Analytics Blog: Features

Spotlight on Google Tag Manager: Open and Secure Tag Management

October 5, 2016

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

New third-party tag templates

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

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

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

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

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

Some recent additions include:

(See the full list of supported tags)

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

Secure container loading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy tagging!

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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

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

Improving Google Analytics Events with Unique Events

September 26, 2016

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

Some benefits of Unique Events include:

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

How Unique Events Work

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

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

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

Learn more in our Help Center article here.

Posted by Breen Baker, Google Analytics Team

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

September 6, 2016

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

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

Testing & Security:

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

Organization:

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

Mobile:

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

Services & Support:

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

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

Explore important insights from your data — automatically

September 2, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enterprise-Class Tag Management: Announcing Workspaces

August 29, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Better insight into your customer interactions with Google Analytics

May 5, 2016

A few weeks ago, we highlighted how connecting site analytics data with digital marketing campaign data can help companies understand the full customer journey. A deep understanding of customers is essential to running a business today as customers have higher and higher expectations for personalized and relevant experiences from brands.

Site and app analytics data are key sources for developing customer understanding and segmentation as, for many companies, this is where customers interact with the brand most frequently. Analytics and Analytics 360 have existing capabilities to help our customers measure lifetime value and understand user engagement for groups of their customers, but often your data needs to go deeper to help analyze your most important customers. Today, we’d like to announce a brand new capability in user-centric analysis to help address this: User Explorer. With User Explorer, you can now analyze the actions that an anonymous individual has taken on your site or app. These insights can help improve the user experience when people interact with your business online.

For example, you might want to understand how your top 10 customers interacted with your site or apps. With User Explorer you can get insights into visitors that spent the most with you over a given time frame and analyze each of their journeys on your site over that time period. This analysis surfaces individual interactions that can uncover new opportunities for optimizing their overall experience and path to conversion. In addition, User Explorer opens up new possibilities to help inform your marketing activities. For example, User Explorer can help you identify anonymous individual customers who have not converted recently and help them re-engage with your site using existing marketing channels.

Combine User Explorer with existing user-centric capabilities to help you go deeper and make your data actionable. With the high value users you've identified using the User Explorer, create a Google Analytics "Segment" so that you can apply this group of users across all your reports and understand how this group behaves across your site. Building an audience from these segments allows your business to remarket specifically to these customers. Using our Cohort Analysis report, will also help customers understand core user engagement metrics such as retention are performing for this same segment. When were they acquired and what percentage of them came back the next day? How many purchases does this group make day by day? In our Active User report you can see the number of users in this segment that were active in the last day, the last 7 days, and more to have a clear picture of the size of your customer base and its trend across time.

We hope this feature will help you gain the insight you need to build amazing experiences for your customers. Happy exploring!

Posted by Gene Chan, Google Analytics Team

Use Smart Goals, powered by Google Analytics, to optimize in AdWords

December 10, 2015

To advertise smart, you have to measure smart. And a key metric for almost any business is conversions, also known as “that moment when users do the thing that you want them to do.”

Many AdWords advertisers are already measuring their website conversions, using either AdWords Conversion Tracking or imported Google Analytics Ecommerce transactions. Measuring actual conversions is ideal, because it allows you to optimize your bids, your ads and your website with a clear goal in mind.

However, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses aren't measuring their website conversions today. Some businesses may not have a way for users to convert on their website and others may not have the time or the technical ability to implement conversion tracking.

The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users use their data to drive better marketing and advertising performance. So, for businesses that don’t measure conversions in AdWords today, we’ve created an easy-to-use solution: Smart Goals. Smart Goals help you identify the highest-quality visits to your website and optimize for those visits in AdWords.

"Smart Goals helped us drive more engaged visits to our website. It gave us something meaningful to optimize for in AdWords, without having to change any tags on our site. We could tell that optimizing to Smart Goals was working, because we had higher sales than usual across our channels during the testing period."

- Richard Bissell, President/Owner, Richard Bissell Fine Woodworking, Inc

How Smart Goals Work

To generate Smart Goals, we apply machine learning across thousands of websites that use Google Analytics and have opted in to share anonymized conversion data. From this information, we can distill dozens of key factors that correlate with likelihood to convert: things like session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser. We can then apply these key factors to any website. The easiest way to think about Smart Goals is that they reflect your website visits that our model indicates are most likely to lead to conversions.

Step 1: Activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics

To activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics, simply go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account, click Goals (under the View heading) and select Smart Goals. The highest-quality visits to your website will now be turned into Smart Goals automatically. No additional tagging or customization is required; Smart Goals just work.

To help you see how Smart Goals perform before you activate them, we’ve built a Smart Goals report in the “Conversions” section of Google Analytics. The behavior metrics in this report indicate the engagement level of Smart Goals visits compared to other visits, helping you evaluate Smart Goals before you activate the feature.

Click image for full-sized version

Step 2: Import Smart Goals into AdWords

Like any other goal in Google Analytics, Smart Goals can be imported into AdWords to be used as an AdWords conversion. Once you’ve defined a conversion in AdWords, you’re able to optimize for it.

Click image for full-sized version

Step 3: Optimizing for Smart Goals in AdWords

One of the benefits of measuring conversions in your Adwords account is the ability to set a target cost per acquisition (CPA) as opposed to just setting a cost per click (CPC). If you aren’t measuring actual conversions today, importing Smart Goals as conversions in Adwords allows you to set a target CPA. In this way, you’re able to optimize your Adwords spend based on the likelihood of conversion as determined by our model.

Smart Goals will be rolling out over the next few weeks. To be eligible for Smart Goals, your Google Analytics property must be linked to your AdWords account(s). Learn how to link your Google Analytics property to your AdWords account(s) in the Analytics Help Center or the AdWords Help Center. Note that your Google Analytics view must receive at least 1,000 clicks from AdWords over a 30-day period to ensure the validity of your data.

Posted by Abishek Sethi (Software Engineer) and Joan Arensman (Product Manager)

Share Google Analytics data and remarketing lists more efficiently using manager accounts (MCC)

November 12, 2015

The following was originally posted on the AdWords Blog.

From monitoring account performance at scale to making cross-account campaign changes, manager accountshelp many of the most sophisticated AdWords advertisers get more done in less time. To deliver more insightful reporting and scale your remarketing efforts, we’re introducing two new enhancements to manager accounts: Google Analytics account linking, and remarketing tag and list sharing.

Access your data with a single link

You can now link your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium account directly to your AdWords manager account using the new setup wizard in AdWords under Account Settings. This streamlined workflow for linking accounts eliminates the need to link each of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts individually.

Click image for full-size version

Now when you import your goals, website metrics, remarketing lists, or other data from Google Analytics, you'll only need to do it once. And whenever you add a new AdWords account to your manager account, it will automatically be linked with the same Analytics properties.

These enhancements save time so you can focus on optimizing your campaigns. You can learn more about linking your Google Analytics account into your manager account in the AdWords Help Center.

Scale your remarketing strategy

Many advertisers are seeing tremendous success re-engaging customers and finding new ones using Display remarketing, remarketing lists for search ads, and similar audiences. To help scale these efforts across the AdWords accounts you manage, you now have options for creating and sharing remarketing lists directly in your manager account from the new “Audiences” view, including any lists imported from Google Analytics or Customer Match.

You can also create remarketing lists using a manager-level remarketing tag and use them across your managed accounts. This eliminates the need to retag your website and manage multiple lists in each AdWords account. If any of your managed accounts have their own lists, they can be made available for use in your other managed accounts.

These enhancements make it easier and faster than ever before to get your remarketing strategy up and running. You can learn more about sharing remarketing tags and lists in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Vishal Goenka, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Real-Time Data Validation with Google Tag Assistant Recordings

August 27, 2015

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: great analytics can only happen with great data.

That's why we've made it a priority to help our users confirm that their data is top-quality. Last year we released our automated data diagnostics feature, and now we’re proud to announce the launch of another powerful new feature: Google Tag Assistant Recordings.

This tool helps you instantly validate your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium implementation. If it finds data quality issues, it helps you troubleshoot them and then recheck them on the spot. It’s available as part of the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension.

Screen Shot 2015-07-21 at 2.27.31 PM.png

"Tag Assistant Recordings is fast becoming one of my favorite tools for debugging Google Analytics Premium installations! I use it multiple times a day with my Premium clients to help explain odd trends in their data or debug configuration issues. Already I'm building it into my core workflow."

- Dan Rowe, Director of Analytics at Analytics Pros

What can I use it for?

Tag Assistant Recordings works with all kinds of data events: purchases, logins, and so on. What if you sell flowers online and want to confirm that Enhanced Ecommerce is capturing the checkout flow correctly? With Tag Assistant Recordings, you can record yourself going through the checkout process as you buy a dozen red roses, and then review what Google Analytics captured.

If you find that your account isn’t set up properly — if the sale wasn't recorded or was mis-labeled — you can make adjustments and test it all over again instantly. With Tag Assistant Recordings, you know you’re capturing all the data that’s important to you.

Tag Assistant Recordings can be particularly useful when (1) you’re in the process of implementing Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium, (2) you’ve recently made updates to your site, or (3) you’re making changes to your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium configuration. It works even if your new site or your updates aren't visible to the public yet, so you can feel confident before you go live.

Tag Assistant Recordings can also help if you want to reconfigure your Google Analytics account to better reflect your business. For example, you may want to configure multi-channel funnels to detect your AdWords channel. Tag Assistant Recordings lets you set up this new functionality in Google Analytics and test immediately whether everything is working as you expect.

"Tag Assistant Recordings has already been a HUGE help! Analytics Pros and About.com were working on an issue with sessions double-counting and Tag Assistant Recordings let us narrow down precisely which hits were having new sessions counted. It saved us hours of time and helped us jump right to where the problem was. So, in summary, this is awesome!"

- Greg McDonald, Business Intelligence Analyst at About.com

How does it work?

Tag Assistant Recordings works through the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension, so you’ll need to download the extension if you aren’t already using it. From there, setup is easy. Simply open Google Tag Assistant, record the user flow you’d like to check, and then view the full report in Tag Assistant. You’ll want to view both tabs in the report (Tag Assistant and Google Analytics) to verify that you see the intended tags. Keep in mind that the Google Analytics data is only available if you have access to the appropriate property or view.

Here's a nifty bonus: If you find a problem, and you think you have fixed it by changing settings from within Google Analytics, return to the Google Analytics tab in Tag Assistant Recordings and click the “Update” button. You'll see instantly how your configuration changes would have affected this recording.

We hope that Google Tag Assistant will be a valuable new tool in your analytics toolkit.

Why not start using it today?

Posted by: Ajay Nainani, Frank Kieviet, and Jocelyn Whittenburg, Google Analytics team

Introducing Trash Can: Data Recovery in Google Analytics

January 27, 2015

We all make mistakes, but the damage might seem irrevocable when accidentally deleting crucial reporting information from Google Analytics. Thanks to feedback from our users, we’re pleased to introduce a new feature to provide a safety net each time you delete a view, property or account from your Google Analytics account: the Trash Can.

To get started, navigate to the Administration tab, select an account, and click the Trash Can feature on the left-hand panel. Check off what you want to reclaim, click “Restore,” and voilà! Your view, property or account is now just as it was before you deleted it. Once 35 days pass from the day you originally trashed it, however, you’ll have to say a final goodbye as the data will be removed from the Trash Can and will no longer appear there.

This feature will be rolling out to all Google Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, but don’t worry–anything you’ve deleted starting today will still show up in the Trash Can once you get the feature update in your account.

Many people rely on Google Analytics to collect, analyze, and report on data in order to make good business decisions. We hope that the Trash Can is just one more way to ensure that you have all the information you need when you need it. To learn more details about the Trash Can feature, please read this Help Center article.

Posted by Chris Cahill, Michael Masukawa, and Dan Morenus

Simplify your Google Analytics Reporting with Add-ons for Google Sheets

January 13, 2015

It's common for Google Analytics users to use spreadsheets to analyze their Google Analytics data or combine it with another data source. But exporting your data from Google Analytics to Google Sheets is a manual process, and it can be tedious if you run reports frequently or manage multiple accounts. With the release of Add-ons for Google Sheets, getting your Google Analytics data into Google Sheets has never been easier!

Add-ons allow you to extend the power of Google Sheets by automating common tasks and integrating with external services. The Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on allows you to access your Google Analytics data, right from within a spreadsheet!

The Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on

The Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on combines the power of the Google Analytics API with the rich feature set of Google Sheets, making it easier for Google Analytics users to access, visualize, share, and manage their data. With this add-on you can:

Query and report data from multiple views.
Compute and display custom calculations.
Create visualizations and embed those visualizations on third-party websites.
Schedule your reports to run and update automatically.
Control who can see your data and visualizations by using Google Sheets' sharing and privacy features.

But perhaps the best way to find out what the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on can do is to see it in action. In this short video I introduce the add-on, show you how to install it, and walk you through creating your first report.

If you want to go deeper, you can watch this more advanced video where I explain in detail the process of building a complete dashboard that automatically updates and can be embedded on a third-party website.

If you have more questions about how to use the add-on, check out the documentation. It explains each of its features and configuration options in much more detail.

Supermetrics and Analytics Canvas add-ons

The Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on gives users a powerful yet user-friendly way to access their Google Analytics data, but it doesn't solve all business integration needs.

For more advanced business and data-integration solutions, I strongly recommend trying out these two excellent Google Sheets add-ons created by our technology partners:

Supermetrics for Google Docs and Sheets by Supermetrics
Analytics Canvas Google Sheets Add-on by nModal Solutions Inc

Both of these add-ons integrate with Google Analytics as well as a variety of other platforms and services such as Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Office, and many more. Free and premium versions are available.

Feedback and Support

Add-ons are a great way to automate the process of getting your Google Analytics data into Google Sheets. We hope you take the time to try out these add-ons and see how they can improve your workflow.

If you use the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on, we'd love to know what you think. You can leave a review in the Chrome Web Store, ask any questions you have in the add-on discussion group, or submit feedback directly from within Google Sheets.

Any and all feedback is welcome!

By: Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer, Google Analytics

Brian Gavin Diamonds Sees 60% Increase in Customer Checkout with Enhanced Ecommerce

November 5, 2014

"Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics made it extremely easy to analyze the metrics that are important to an ecommerce site and garner the insights to make smart changes to our website, driving significant improvements in performance!"

-- Danny Gavin, VP and Director of Marketing at Brian Gavin Diamonds

Our Enhanced Ecommerce features in Google Analytics are officially out of beta today, complete with brand new tools like Product Attribution. Combined with our new Shopping Campaigns report, Google Analytics provides our retail clients with an integrated view of their customers. As part of today’s announcements, we’re also excited to highlight partnerships with Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper. Using Enhanced Ecommerce in conjunction with our partners’ products simplifies the implementation process and gives you a full set of tools to create and optimize your ecommerce site. Please see the end of this post for more information about our partners’ solutions.

Understand customer behavior

Enhanced Ecommerce provides insight into the customer’s path to purchase, like when customers added items to cart, started the checkout process, and completed a purchase. Importantly, Enhanced Ecommerce gives you the ability to identify segments of customers who are falling out of the shopping funnel. You can then focus on these high intent-to-purchase customers with remarketing or by optimizing your checkout flow. Brian Gavin Diamonds, a Texas-based jewelry design house that is renowned for its signature hearts and arrows diamonds and custom jewelry design, used Enhanced Ecommerce to discover that in a single month they had missed out on more than half a million dollars in sales due to cart abandonment at the customer login page. The company worked quickly to optimize their checkout flow with guest checkout functionality and immediately realized a 60% increase in customers completing the checkout process to payment. You can read more about Brian Gavin Diamonds’ success with Enhanced Ecommerce in our case study.

Optimize online merchandising to increase sales

Once you’ve gotten users to your site, Enhanced Ecommerce allows you to optimize the onsite experience to drive sales. By using Product Lists, you can identify how customers are discovering and interacting with products before purchasing them. Armed with this information, you can analyze your onsite promotions in order to build a more effective merchandising strategy, or use the product attribution functionality to understand which product lists drive conversions.

In an increasingly mobile world, this information is critically important since screen real estate is limited and must be used wisely. For retailers with mobile apps, the Google Analytics SDK fully supports Enhanced Ecommerce, so you can do rich analysis of product performance and customer behavior across all sales channels. Across both desktop and mobile, Enhanced Ecommerce delivers the information you need to increase sales on your site.

Drive revenue with Shopping Campaign reports

Today, we’re also introducing a new Shopping Campaigns report as part of the AdWords reporting section in Google Analytics. This feature will be rolled out over the next few weeks and will allow you to analyze the performance of your shopping campaigns. With this functionality, you’ll have the ability to understand the product categories/types that are driving site engagement and revenue and use this information to optimize your bids. So, how can you get started? If you have already linked your Adwords and your Google Analytics accounts, this report will automatically appear in the Adwords reporting section of your Analytics account. Not linked yet? Simply follow these instructions to link the two accounts.

Get Enhanced Ecommerce with our partner integrations

Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper have partnered with us to integrate Enhanced Ecommerce as part of their ecommerce solutions. If you’re using one of these platforms, you can take advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce by enabling one of these pre-built integrations. Shopify and Blue Acorn's solutions are available today while solutions for Prestashop and mShopper will be available in the coming week. To learn more about our featured partners, please visit our partner page.

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is built to help you understand your customers and optimize your sales conversions. Combined with Shopping Campaign reports, Google Analytics is a complete solution for ecommerce businesses. For more information about how to implement this feature in your Google Analytics account, please see the documentation available in our help center.

Posted by Marcia Jung, Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics team

More about our partners

Shopify

Shopify is a commerce platform that allows anyone to easily sell online, at their retail location, and everywhere in between. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, a point of sale system to power retail sales and a card reader to process credit card transactions through a mobile phone. Shopify currently powers over 120,000 retailers in 150 different countries, including: Tesla Motors, Gatorade, Google, Wikipedia, LA Lakers, CrossFit, and many more.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a world industry leader in Open Source solutions for ecommerce, whose mission is to challenge ecommerce limits by developing a powerful solution that is accessible to anyone, anywhere. Through the Open Source software, PrestaShop allows everyone to create online stores quickly, easily and for free. The company currently counts more than 200,000 online stores worldwide, 700,000 community members and over 4 million software downloads.

Blue Acorn

Blue Acorn is a premium eCommerce agency dedicated to helping retailers and brands achieve revenue growth through a comprehensive, data-driven approach. In order to best support this approach, they became the first Magento Solution Partner in the world to also hold certified partnerships with Google and Optimizely. By integrating data and testing throughout their services, they are able to help their clients make the best decisions possible and further support their best-in-class design, development, and optimization capabilities.

mShopper

mShopper is a leading mobile commerce platform that allows retailers to create custom, mobile-optimized e-commerce sites designed specifically to increase sales on mobile devices. The integration with Enhanced Ecommerce will provide a dramatic impact on mobile commerce conversions for retailers by delivering superior insight on product sales and overall campaign performance. mShopper recently launched mStore® v4.1 with marketing tools and a performance dashboard to drive conversions and improve sales for customers using mobile devices as well.

The Top 3 Google Analytics Configuration Issues Impacting your Data (and How to Fix Them)

September 23, 2014

Good data is important. How important? Studies show that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of companies. In fact, the average company loses 12% of its revenue due to bad data. As you know, Google Analytics is a powerful product with a wealth of features to help you optimize your results online. However, to unleash the power of Google Analytics’ marketing tools, you must ensure the data collected is complete and of the highest quality. The insights that fuel action in Analytics depend on good data, especially for some of our advanced algorithmic marketing functionalities like data driven attribution.

Since its release two months ago, our popular new diagnostics tool is working hard to ensure you’re getting the best results. Today, we’d like to share insights into some of the most common account errors along with likely causes and suggested solutions. In particular, we’ll look at some solutions for when our diagnostics tool is telling you the following: “Bad Default URL,” “Clicks and Sessions Discrepancy,” and “No Goal Conversions.” Read on to understand the impact of these issues as well as their common causes.

Bad Default URL

“Data without quality is useless.”

João Correia, Analytics Strategist at Blast Analytics & Marketing

When you create a Google Analytics account for website tracking, one of the first questions we ask is for a default URL. This is generally the homepage of your website. Diagnostics ensures that you have tagged your default URL correctly for this property, and warns you if this is not the case. Having a properly tagged website is an essential step towards being able to understand consumer behavior.

This warning is generally caused by either missing or malformed tracking code installed on your default URL, or more simply a typo in the URL that was input. If the default URL is incorrect, simply login to your Google Analytics account, click the “Admin” button in the header, and click “Property Settings” to adjust your default URL. If the tracking code is flawed, you’ll want to talk to your webmaster and ask to have the tracking code correctly installed.

Beyond the default URL, we also check for tracking code health across your site. We look for pages that have missing or malformed tags. And we continually run these checks, ensuring new pages you launch in the future also are properly tagged.

Clicks / Session Discrepancies

"Diagnostics helped me identify and fix an AdWords data discrepancy in my account. Without the tool, I may have never even realized that my data was inconsistent. This is a great tool!"

Monika Rut-Koroglu, Digital Analytics and Optimization at FXCM

Google Analytics offers rich capabilities that help users share data with linked AdWords accounts and gain unique and powerful marketing insights. It’s common to expect the number of clicks you see in AdWords to match the number of sessions you see in Analytics; but this is not always the case. This discrepancy can slow down meaningful analysis, and is a situation that can and should be rectified.

The most common causes of this issue have to do with your configuration settings. For example, when you send ad clicks through a third party that redirects to your site; the third party will often times drop vital tagging parameters which are mandatory for Analytics and AdWords to associate clicks and sessions. Other examples are having AdWords auto-tagging disabled, and redirecting users to mobile sites while unintentionally dropping tagging parameters.

Fixes for these issues can vary; we have a detailed guide to walk users through this or you can follow prompts in Google Analytics when we identify specific actions for you to take. If you have a third party who uses redirects and drops parameters, talk to them to resolve the issue. If auto-tagging is disabled on your AdWords accounts, consider enabling it.

No Goal Conversions

“[Google Analytics Diagnostics] is a great idea... Just discovered it the other day on my iPad. Helpful to let me redefine my goals better and find out what's not working.”

Sherri Matthew, Harpist and Small Business Owner

Google Analytics goals offer valuable ways to identify, track, and help you drive more valuable outcomes. Sometimes goals can break, and stop this critical stream of insights from reaching you. We run diagnostic checks to ensure your goals continually identify a steady flow of high value customers, and we warn you if this flow breaks.

The most common cause for goal breakage is when a goal is based on a URL that changes. If your webmaster updates the URLs on your site, and the URLs in the goal settings aren’t updated accordingly, this will cause your goal to stop tracking. The second most common cause for goals breaking is if the event tracking on your site changes and the events listed in the goal aren’t updated accordingly.

If you’ve had a goal break for these reasons, visit the “Admin” section via a link in the header of your Google Analytics account, and click “Goals” to correct your goal configurations.

More About Diagnostics

Google Analytics Diagnostics scans for problems every day (with some exceptions). It inspects your site tagging, account configuration, and reporting data for potential data-quality issues. Only users with Edit permission can see and respond to diagnostics messages. Diagnostics honors the first response to a message; for example, when a user ignores a message, it is ignored for all users.

The tool currently scans for dozens of issues, and dozens more are planned. Just keep an eye on your account over time - it will notify you if and when new issues or opportunities are detected.

- Frank Kieviet and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

New Benchmarking Reports Help Twiddy Boost Email Open Rates by 500%

September 10, 2014

If you’ve ever wondered how your website is performing compared to the competition, our new Benchmarking reports in Google Analytics will help you find out.

Analytics users can now compare their results to peers in their industry, choosing from 1600 industry categories, 1250 markets and 7 size buckets. Benchmarking leverages the footprint of Google Analytics and can help you set meaningful targets, spot trends occurring across industries and answer a whole array of questions: Which channels should you be investing more in? How does your mobile engagement compare to your peers? How unique is your audience?

The new Benchmarking reports display acquisition and engagement metrics — like sessions and bounce rate — by Channel, Location, or Device Category dimensions. To ensure total data transparency, the number of properties contributing to the benchmark is displayed once you choose the industry, market and size. A helpful heat map feature makes it easy to see areas of strength and opportunity, and where to devote more resources.

Benchmarking in Action: Twiddy Finds a New Email Marketing Opportunity

Twiddy.com, a vacation rentals company in the Outer Banks-- a popular summer getaway destination-- has been using Benchmarking reports to help focus its marketing resources. A look at their peer benchmarks by channel showed that Twiddy was doing many things well during its peak summer booking season. Still, “it was clear we were missing a huge opportunity in email marketing,” reports CMO Ross Twiddy. His team used Google Analytics data to revamp their email marketing and improve the flow and process.

Email opportunity: Visitors from email spend nearly twice as long on site as the average, but user sessions generated from email are 82% below average and new users from the channel fall 91% below similar sites.

Twiddy even used Google Analytics to choose the best-selling messages for their email campaigns. Their analysis helped them zero in on the factors that were most consistent in repeat bookings: the price range, location, rental type, and even vacation week that would be most likely to convert with for each customer. "We launched an email last week based on our findings, and it shattered our email marketing records: a 48% average open rate and a 40% clickthrough rate,” says Ross.

Twiddy is happy with the new visibility they’ve gained: “The Benchmarking reports were powerful enough for us to reallocate time, budget and resources towards running down the deficiency. We can’t wait to start testing the reports out more broadly during the next peak booking season.”

Get Started with Benchmarking

Benchmarking reports can be found in the “Audience” section of the reporting interface and are rolling out over the next few weeks to all Google Analytics users who have opted in to share their data anonymously. If you want to join in, simply check the “Share anonymously with Google and others” box in the Account Settings tab of your account admin page. This is only the beginning for benchmarking within Google Analytics. We’ll be expanding these capabilities in the coming months, both incorporating conversion metrics and adding support for mobile apps. For more information on Benchmarking reports, check out our Help Center.

Posted by: Nikhil Roy, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Analytics Pros helps Avvo Gain New Insights with Data Import

July 1, 2014

Companies use many systems to run their business. These may include multiple web advertising networks, CRM and content publishing systems, point of sale systems, inventory databases, etc. Integrating the data from these systems with Google Analytics provides a better understanding for how your customers behave on the web.

At the 2014 Analytics Summit we announced the new Data Import. Data Import helps unify data from your different business systems, allowing you to organize your data the same way your business is organized. This will allow for more accurate analysis and bringing together previously disparate datasets into one complete picture. Using Data Import, you can upload your brand’s existing data into Google Analytics and join it with GA data for reporting, segmentation and remarketing.

By using the Data Import functionality in Google Analytics Premium and with the help of Analytics Pros, consumer legal services brand Avvo created clear, accurate data, which continues to impact decisions across their organization. While Avvo already had a successful and fast-growing business, the lack of visibility into advertising success made it hard to align key revenue opportunities with actual site usage. Read the full case study here.

“We’ve been very pleased with the results that were realized using Data Import in Google Analytics to analyze client behavior on our website. This exercise has given us better insight into valuable data that will ultimately impact how we segment the market for legal services.”

- Sendi Widjaja, Co-Founder & CTO, Avvo, Inc.

Data Import also now supports a new Query Time mode that allows you to join your data with historical GA data. With this mode you can:

Enhance existing, already processed GA data with imported dimensions and metrics.
Upload calculated values after a transaction occurs, like total customer spend, last transaction date, or a loyalty score.
Correct any errors in data you have uploaded to GA in the past.

Query Time mode is currently in whitelist release for Premium users. For more information, contact your Premium account manager. You can learn more about Premium here.

Illustration of a new Google Analytics report with data from multiple sources

We are also introducing a new version of Cost Data import that provides more versatile support for importing historical data. Additionally, cost data can now be uploaded directly through the Google Analytics web interface (previously, data import required using the GA API). Note: Users of the original cost data import must migrate to the new version. Details can be found in the cost data migration guide.

How to get started using Data Import

For more information, read Data Import on the Google Analytics Help Center. Also check our new developer Data Import guides that will get you up and running in no time. Some features are currently not rolled out to all users. If you’d like to join the beta for full-access, sign-up here.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Jieyan Fan, Richard Maher, Rick Elliott and the Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics 360 Suite - built for enterprise.

Spotlight on Google Tag Manager: Open and Secure Tag Management

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

Improving Google Analytics Events with Unique Events

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

Explore important insights from your data — automatically

Enterprise-Class Tag Management: Announcing Workspaces

Better insight into your customer interactions with Google Analytics

Use Smart Goals, powered by Google Analytics, to optimize in AdWords

Share Google Analytics data and remarketing lists more efficiently using manager accounts (MCC)

Real-Time Data Validation with Google Tag Assistant Recordings

Introducing Trash Can: Data Recovery in Google Analytics

Simplify your Google Analytics Reporting with Add-ons for Google Sheets

Brian Gavin Diamonds Sees 60% Increase in Customer Checkout with Enhanced Ecommerce

The Top 3 Google Analytics Configuration Issues Impacting your Data (and How to Fix Them)

New Benchmarking Reports Help Twiddy Boost Email Open Rates by 500%

Analytics Pros helps Avvo Gain New Insights with Data Import

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