Analytics Blog: Data Studio

How to Apply Holiday Shopping Insights to Your Analytics Strategies

October 24, 2016

The Year of the Supershopper
We all have that friend — the one who somehow knows the latest brands, the season’s must-have products, and where to find the best deals at the snap of a finger. In years past, this friend was an enigma, making us wonder how does he or she do it?

Today, we can all be that friend. With the ability to instantly discover, research, and purchase, shoppers around the world are more informed and more efficient than ever before - they’ve transformed into supershoppers seemingly overnight.

But what defines supershoppers? And what does this mean for retailers trying to win them over this holiday season? Let’s find out.

They Keep Their Options Open
Last year, more than 50% of holiday shoppers said they were open to purchasing from new retailers¹. This is especially true online. More than three-quarters of smartphone shoppers who usually go to the same physical stores when they shop for products are very open to new retailers and brands online². Why? Mobile makes it easy to explore all of your options no matter when or where you’re shopping. In fact, after searching on Google, 76% of mobile shoppers have changed their mind about which retailer or brand to purchase³.

Mobile is Their Muse
It used to be that shoppers would thumb through catalogues or stare longingly at the holiday window displays, but mobile is now the super shopper’s go-to source for inspiration. Sixty-four percent of smartphone shoppers turn to mobile search for ideas about what to buy before heading into a store⁴. And 1 in 4 mobile video viewers in the U.S. have visited YouTube for help with a purchase decision while they were at a store or visiting a store's website⁵.

But shoppers aren’t only making purchase decisions, they’re discovering new brands and products along the way: more than half of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their phones⁶.

They Want the Best - Not the Cheapest
In July we learned that shoppers are on the quest for the best — and this still rings true more than ever today. Last holiday, mobile searches related to “best gift” grew 70% year over year while mobile searches related to cheap or inexpensive gifts grew about 35%⁷. They’re also willing to do the research to the make the best decision: on YouTube, mobile watch time for product review videos has grown 60% year over year⁸.

But supershoppers don’t only want the best - they want personalized, unique, cool gifts. Mobile searches related to “unique gifts” grew more than 65% while mobile searches related to “cool gifts” grew a whopping 80%⁹.

Mobile is Their Door to the Store
Although more and more people are willing to buy on mobile, we know that mobile is still used predominantly as a door to the store. In fact, 76% of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase¹⁰.

Once they’re inside your store, they expect the experience to be a seamless one: more than 40% of smartphone shoppers want retailers to automatically surface relevant information such as the location of the item in the store, a special deal or related products¹¹.

They Shop ‘Til they Drop
Supershoppers live up to their name as the holiday season progresses. From November through mid-December we see online conversion rates increase across devices. Last year, on mobile alone, they jumped 30% on Black Friday and 50% on Cyber Monday when compared to November 1¹².

Tips to Using Analytics to Reach Today’s Shopper
Analytics is a critical marketing tool all year long. But that importance is amplified during the holiday season. Here are five ideas on how you can use analytics to get the most out of the holiday shopping season.

1. Understand which days drive the most sales — be there. In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft strategy — across mobile, desktop, and tablet — that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.
For example, adjust bids for auction-based media and use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier. Use Smart Bidding in AdWords or DoubleClick Search to maximize your performance.

2. Get personal when engaging with window shoppers. The great thing about the holidays is that you can start shopping at any time — and then wait for discounts. Many consumers may already be browsing your site looking for gift ideas. This is an audience that may convert at a higher rate. Use Google Analytics to create remarketing lists including these shoppers, and then customize your marketing campaigns to better suit their needs.

But don’t stop there: Remember, supershoppers crave personalization. Test different variations of your website with this same audience to offer more customized experiences. Try Google Optimize, our free site testing and personalization tool, to get started.

3. Act fast: Create a culture of optimization. Your holiday marketing plans are set long before the holiday season starts. It’s very important to monitor your activities to ensure they’re driving business growth. And if they’re not you need to take action by immediately identifying areas of opportunity and improvement.

Google Analytics offers a number of ways to help simplify reporting, sift through data, and spotlight insights for you. Custom reports, dashboards and shortcuts all let you customize reporting so you spend less time looking for data and more time analyzing important information. Or better yet, try Google Data Studio and create a holiday shopping dashboard for different teams in your organization.

4. Analyze your performance against your competitors. Benchmarking your business against your competitors helps you see the big picture. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking reports. The benefit of using those reports is that they will provide you a comparison between your data and your competitors, using characteristics such as website traffic, country and detailed vertical information.

5. Start developing your New Year marketing strategy. With so many new shoppers entering your stores, sites, and apps, data and analytics are critical to helping you convert first-time shoppers into long-term, loyal customers. Use your website data to create lists of first-time customers during the holidays, and deliver personalized communication across channels to build relationships. With Google Analytics you can create remarketing lists and easily connect with this audience.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Julie Krueger, Retail Managing Director, Google and Casey Carey, Director of Analytics Marketing, Google

Google/ Ipsos, Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study - Total Shoppers Report, Jan 2016, Base: US Holiday Shoppers, n=1,500

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000, Same store shoppers = 801

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google-commissioned Ipsos Brand Building on Mobile Survey, U.S., December 2015 n=1000, 18-54 year olds

Google/Ipsos, "Consumers in the Micro-Moment," Wave 3, U.S., n=1291 online smartphone users 18+, August 2015

Source: Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

YouTube data, U.S., Classification as a “Product Review" video was based on public data such as headlines and tags, and may not account for every such video available on YouTube, Nov - Dec 2014 and Nov - Dec 2015

Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

Google/Purchased Digital Diary: How Consumers Solve Their Needs in the Moment, May 2016, Representative sample of US Smartphone users = 1000. Local searchers = 634, Purchases = 1,140

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google Analytics Shopping category data, Nov 1, 2015–December 14, 2015, United States

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

October 4, 2016

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

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

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

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

Get started today so you can:

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

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

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

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

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

Get started for free.

Happy reporting!
The Data Studio team

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

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Data Studio

Announcing: Smart, Fast-Acting Analytics — For Everyone

September 28, 2016

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

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

Businesses of all sizes need tools to measure and succeed

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

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

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

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

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

Martijn Scheijbeler

Director of Marketing - The Next Web

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

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

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

Modern measurement for everyone

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Data Studio for Publishers

September 7, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Which TV Ads Made the Podium During the 2016 Olympics?

August 23, 2016

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

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

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

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

See

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

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

Almost 35% of respondents remembered seeing the Nike ads.

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

Think

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

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

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

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

Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sourcing

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

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Data Studio: New Google Cloud SQL and MySQL connector

August 22, 2016

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

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

Example report accessing sales data by sales person from MySQL database

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

List of connectors now includes Cloud SQL and MySQL

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

Configuration screen to access your SQL database

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

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

Posted by Anand Shah and Nick Mihailovski, Product Managers

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

August 11, 2016

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

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

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

Awareness

35% of respondents remembered seeing the Coca Cola ad.

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

Interest

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

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

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

Desire

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

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

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

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

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

Sourcing

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

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Data Exploration with Google Data Studio

August 8, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy visualizing!

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Behind the Scenes with Google Data Studio

August 2, 2016

This Spring, as part of our Google Analytics 360 suite, we introduced Google Data Studio 360, to help you simply and beautifully present data from multiple data sources, including Google Analytics, Google Sheets and much more.

In May, we introduced Google Data Studio, a free version of our tool, to put it in the hands of many more of you - which has led to the design and sharing of creative reports that bring your information to life. We’ve been excited to see the rapid adoption, and initiated a series of livestreams to answer questions around our design of the product, deliver demos and highlight features.

The first recording in this series, hosted by Product Manager Nick Mihailovski and Louis Gray, is now available, and shares:

An introduction to Google Data Studio
The perspective of our product manager on Data Visualization
Walkthroughs and sample reports

Watch the first video in this series via the embed below or on YouTube here.

Posted by Louis Gray, Google Analytics Team

Google Data Studio for Ecommerce Businesses

July 27, 2016

Google Data Studio is a great tool to visualize datasets from multiple sources, such as Google Sheets, BigQuery, AdWords, and others. But being part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, it is no surprise that it makes a perfect visualization tool for Google Analytics too! In the coming weeks and months we will showcase some best practices and sample reports in this blog, but we thought we would start with something you are acquainted with: Google Analytics.

With that in mind, we decided to create a sample report that may give you some inspiration on how to build your next dashboard. The example below will provide some good ideas on which charts, dimensions and metrics to use to visualize your Ecommerce data. Please note that some of this data will be available only for accounts that have Enhanced Ecommerce implemented.

Report created using Google Analytics data on Google Data Studio

Let’s go over some of the elements you see in the screenshot above.

Header: it is always helpful to provide some info and controls in the top of the report. In this case you will see the website logo, a time range control and a series of four filter controls, with which you can segment your reports by Device, Country, Source or User Type.
Trend charts: the four line charts in the top left will show how the business is performing over time (also compared to the previous period). This is important to understand drops and spikes in the data.
Scorecards: the overall stats (green background) show in a glance how the business is doing, they provide a quick and effective way to understand the bottom line.
Detailed information: tables are the best way to represent data in a detailed way. As seen in the report, the tables provide more information about the products being sold and also the traffic sources bringing the most users.
Additional info: depending on your business, you might want to add special metrics and dimensions to enrich your report (e.g. custom dimensions & metrics). In the report above you will find some additional information on the bar and pie charts in the bottom right corner.

We hope that this sample report helps you get up and running. Feel free to share your own report in the comments, we would love to learn how you are using Data Studio to report and visualize your data!

This report was created using a Google Analytics data source, check this step-by-step guide for a detailed account on how to create Data Studio reports using Google Analytics. Learn more about Data Studio in the Help Centre: https://support.google.com/datastudio/

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Data Studio: New, Simplified, AdWords Connector

July 25, 2016

Google Data Studio is our new Business Intelligence product that makes it easy to connect, visualize, and share data. Today we updated the Google Data Studio AdWords connector to be more flexible and easier to use.

The AdWords connector allows AdWords customers to access their AdWords account data in Data Studio, build visually stunning reports, and share those reports to business stakeholders across their organization.

Report built with the AdWords connector in Google Data Studio

With our recent update, the new AdWords connector now unifies over 100 AdWords dimensions and metrics as a single list, making it easier select the data you want to visualize.

20 of over 100 dimensions and metrics available in the new connector

The new connector also supports many more combinations of dimensions and metrics, dramatically simplifying building reports.

Customizing a table with AdWords data in the Report Editor

Of course, when you build AdWords reports with Data Studio, all the existing Data Studio features are compatible with this data including: calculated metrics, derived fields, custom visualizations, rich styling and custom branding, simplified sharing through Google Drive and realtime collaboration.

These new changes are available today in both Data Studio 360 and Data Studio versions. To use the new connector, you must create a new Data Studio Data Source. Data Source using the previous connector will continue to work. Please read our help documentation on how to migrate to the new version.

We’re excited to see all of the new reports customers will create with this enhancement.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Data Studio team

Let us know your thoughts on Google Data Studio

June 20, 2016

Are you a current or past user of Google Data Studio? We would love to hear your thoughts about your experience so far with Google Data Studio.

The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete. Your comments will help us build a better product!

Note: Your answers will be held in strict confidentiality. The results will be reported in aggregate form only, and cannot be identified individually. Thank you!

Posted by the Google Data Studio Team

Get Facebook, Bing, Twitter & more into Google Data Studio

June 20, 2016

Google Data Studio is the biggest step forward in Google’s data reporting & visualization offering since the launch of Google Analytics in 2005. It lets you build great-looking, interactive dashboards that you can share in a similar manner as Google Drive files (see for example this web analytics dashboard). It's a giant leap forward from the old Google Analytics dashboards and a game changer for online marketers.

Google Data Studio provides native integration with a few Google platforms (Google Analytics, AdWords, YouTube, BigQuery, Attribution 360). Of course, most marketers, to use Google Data Studio as their primary dashboarding tool, would like to include data from many more sources, such as Facebook Ads, Bing Ads and Twitter Ads.

Fortunately, there’s a really simple method for adding many more data sources into Google Data Studio, using its Google Sheets connector. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide for doing that.

1. Create a Google Sheet with data to be imported
There are a number of ways to do this. For instance, to get Facebook Ads data, you can go to Facebook Ads Manager to do a CSV export of your data, and then upload it to Google Drive. For some data sources, you can use spreadsheet functions like IMPORTXML. Or you can build your own Google Apps Script connectors.

For a fully automated data importing workflow, I recommend you try our Supermetrics add-on for Google Sheets (available here; free for 30 days, then $49/mo). It has an easy-to-use query builder and connects to a large number of data sources, like Facebook, Bing, Twitter, MailChimp, even Adobe SiteCatalyst.

To run a simple query using Supermetrics:

Launch Supermetrics from the Add-ons menu
Log in to a data source (eg. Facebook Ads)
Pick a few metrics (eg. impressions and cost)
Split to rows by one or more dimensions (eg. country)
Click the blue Get Data to Table button

After you’ve fetched the data, your Google Sheet should look something like this (here we’re splitting by country):

If you don’t want to test Supermetrics now, you can make a copy of this sheet to try out the following steps.

2. Import the data into Google Data Studio
You can launch Google Data Studio here. If you haven’t yet used Data Studio, you can get the free version here (US only for the time being).

In DATA SOURCES, click the plus button in the lower-right corner:

From connectors, select Google Sheets and the file you just created, then click CONNECT

Next, Google shows you a list of fields imported from the Google Sheet. Click CREATE REPORT, and in the next window, ADD TO REPORT.

3. Using the data
You now have a blank report where you can start working with the data. To check everything has been imported ok, try inserting a table. You can change the columns displayed in the Table Properties sidebar.

You can then start building your report. After some trying, you’ll be able to make something great like this:

In many cases, you will want to include more than one Google Sheets data connector, to fetch data from different sources or with different metrics & dimensions. This can be done very easily, just repeat step 1 and 2. Go back to Google Sheets to fetch new data, e.g. Twitter Ads, to another sheet. Then in Data Studio, when adding a graph or table, in the properties sidebar press the arrow next to Data Source to add a connection to the new sheet.

4. Ensure your reports stay up-to-date
If you used the Supermetrics add-on to fetch data into Google Sheets, you can set the those queries to refresh automatically every day, so your Data Studio report will always have the latest data. In Google Sheets, go to Add-ons: Supermetrics: Schedule refresh & emailing, and store a daily refresh trigger.

Final thoughts
Google Data Studio is a powerful dashboarding tool for any marketer, but by default only works with Google platforms. To make the most of it, use its Google Sheets connector in combination with the Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to build cross-channel reports.

Posted by Mikael Thuneberg, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Announcing Data Studio: our free, new, Data Visualization Product

May 25, 2016

Earlier this year, as part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite announcement, we unveiled a new data visualization and reporting platform for large enterprises — Data Studio 360.

Yesterday, at the Google Performance Summit, we announced a free version of Data Studio for individuals and smaller teams. Data Studio lets you connect to all your marketing data and turn that data into beautiful, informative reports that are easy to understand, share, and fully customizable. We wanted to take a moment to give you some of the details about Data Studio.

Making it easy to share data within your organization — or with the world

One of the fundamental ideas behind Data Studio is that data should be easily accessible to anyone in an organization. We believe that as more people have access to data, better decisions will be made.

With multiple data connectors, you can now easily create dashboards from many different types of data and share with everyone in your organization - and you can mix and match data sources within a single report. For example, you can combine Google Analytics data and Google AdWords data into a single report.

Today, we’re offering multiple data connectors, so you can connect to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Sheets and many other Google services. But Data Studio offers integration with a wide variety of data sources. There’s also a connector for BigQuery and we will soon have connectors to SQL databases that will let you access first party data.

Data Studio is more that just sharing reports with other people — it’s true collaboration. We used the same infrastructure as Google Docs, so you can edit reports together, in real time. This is useful as you combine data from multiple teams and need others to add analysis and context to the report.

Visualization tools to style your reports and data

In addition to new sharing and collaboration tools, Data Studio gives you many flexible ways to present your data. Sure, there’s the usual assortment of bar charts, pie charts, and time series. But we’ve also included some new visualizations — like bullet charts that help you communicate your progress towards a business goal.

Another advanced feature is the ability to create a heatmap using tabular data. This visualization makes it easy to instantly identify outliers within a table of data.

Data Studio also has an array of other features to help you customize how you present your data. There are a number stylistic tools that enable you to design your reports to represent your specific brand. There are also interactive data controls, like a date picker and dynamic filters, that enable report editors to make reports interactive for viewers.

For example, let’s say you want to let users segment a report by country. Just add a control element to the top of your report and the user can dynamically segment the data. In the image below the check boxes will change the data in the map and data table based on what a user selects.

These are just a few of the tools that you can use to help others in your organization understand data.

Two versions for different types of organizations

The primary difference between Data Studio 360 and the free version, Data Studio, is the the number of reports you can create, which is five per account. Both versions support connecting to unlimited data sources and offer unlimited report viewing, editing and collaboration. For more information, check out our Help Center.

Getting started

If you’re ready to get started, watch this brief overview that will help you build your first reports.

Then check out the interactive walkthrough - it’s built with Data Studio. Just choose “Welcome to Data Studio (Start Here)” from the list of reports in your account.

Data Studio is currently available to users in the United States and we’ll be rolling it out to other geographic regions throughout the year. We hope it helps you share more data and make better business decisions.

Happy Dashboarding,

Posted by Nick Mihailovski & Nathan Moon, Data Studio team

Announcing: Smarter, more sharable analytics innovations

May 24, 2016

We’re incredibly excited to share with you the new analytics product innovations announced just moments ago at the Google Performance Summit. These innovations for the Analytics 360 Suite are more integrated, more collaborative, and use built-in intelligence to handle more data than ever in our new multi-screen, cross-channel world.

Why are these innovations arriving now? Because across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, more than half of all web traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets¹. And every year, over half of the trillions of searches on Google happen on mobile².

This shift to mobile has made marketers' jobs more complex. We all have more opportunities than ever to reach consumers all day and measure their behavior in their I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do and I want-to-buy moments. But it's also harder to keep all the channels and touchpoints straight. You can’t market effectively in today’s world with products that were designed for a desktop-first world.

Two months ago we announced the Google Analytics 360 Suite, an enterprise-class modern measurement solution built from the ground up to help enterprise marketers and analytics professionals succeed in this new multi-screen world.

Today, we announced new innovations focused on three themes:

Read on to learn the analytics highlights from today’s announcements.

Enterprise analytics re-imagined for modern marketing

Google Analytics 360 Suite is beginning to roll out to current customers. This includes Google Analytics 360 (formerly known as Premium), Attribution 360 (formerly known as Adometry), Audience Center 360, and Tag Manager 360 when used as part of Analytics 360. The rollout will occur in phases over the next several months, and users will see an improved and unified product experience and a new look and feel across all Analytics 360 Suite products.

Google Optimize 360, our website testing and personalization product, is now available in paid BETA globally. The results from our closed beta have been amazing: one of our beta customers reduced the time to deploy a site experiment from three days to 10 minutes. Optimize 360’s deep integrations with Analytics 360 increase testing agility and reduce setup times. With just a few clicks, you can use the audiences and goals you’ve already created in Analytics 360 to run experiments with Optimize 360.

Google Data Studio 360, our data visualization product, will start rolling out in paid BETA in the US. This is our enterprise version with licensing starting at 200 users. Data Studio 360 allows you to connect to all your data with native integrations across many popular Google products, as well as non-Google data. Visualize your data by creating reports and dashboards. Share your data across your organization with built-in, real-time collaboration.

Google Data Studio is a completely new, free version of Data Studio 360 that we’re launching today! Starting now, anyone can use Data Studio to create up to 5 reports with unlimited sharing, editing and collaboration. We’re starting the BETA in the U.S. and rolling out to other regions throughout the year.

Succeeding together

With massive volumes of data being created across screens, channels and touchpoints, built-in intelligence has become foundational in approach to analytics product development. This means we’re doing more of the heavy lifting for you, and we’re seeing a tremendous response from businesses. For example, Smart Goals in Analytics is now enabling more than 60K advertisers to optimize their AdWords performance. You’ll continue to see exciting developments in the future related to intelligence.

As consumers blur the lines between online and offline, it’s more important than ever to build your business in new ways. Google is excited to go on this journey with you, and we're building much more for the multi-screen, cross-channel world. Visit our website to learn more about all the new products in the Analytics 360 Suite.

To see the full range of ads and analytics innovations announced this morning, watch the Google Performance Summit keynote here.

Posted by Paul Muret, VP of Analytics, Display, and Video Products at Google.

¹ Google Analytics 2016
² Google 2016

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