The following was originally posted to the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog. 

Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick 

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

As complexity increases in the app ecosystem, successful developers are looking for new ways to measure, manage, and optimize across multiple ad networks and operating systems.  This morning, at our annual I/O conference, we announced via Livestream a new set of media partnerships and ads offerings designed to meet the unique needs of mobile app marketers.  

Transparent, open and reliable measurement solutions

For app developers looking to drive installs and engagement, it’s critical to understand the effectiveness of various media partners and placements. That’s why we have been investing in solutions to help developers apply consistent measures across a fragmented ecosystem of ad networks, and understand the quality of users that each delivers.  

Google Analytics for Apps provides an industry-leading solution for in-app analytics that is increasingly benefiting advertisers as they seek more transparency into ad effectiveness across networks.  You can already use Google Analytics to track the performance of your mobile app install campaigns and understand the lifetime value of your users on both Android and iOS. As of today, we’ve built partnerships with 20+ ad networks including InMobi and Millennial Media since launching iOS conversion tracking late last year. Data integration with these partners provides a comprehensive view of app value across networks based on the metrics developers care about (i.e., LTV and retention), helping you make better decisions on where to spend your advertising dollars. In the next few months, you’ll be able to “postback” your conversions to referring networks in order to optimize your traffic -- all made possible with a single SDK. 

And it's not just about our measurement solutions.  We recognize that developers should have choices when it comes to attribution vendors, and are committed to open solutions for the industry.  That’s why we also announced the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into AdWords. Working with third parties, including Adjust, Appsflyer, Apsalar, Kochava, and Tune, we are able to increase measurement accuracy between different trackers in AdWords, ensuring your data is accurate and  reliable.

By partnering with these leading ad platforms and tracking systems, we believe we can make the entire mobile apps ecosystem stronger and more connected -- all with the goal of making developers more successful.

But we didn’t stop there. 

It’s easier than ever to promote your apps across Google 

For developers looking to promote their app, we offer a variety of placements across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, and YouTube.  And earlier this year, we announced Search Ads on Google Play. By showing ads alongside app search results, you can reach consumers right when they’re looking for a new app, at the moment they are ready to install. 

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Today we announced Universal App Campaigns, a new campaign type that allows advertisers to reach consumers across Google media more efficiently and effectively.  Universal App Campaigns offers a simple way to set up install ads for your Android apps in AdWords or directly from the Google Play Developer Console. 

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With a single campaign, you can scale your reach across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, YouTube and Google Play. Just provide us with a few inputs about your app — what your ad creative will say, the audience you wish to reach, and how much you want to spend — we’ll do the rest for you. Behind the scenes, our ad creation and bidding engines will help maximize performance for your campaigns so you can spend more time building and enhancing your apps.  Search Ads on Google Play and Universal App Campaigns will be rolled out to developers and advertisers in the coming months.

Complete solutions for your entire business

Today at I/O we also announced solutions to help you develop apps, engage users organically, and earn more money from your app.  Our innovations in analytics and ads are designed to complement these offerings, and allow you to grow your business with measurement solutions that are open and reliable, and promotion tools that make ad buying easier and more effective.  Thank you to all the developers out there who are building these experiences. We look forward to engaging with your apps and supporting your ongoing innovation by working closely with you and your partners in the ecosystem.

Posted by: Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management

Successful developers understand that in order to have a popular app, focusing on retaining a loyal user base is just as important as driving new installs. Today at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, we introduced new reports that will help you measure how to do this in two meaningful ways. We’re happy to announce that Mobile App Analytics will now let you understand how users come back to your app day after day, and provide the rich insights you need in order to measure their value over time. Let’s take a look at how these new reports can help make your app a hit.

Active Users

The active user report displays your 1-day, 7-day, 14-day and 30-day trailing active users next to each other in one, easy-to-view dashboard. The new overview gives immediate insights into how users interact with your app over time, along with dropoff rate comparisons. With this report, an app download is only the beginning of a potentially valuable relationship with your new users.

Benchmark active users at 1-7-14-30 days by selecting the segments you want. (Click to enlarge image)

While these metrics help you monitor your active user trends, when put into context they can answer important questions about your user acquisition strategies. For example, if you are investing in different campaigns, you can compare the cost of retaining users acquired via paid traffic versus organic to understand if you are attracting the right type of users. Not only can you measure your cost effectiveness, but you can also continue to monitor whether or not the users you paid for are still coming back after the campaign is over. This is particularly important when trying to keep your loyal user base engaged and happy with your app.

Lior Romano, Founder and CEO of Gentoo Labs (the makers of  Contacts+ for iOS and Android), was one of the first customers to try out this new report during our beta test period. He found the Active Users report especially useful when managing and organizing all their information at-a-glance: “We love the new Google Analytics Active Users feature -- it's a real time-saver! We get a quick overview of the 1/7/14/30-day active user trends side by side in a snap, which helps us to easily track our main metrics.”

Cohort Analysis

After learning how many users have opened your app, the next step in driving engagement is understanding when they come back. Cohort Analysis is a user analysis technique that allows you to analyze and compare your users by looking at their customer journey. Using Cohort Analysis, you can see when users are coming back to your app and their behavior over time after the day of the first session, and lets you further filter the information by day, week or month. We’ve also added the ability to compare different segments of users based on the day of the first install. 

In order to validate your user acquisition strategies, Cohort analysis lets you compare different periods or campaigns. For example, you can compare different weeks or months to measure the retention effectiveness of a single channel to see if you continue to attract valuable users throughout a campaign. The flexibility of the report also allows you to see how much time users are spending in an app as they come back day after day. With these valuable insights, Mobile App Analytics users can tailor their acquisition campaigns or app experience, just as our partner E-Nor did: “Cohort analysis in GA made it easy for E-Nor to gauge the effectiveness of lead nurturing efforts during an app free-trial promotion campaign. The analysis clearly showed that many users responded well to email and in-app reminders, resulting in over 50% retention between the 3rd and 5th day post sign-up as opposed to 30% in the first and 2nd day.”

See at a glimpse when users are coming back to your app. (Click to enlarge image)

Lifetime Value

Analyzing retention is a great way to ensure users stick with your app and come back day after day. With Lifetime Value reporting, you’ll get a full picture of these users’ value over time. To get the most out of this report, it’s important to start with a clear definition of what a user’s value means to you based on your business objectives. Once you’ve defined the value, you can access the report to measure certain variables such as revenue per user and number of screen views per user over a period of 90 days. For example, if the goal of your app is to get users to purchase virtual or material goods, you’ll want to use this report to get a clear view of when they make a purchase and how much they are spending in your app over time.

Lifetime Value is a key metric to use to measure the effectiveness of your acquisition campaigns. If your cost to acquire a new user is higher than the average value over time, you might want to optimize your campaigns to meet the lifetime revenue they generate. Lifetime Value is particularly valuable if you offer in-app purchases, but it can be applied to discovering many other useful insights, such as number of times they open your app, total number of screens and goal completions.

Session duration per users compared to goal completion over a 60 day window. (Click to enlarge image)

How to get started

Cohort Analysis report can be found under the ‘Audience’ section in your Google Analytics account, and is now available in beta. Lifetime Value and Active Users reports are coming soon to all Analytics accounts.

To get started login into your Analytics account and look for the new reports under the Audience section. 

Posted by Gene Chan and Rahul Oak on behalf of the Google Analytics Team

Cross-posted on the Inside AdMob Blog 

Since March 2014, Google Analytics has been fully available in AdMob, and now app developers are increasingly seeing results by combining data from both platforms. Here’s one story that illustrates the power of AdMob and Google Analytics together.

Passion for languages and learning

Jason Byrne, and business partner Robert Diem, are passionate about making a difference in education. They came together during their time as professors in Japan to found Eltsoft LLC, a company that builds mobile language learning apps for iOS and Android. Together, they started creating a series of fun tools  that allow users to study whenever they want, wherever they are.

Global expansion

Their most popular app is English Grammar, which has been downloaded by more than a million people looking to sharpen their English-language skills in nearly 120 countries.

All of the company’s apps are available for free or as paid versions. To increase revenue, they chose AdMob to earn money from the free versions of their apps with advertising. “AdMob monetization is central to our success because it delivers high-quality, appropriate ads to our audience in their native languages, wherever they live,” says Jason. 

The Google Analytics data within AdMob helped them understand more about their users. "Our app, English Grammar, has users from all around the world, so we turned to data from Google Analytics and AdMob to understand which languages we should consider for localization. For example, we knew we had to prioritize German and French, but we discovered other languages that we didn't expect, such as Russian and Japanese."

A data-driven approach to marketing 

Eltsoft uses data to focus their marketing campaigns and assess where to use their resources most effectively. “Google Analytics keeps making campaign analysis simpler and clearer,” Jason says. “Data from various sources - Google Analytics and Google Play, for instance - are now all in one place. That helps me understand what’s happening with our ad campaigns.” 

While data analysis helped Eltsoft validate some of their hypotheses, it also uncovered opportunities according to Jason: “The greatest takeaway for me is that the results are never really what I expect. I am often surprised. Analytics has given us great insights into who our users are, and has provided a very important lesson in the value of surveying our user base. Our simple assumptions are often inaccurate.”

Replicating successful strategies

Eltsoft has developed a way to calculate the value of users by using a combination of AdMob metrics (like ad request values) and Analytics metrics (like user counts and sessions per user). Having Google Analytics in AdMob has unlocked such analysis because the data is available in the same interface.

As a result, Eltsoft can now understand what works best for their users. “For example, we’ve made changes to our apps, and Analytics has really helped us to track the effectiveness of those changes. I would say six months ago, that our success was a mystery. The data said we were doing well, but the whys were not clear. Therefore, we couldn’t replicate or push forward. But today, we understand what’s happening and can project our future success. We have not only the data, but can control certain variables allowing us to understand that data.”

“Google Analytics data is literally a goldmine,” says Jason.

If you want to learn more about how Eltsoft is using Google Analytics and AdMob, download the full case study. 

Want to learn how to get the most from Analytics in AdMob? Sign up for our free online course, Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals.

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

If you use AdMob or other mobile ad networks to drive installs of iOS apps, here's some good news: iOS install tracking is coming as a Public Beta in a few weeks to all Google Analytics accounts. This detailed view of iOS install campaigns will be available right in your Google Analytics interface.

Optimize your iOS install marketing programs

Install metrics are a useful way to measure your marketing campaign performance. However, not all marketing efforts create the same volume and quality of users. With these new reports, you'll see how one source performs compared to another, so you can optimize your marketing spend. You can even dive deeper into the same marketing channel to see how one campaign or ad is performing compared to another. 

For instance: If users coming from source X tend to use your app once and abandon it, while users from source Y tend to use it for eight months and generate $68 each in value, you'll know. And with Google Analytics' powerful segmentation, you can combine post-download metrics with your acquisition channels across all Google Analytics reports, to make even better decisions for your marketing programs.

New iOS install tracking report (click image for full-size).

Beyond the install

Google Analytics Certified partner InfoTrust is already finding that the feature helps them measure and optimize install campaign performance.

"Many of our customers have mobile apps that generate more traffic and engagement than their desktop properties. Their goals are to bring users back to the app consistently and drive more engagement through more relevant articles and products, and increasing subscriptions or purchases. Seeing which marketing campaigns drive iOS users to app installs, and what users do after the install, is critical when determining where to use marketing spend."

Amin Shawki, Analytics Manager 

InfoTrust, LLC

Mobile ad networks integrated with the new reporting include Aarki, AdMob, AppLovin, Millennial Media, MdotM, Taptica and Tapjoy, with more to come soon. These iOS integrations join our existing Android campaign measurement tools.

Getting started

Learn more and get started easily with this step-by-step guide.

We hope this iOS integration helps you make even better choices for your business and for your customers. Happy mobile analyzing!

Posted by Rahul Oak, Product Manager, Google Analytics for Apps

So you’ve built an app? Awesome! But how are you tracking success? Does anyone know about your app? Do you have a good monetization plan? 

Today we’re excited to officially announce our newest Analytics Academy course, Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals, designed to help you answer these questions and more. 

Whether you’re an app developer or an experienced marketer in the mobile app space, knowing the fundamentals of mobile app measurement can help you improve your app marketing and monetization efforts. In this course, you’ll learn how to identify your most valuable users, how to find more of them, and how to tailor your monetization experience for different groups of users.

How it works

In this free online course, instructor Fontaine Foxworth will lead you through a series of conceptual training videos and interactive exercises to teach you about Mobile App Analytics. Throughout the course, she’ll use an example online gaming app called Go Fish!, which will demonstrate common Analytics use cases and help you apply what you learn to your own mobile app. 

After the course opens, you’ll have four weeks to earn a certificate of completion while working alongside a worldwide community of Analytics enthusiasts. In total, the course should take between two to four hours to complete.

Ready to sign up? Register now and join us when the course begins on Tuesday, November 18th.

We look forward to your participation in the course!

Post By: Christina Macholan & The Google Analytics Education Team

Good news for mobile app developers: Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting and Remarketing are now available for apps in Google Analytics.  Just one of the improvements for audience segmentation and remarketing we're announcing today, these changes should make it even easier for all our advertisers to reach their high-value customer segments. 

In-App Audience Demographics Reporting and Remarketing

Good analytics are especially important to app developers. At Google I/O, Hovhannes Avoyan, the CEO and Founder of PicsArt , had this to say: 

“We need analytics to help us understand who our users are, how they interact with our application, how our application performs. With all that knowledge, we want to apply different monetization strategies to different kinds of users.” 

Now developers can see just how different user segments engage and monetize with In-App Audience Demographics Reporting. 

And it's more than just data. Analysts and developers can blend audience demographic and behavior data into detailed audience lists to be targeted with in app remarketing campaigns. In short, all the great remarketing capabilities for Google Analytics users on the web are now available for apps as well.

New In-App Audience Demographics Reporting

Segmentation and remarketing lists get an upgrade

Creating remarketing lists for apps and web is now even easier with recent upgrades to both segmentation and audience building. A streamlined creation flow for creating audiences allows users to go from segment to audience within clicks (plus a few bonus admin features like list renaming and automatic list sizing).

New Audience Builder Experience, now supporting App lists

If you prefer to stand on the shoulders of remarketing giants, Analytics power users have developed and shared audience definitions that import via template links or from the solutions gallery. This simplifies things dramatically for new users. A process that could be complicated and time-consuming can now be done with 6 clicks in under 1 minute. Give it a try: import our Engagement Pack of Core Remarketing Lists.

On the segmentation side, users have told us they wanted segments to be more discoverable, easier to manage, and more intuitive to build. We've been listening, and have made interface improvements, adding a simple “Add Segment” button within reports, a new segment-selection interface, hover-over segment definitions, and a 1-click action dialogue to Share, Edit, Copy, Remove, or Remarket to a segment. 

New Segmentation Experience: fewer errors for better analysis

Measure remarketing performance with the new Display Targeting report

Once you’ve found a segment, created an audience, and activated your remarketing campaign, close the loop by measuring the performance of those audiences across all remarketing campaigns . Enter the new Adwords Display Targeting report in the Acquisition section to see all your active remarketing lists, along with impressions, spend, behavior, and conversion rates under the “Interests and Remarketing” tab.

New Remarketing List Performance in Display Targeting Report

You can learn how to update your SDK to enable these features in our Help Center or get started now by creating some remarketing lists. We hope that these improvements make your audience segmentation and remarketing-- in apps and on the web-- more intuitive and more effective. We’d love to hear from you! Please leave questions or feedback in the comments, and stay tuned for more audience-related improvements. 

Posted by Dan Stone, Product Manager, and Kanu Singhal, Technical Lead from the Google Analytics Audience Team

Today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco we will be announcing two key launches powered by Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. You can follow the livestream today at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM UTC) with the Google Analytics sessions from 2:30PM PDT.

Announcement #1: Bringing the power of Google Analytics to AdMob
We’re happy to announce that Google Analytics is fully available in the AdMob interface on a new Analyze tab. App developers now have a one-stop way to measure success and adjust their earning strategies based on what they learn.

Today’s app developers have to make decisions quickly and implement them seamlessly if they want to stay relevant. It also helps if every business decision is backed up and validated by reliable data. Until now, app developers using AdMob and Google Analytics had to use two separate tools to monetize and measure. Starting today, they’re now in one place.

More than just Google Analytics inside AdMob
The new tab is simpler, yes. But app businesses can also now make decisions faster without losing data accuracy. They’ll also benefit from a new set of features that make measurement the foundation of all monetization programs:

• drop down menu to switch between individual apps reports
• new home page with combined Google Analytics and AdMob reporting
• new Analyze tab with all Google Analytics reports

To see the new feature in action, sign in to your AdMob account and look for the Analyze tab at the top of the page. 

click to enlarge

Your new home tab in AdMob will now incorporate data on how your app is monetizing as well as how it is performing overall with insights on in app purchase, traffic and ads metrics in your app: all in one tab - a unique feature just in Admob.

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Get started in one click with Google Analytics and AdMob 

1. Login or open a new account on AdMob and sign up for Google Analytics (GA) in the new Analyze tab. 

2. If you are already using Google Analytics for your apps, you can link your existing account with AdMob in the Analyze tab. 

3. If you are not using Google Analytics, you can sign up via AdMob and complete the process without leaving the interface.

Announcement #2: New Content Experiments with Google Tag Manager

People have a lot of choice when it comes to apps and keeping them engaged is a challenge. Businesses who experiment with different app layouts have a higher chance to find the best performing solution and keep users engaged. A few months ago we announced Google Tag Manager for apps, today we are enabling content experiments: an easy way to set up and run experiments to change anything from in-app promotions to menu layout. With Google Tag Manager you can modify app configuration for existing users without having to ship a new version.

But how can we always be sure that we are changing it for the best? Wouldn’t it better if you could validate business decisions with data? Now you can run content experiments on a subset of your users to choose the best option - where to show promotions? How often? Data in Google Analytics will answer your questions and you can now be sure your decisions will be backed by data.

Google Tag Manager has been built to be very intuitive, even for people not familiar with coding. Businesses can now let their marketers or business analysts run experiments without requiring a developer to be involved. App experiments are now accessible to everyone.

click to enlarge

Getting started with Google Tag Manager

1. Sign up for an account at www.google.com/tagmanager and create a mobile container
2. Download the SDK for either Android or iOS. 
3. Start programming! Use the SDK to instrument configuration and events you care about in your app.
4. When you’re ready to dynamically change your app, use the Google Tag Manager interface to start configuring. Remember to press the “Publish” button to push your rules and configurations to your users.

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps and Google Tag Manager

The following was originally posted on the Inside AdWords blog.

When you log in to AdWords Express today, you’ll notice that it’s now easier to find the information that’s important to you, whether you’re on your phone, tablet or laptop. After gathering feedback from AdWords Express users, we’ve redesigned the dashboard with ad performance stats front and center.

See how many views, clicks and calls your ad has received from customers on different devices 

Check your ad’s performance on the go

It’s easy to manage your advertising, even when you’re away from the office. For example, to check how many customers have seen your ad from their tablet (while using your own phone) just look under the “Views” graph.

Check your ad’s performance on the go

Go beyond the click with Google Analytics

Now you can see more details about how users interact with your website after clicking your ad by linking your Google Analytics and AdWords Express accounts. Once you connect your accounts, you’ll see a new card on the AdWords Express dashboard (as well as in your Analytics account). 

Google Analytics information in AdWords Express

To learn how to link Analytics and AdWords Express, visit the help center.

If you have additional feedback on this new design, please let us know. And if you haven’t yet started using AdWords Express, you can sign up today. 

Posted by Francisco Uribe, Product Manager

Today we’re happy to announce a deeper integration between AdWords and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps that will help advertisers make faster and better decisions about marketing their apps.

To put it simply: link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts and enable auto-tagging, and you’ll start receiving a new set of detailed reports on things like day parts, destination URLs and keyword positions. These automatic reports show exactly how your search and display campaigns are performing and offer rich insights into the kind of users they’re driving to Google Play. 

Any user of both AdWords and Google Analytics can have this set of reports by just enabling auto-tagging. We handle the rest, so you can focus on optimizing rather than manually tagging AdWords campaigns.

These new reports can be found under the Acquisition menu for Google Analytics App Views. They’ll become visible to everyone over the next few days.

Insights for display & search campaigns

These new reports cover both display and search campaigns. You can: 

• Check the Campaigns report to better understand users being driven into your app, and see how they use your app. 
• Find out from the Day Parts report when users are interacting with your campaigns.
• Use Search reports to find out which keywords and search queries are acquiring the most new users.

Click image for full-sized version

A step towards measuring lifetime value of your customers

Ad campaigns should help you find the best customers. These new reports go a long way towards identifying them. Whether you track in-app revenue or specific goal conversions, you’ll be able to tie user quality to the campaign that brought them to your app.

One of our early Beta testers was Nubee, a Singapore-based game development studio. They shared their experience with us:

"We were satisfied that we could track which keywords attributed to sales. Using this data, we were also able to modify the download page." - Shizuka Watanbe, Head of PR, Nubee

We hope you’ll find these new reports useful. You can get them running by linking accounts and enabling auto-tagging today.

Posted by Rahul Oak, Product Manager, Google Analytics for Apps

It wasn’t too long ago that we launched events and conversions in Google Analytics Real-Time reports. We’ve heard from many of you who are using Real-Time reporting to test changes to your site, create dashboards to monitor your traffic and goals, or make rapid decisions about what content to promote today.   

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Real-Time events and conversions reports will be coming out of Beta to all users over the next few weeks. Based on your feedback, we’ve refined these reports to make them even more valuable:  you’ll soon see them in App profiles, and we’ve also added dedicated metrics for Unique Visitors.  

Events and Conversions in App Profiles

Once the development is done, launching a new version of your app is always a bit nerve-wracking. So many problems can happen at that stage, and most of the channels for finding out that things went wrong aren’t very helpful for helping you know how your whole user base is seeing things. Wouldn’t you like to know what your users are experiencing, not just what your servers or social media are telling you? With event tracking in real-time, you can use event labels and values to measure interactions at your users’ devices, so you can best understand and respond to what users are seeing in the wild.

(Click image for full-sized version)

Perhaps your latest release adds some new social features, and you want to maximize the number of people sharing content. You can add an event to a small interaction, or a view snippet to a dedicated dialog screen. Once you’ve done that, create a goal based on that interaction, and see it show up in real-time as users help spread the word.

Unique Visitors for Events and Conversions

Google Analytics users are a creative bunch, and use events and conversions for an incredibly wide variety of things - from caffeine to detailed web interactions. We’re always doing our best to help you understand your users better, which is why we’ve added Active Visitors metrics to the Real-Time Events and Conversions reports. Sharing a link or staying on a page for several minutes is great, but it’d be even better to be able to understand what percentage of your users hit a certain event or reach a particular goal in real time.  

When you create a new advertising campaign, blog post, or social media engagement, your traffic usually goes up - but without a knowledge of how individual users behave, it’s difficult to see the quality of your traffic as it changes. By looking at Active Visitor Conversions in real-time, you can better understand your conversion funnel as it’s happening: whether users are just browsing, or whether they’re actively engaging and converting.  

We hope you find the new reports valuable! We’d love to hear how you use them - let us know in the comments. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Jon Mesh, Google Analytics team

Here's some great news from Google’s search team: In-app content is now becoming visible in Google search. Starting today, users on Android devices can jump straight from Google search results to pages inside an app.

For Google Analytics for mobile apps users, this opens up a new world of insights into areas like revenues, engagement and overall app usage.

We've reposted the original blog post below. And if you haven't already, try Google Analytics for mobile apps for powerful insights into how users engage with your app.

There are many reasons to build or not to build a mobile app as part of your broader mobile strategy. For instance, while apps offer a rich user experience, users can’t access them through Google Search like they do websites. Today, we’re announcing a new Google Search capability, app indexing, that will start to make apps more accessible through Google on Android.

Let’s say that a user is searching for a movie. With app indexing, Google will begin to include deep links to apps in Android search results. When the user taps on the “Open in app” deep links, the app opens up directly to the movie in question.

In this example, in order for the app deep links to appear in search results,

• The Flixster app supports deep linking
• The Rotten Tomatoes website has specified that the Flixster app page is an alternate for the web page
• Google has indexed the Flixster app to determine relevance
• The user has installed the Flixster app

The end result is that users will have a seamless search experience when accessing your app content through Google.

Google is currently testing app indexing with an initial group of developers including AllTheCooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy,Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDb, moviefone, newegg, OpenTable, Trulia, and Wikipedia. Deep links for these applications will start to appear in Google search results on Android, in the US, in a few weeks.

How to get started

If you are interested in enabling indexing for your Android app, you can learn more about our developer guidelines at developers.google.com/app-indexing and sign up. We are expanding our app indexing efforts and will gradually include more developers over time.

Posted by Chaesang Jung, Software Engineer

We recently re-imagined in-app analytics from the ground up, speaking the language that matters to app developers and marketers. Since launch, the insights provided by Google Analytics for Mobile Apps are already helping hundreds of thousands of app developers and marketers create more successful Android and iOS apps and experiences by measuring metrics at all stages: acquisition, behavior and conversions. 

As a follow-up from this week’s Summit, today we’re excited to announce that the integration between Google Analytics and Google Play, previewed at I/O 2013, is now available to all users! This is especially exciting for app developers and marketers because it’s the first time - and only way - to get a holistic view of the Play acquisition funnel in one easy to understand report.

The data sources you’ll be able to see include:

Google Play traffic sources: discover how marketing campaigns and search are driving installs and new users. The Google Play Referral Flow will help you refine your app marketing mix in order to focus on those campaigns and programs which are working to bring the highest quality traffic. 

Views on Google Play: understand how your app is being viewed on Google Play as the result of campaigns and search. Your description, screenshots and other content are what’s going to drive new users to install.

Installs: installs shows the number of users for each referral who actually clicked the install link for your app on Google Play. Comparing installs to views for each referral shows you if your app description and screenshots are leading to conversions. Highlight through each source further up the funnel and determine which are successful at driving downloads. 

New users: beyond installs, new users shows you how many active users actually launch your application after it’s installed. This is a key metric to see even beyond installs, reported from the Google Analytics Services SDK. Tracing the path up the funnel shows you clearly which sources don’t just account for those installing your app, but which lead to passionate users who spend time with your app leading to in-app conversions

As these reports are using flow visualization, you can also select any path you wish to analyze further which will highlight that path and present useful data points along the funnel such as drop off rate. 

To start using the Google Play Referral Flow Report, you need to simply link your Google Analytics Property to your Android app in Google Play. Linking to your app takes only seconds. 

The collaboration between Google Analytics and Google Play doesn’t end there! By linking your Analytics property to your Android app, key Google Analytics engagement metrics from your default profile will now appear inside the Google Play Developer Console. This two-way integration gives you instant access to the in-store and in-app metrics of record in whichever Google product you use. Read more on the Android Developers Blog.

These powerful new features from Google Analytics and Google Play take mobile app analytics to the next level.   

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

At Google, we want to build tools that help you stay connected no matter where you are. Whether you’re in the boardroom, at a live event, or even during a day at the beach: having access to Analytics at your fingertips is important. That’s why we previously launched an Android app for Google Analytics that we’re excited has been downloaded more than 700,000 times to date.

We’ve been listening to your feedback and hear you loud and clear: the Google Analytics Android app should do more. So today we are pleased to announce the launch the latest version of the Google Analytics App for Android devices.

Visit Google Play to download and install the app to keep up with your data anytime, anywhere. Like what you see in the new version? Review it in Google Play!

We’ve added more reporting tools and enhanced the functionality of this version, so you have a first-class Google Analytics experience on every device. What’s new, specifically?

• A completely redesigned look and feel, ideal for tablets and phones
• New visualizations that automatically resize to fit your screen size and orientation 
• Side navigation that mirrors Google Analytics on the web for quick access to reports
• Specialized reporting for web and app views (profiles)
• An Overview screen summarizing key metrics from each report 
• Deeper analysis via dimension-based drill down in most reports
• Better Real-Time reporting
• Advanced Segments to further analyze your data

See an overview of your important metrics on one screen

Bringing the robust features of GA on the web to your fingertips

With the Google Analytics App, you can access all of your data - for both web and app reporting views (profiles) - so you can keep track of all of your important data with reports that are optimized for whatever device you’re using, ensuring a beautiful and intuitive experience. 

We’re also introducing new visualizations designed with tablets and phones in mind. Rather than getting overwhelmed with too much information on a small screen, you now see just the most relevant metrics on cards, so you decide when you want to drill-down for details or just get a quick update on your performance. 

We built our app using Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps. As a result, it’s highly configurable and we can add new reports, change navigation, update visualizations all without having to update the app.  We’ve made several improvements to the app based on your feedback and have more planned, so please keep it coming. Learn more about how you can make your own apps highly configurable with GTM.

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Mobile Apps pose a unique set of challenges for marketers and developers. On the web, you can iterate on content and features in near-real-time and deploy conversion tracking, Remarketing, analytics and other tags to measure the effects on your users. Apps, on the other hand, are effectively frozen at the point of user install. Making even the slightest change means waiting until your next update makes its way through the various app stores and even then, you can’t be sure that all of your users will update quickly, if at all.

The surprisingly static nature of Mobile Apps creates significant problems. Forget to add an event to a key button press? Tough! Need to add conversion tracking for a last minute campaign? Too bad! Realize you need to change an important configuration setting? Sorry, not possible... that is, until now! Previewed at Google I/O earlier this year, today we're launching Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps.

With Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps, you instrument your app once and from then on, you can change configurations and add analytics, remarketing and conversion tracking later – without updating your app. 

Just like on the web, Google Tag Manager continues to be a free product, streamlining the process of adding “tags” to your native iOS and Android apps, making it both easy and accountable. Measuring key events is now as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Include the new Google Analytics Services SDK (Android, iOS) in your app. This new unified SDK includes both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics functionality while sharing a common framework.
2. Push interesting and important events to the Data Layer. Once events are registered on the data layer, they can be used to trigger Google Tag Manager Tags and Macros. 
3. Use Google Tag Manager’s web-based interface to write Rules and determine when various Tags should fire.

If you’re already a Google Tag Manager user, then there’s really nothing new for you to learn. The same style Tag Templates, Rules and Macros that you already know are now available for the new Mobile App Container Type. New users can get up to speed quickly, thanks to the easy-to-use web-based interface.  

Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps natively supports AdWords Conversion Tracking, AdWords Remarketing and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps (Universal Analytics) tags. It also supports custom and 3rd party tracking events using the custom tag. For Mobile Apps, Google Tag Manager also takes things one step further using the Value Collection Macro. As we previewed at I/O 2013, developers can now create server-side configurations and use them to build highly configurable Apps. Collectively, these new features make Google Tag Manager a powerful tool for marketers and App Developers alike.  

Sign-up for your free Google Tag Manager account now and learn more about Mobile App tagging.  

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Product Manager, Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager

The following was originally posted to the Analytics Japan blog.

Google recommends responsive web design as a way of optimizing for smartphones and tablets. Responsive web design is a method of identifying the device based on the screen size and adjusting the design using CSS, while sharing one block of HTML across all devices. The concept has also been discussed on the Webmaster Central Blog so head over there for more details.

This post will look at an example of using Google Analytics on a site enabled for responsive web design.

The case involves a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP), NRI Netcom, working on an overseas payment service website for their customer, Seven Bank. NRI Netcom installed Google Analytics for post-optimization data analysis to support Seven Bank's web publishing and marketing. The implementation enabled pages to be served to desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets using responsive web design, all from a single URL.

They used page-level custom variables in Google Analytics to enable NRI Netcom to access reports on each type of page sent out.

For example, page-level custom variables can be set up as follows to identify which CSS version is being displayed: PC, smartphone or tablet.

PC = 960 px or more  

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'fullsize', 3]);

Smartphone = 520 px or less

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'mobile', 3]);

Tablet = 520 px to 960 px 

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'tablet', 3]);

This enables metrics for each screen type to be compared at a glance, as shown below, using Google Analytics Reporting. (The figures on the report are not the actual figures.)

The actual setup was a little more complex. The three screen types (smartphone, tablet and PC) were added, and the display height and width selected for each user tracked. Then, Seven Bank deployed its website in ten languages, as this was to be an overseas payment service.

It was configured to handle three different types of devices, different screen heights and widths, and different languages, as well as to provide instant verification on the Google Analytics Reporting screen.

Several pieces of useful information began to emerge from the Google Analytics data. Firstly, as a result of optimizing for smartphones, there was a clear improvement in engagement and conversions amongst mobile users. Differences between tablet and smartphones were also observed. Engagement metrics such as average time on page and average page views differed widely. Metrics were also found to be clearly different depending on whether the same smartphone/tablet was held horizontally or vertically.

A number of other effects were seen which weren't particularly relevant to conversions. A clearer picture of referral paths for mobiles and their effect on conversions aided understanding of the efficacy of incoming traffic. Whereas organic search won out on pure referral numbers, the number of conversions from users clicking the Seven Bank inquiries link on smartphones to make a call (measured using event tracking) was clearly better at referrals routed through AdWords.

Interesting results were also seen for different languages. It was obvious, for example, that conversions on mobiles were much higher for specific languages.

All of this is actionable data which will continue to help Seven Bank develop marketing strategies and further optimize their mobile site  — read the full case study here (in Japanese).

Posted by Noriyuki Ouchi, Google Analytics Solution Consultant