Vacation Rentals runs 9,000 North American rental properties from the mountains of Utah to the beaches of South Carolina. As you can imagine, that many guests and destinations creates some interesting challenges for Wyndham's online booking system.

They turned to Google Analytics Premium and Google Tag Manager for help, and we've just published a new case study showing the results. (Spoiler alert: property search CTRs are up by 30%.)

Wyndham did some very clever things with both tools. For instance, they used Google Tag Manager to implement Google Analytics Premium Custom Dimensions to capture user behavior around metrics like rental dates and length of stay. Then they used Google Analytics Premium to dig into the details and gather insights. That's how they learned that, while a "good view" is one of the top things customers included in searches, the scenic view attribute actually had a lower conversion rate than other features offered in their suites.

As a result, Wyndham redesigned its search results to put the properties with the most profitable mix of attributes on the first page. The Wyndham team also learned how far in advance people begin searching for various vacations, and have adjusted their campaigns and spending to match the peaks in demand.

With changes like these, Wyndham's customers are maintaining more interest through all stages of the funnel. Wyndham says its property search CTR has skyrocketed by more than 30%. Here's what Nadir Ali, their Director of eCommerce Analytics, has to say about this success:

“Google Analytics Premium is helping us connect the dots. As a data-driven organization, we strive to approach each business challenge objectively and back our assumptions with data. Google Analytics Premium gives us the flexibility to customize the data we collect in a manner that makes it easy to answer our business questions.”

We're always happy to see the creative ways partners use Google Analytics Premium and tools like Google Tag Manager. Congrats to Wyndham on some excellent (and ongoing) results.

See the Wyndham Vacation Rentals case study

Posted by Rachel Reader, Google Analytics Marketing

Progressive Builds a Better Mobile App with Google Analytics Premium

November 17, 2015

You've probably seen Progressive Insurance's terrific commercials with Flo the enthusiastic cashier. But have you seen their terrific new mobile app?

It's a story of perseverance. Their full site at Progressive.com has been rated as America's best insurance carrier website for more than a decade.¹ But a few years back, as consumers shifted to mobile, the company realized it needed to make a whole new push to build a mobile app that matched its customers' changing behavior. They had a mobile app—they just didn't have a great mobile app.

Progressive recognized to get started, they'd need sophisticated analytics to really understand what their customers wanted most from a mobile experience. They turned to Google Analytics Premium, in combination with other Google measurement tools, for the solution. Features like Custom Reports, Custom Dimensions and the integration with BigQuery let them streamline the app testing process, spot the root causes of app crashes, and simplify user logins.

“The Google Analytics Premium user interface lets us easily understand the consumer experience on apps. Both our IT and Business organizations rely on this data.” — Kaitlin Marvin, Digital Analytics Architect, Progressive Insurance

Google Analytics Premium helped Progressive move fast. Their team lowered app testing time by 20% and boosted successful customer logins by 30%. The result is a mobile app that may not be quite as famous as Flo, but continues the best-in-class tradition that keeps Progressive customers happy and loyal.

See how they did it: read the full Progressive case study.

¹Progressive Insurance, "Keynote Recognizes Progressive Insurance for the 24th Time as Premiere Insurance Carrier Website," March 17, 2015.

Posted by Rachel Reader, Google Analytics Marketing

L'Oréal Canada finds beauty in programmatic buying

July 29, 2015

Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

While global sales of L'Oréal Luxe makeup brand Shu Uemura were booming, reaching its target audience across North America proved challenging. By collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld (and his cat, Choupette) and using DoubleClick Bid Manager and Google Analytics Premium, the campaign delivered nearly double the anticipated revenue.


Goals	Re-introduce and raise awareness of the Shu Uemura cosmetics brand in North America Drive North American sales of Karl Lagerfeld’s Shupette collection for Shu Uemura Grow the Shu Uemura email subscriber list

Approach	Organized website audiences with Google Analytics Premium Used programmatic buying to lead prospects down the path to purchase Leveraged a range of audience data in DoubleClick Bid Manager to buy paid media in display and social channels

Results	Drove almost 2X the anticipated revenue Exceeded CPA targets and achieved a 2,200% return on ad spend (ROAS) Increased web traffic and email subscribers

To learn more about Shu Uemura’s approach, check out the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Google Analytics Solutions - new product innovations.