Google Analytics Blog

Using the Customer Voice to Speed Up Decision Making

2017-01-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

See the Lenovo story here.

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

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

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

KASKUS doubles CTR and triples CPM with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360

2016-12-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

Want to review a new digital camera, get gift ideas, or buy tickets to the next Morrissey concert? If you're in Indonesia, KASKUS is your place. 28 million unique users buy, sell, talk and share information on the site each month, making it the country's largest user-generated content publisher.

With so many users, KASKUS recently faced a growing challenge: how to serve ads that are relevant to users’ age, gender and interests?

“As KASKUS is the leading digital community and social commerce platform, our vision is to drive data-driven monetization by making our first-party audience data actionable, we want to give advertisers ways to perform better in our sites and increase the effectiveness of our impression-based ads." Ronny W. Sugiadha, Chief Marketing Officer for KASKUS

Sugiadha and his team wanted to create an audience segment that had a high demand among advertisers: users who had shown interest in mobile devices and were more likely to purchase them.

KASKUS turned to Sparkline, a Google Analytics 360 Services and Sales Partner, who worked with them to approach the challenge to serve the most relevant ads. The process went from an advanced Google Analytics 360 implementation, to segmentation analysis and audience sharing with Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP).

Below is a screenshot of the actual segment shared between Google Analytics 360 and DFP. To learn more about the process, read the full case study.

How well did the new audience work compared to its old open-auction inventory in the Doubleclick Ad Exchange (AdX)?

"Using the Google Analytics 360 Audience Segment sharing feature in DFP and AdX, we doubled our CTR and saw a 3.3X CPM uplift on this audience-targeted AdX inventory," reports Ronny Sugiadha. "We are looking forward to even more positive impact moving forward."

To learn more about how KASKUS achieved those results read the full case study.

Posted by Catherine Candano and Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

googleAnalyticsR: A new R package for the Analytics Reporting API V4

2016-12-16T13:44:00.002-08:00

Hello, I'm Mark Edmondson and I have the honour of being a Google Developer Expert for Google Analytics, a role that looks to help developers get the most out of Google Analytics. My specialities include Google APIs and data programming, which has prompted the creation of googleAnalyticsR, a new R package to interact with the recently released Google Analytics Reporting API V4.

R is increasingly popular with web analysts due to its powerful data processing, statistics and visualisation capabilities. A large part of R’s strength in data analysis comes from its ever increasing range of open source packages. googleAnalyticsR allows you to download your Google Analytics data straight into an R session, which you could then use with other R packages to create insight and action from your data.

As well as v3 API capabilities, googleAnalyticsR also includes features unique to v4:

On the fly calculated metrics
Pivot reports
Histogram data
Multiple and more advanced segments
Multi-date requests
Cohorts
Batched reports

The library will also take advantage of any new aspects of the V4 API as it develops.

Getting started

To start using googleAnalyticsR, make sure you have the latest versions of R and (optionally) the R IDE, RStudio

Start up RStudio, and install the package via:

install.packages("googleAnalyticsR")

This will install the package on your computer plus any dependencies.

After successful installation, you can load the library via library(googleAnalyticsR), and read the documentation within R via ?googleAnalyticsR, or on the package website.

An example API call — calculated metrics

Once installed, you can get your Google Analytics data similarly to the example below, which fetches an on-the-fly calculated metric:

library(googleAnalyticsR)

# authenticate with your Google Analytics login
ga_auth()

# call google analytics v4
ga4 <- google_analytics_4(viewId = 123456,
                         date_range = c("2016-01-01",
                                       "2016-06-01"),
                         metrics = c(calc1='ga:sessions /
                                            ga:users'),
                         dimensions = 'medium')

See more examples on the v4 help page.

Segment Builder RStudio Addin

One of the powerful new features of the v4 API is enhanced segmentation, however they can be complicated to configure. To help with this, an RStudio Addin has been added which gives you a UI within RStudio to configure the segment object. To use, install the library in RStudio then select the segment builder from the Addin menu.

Create your own Google Analytics

Dashboards googleAnalyticsR has been built to be compatible with Shiny, a web application framework for R. It includes functions to make Google Analytics dashboards as easy as possible, along with login functions for your end users.

Example code for you to create your own Shiny dashboards is on the website.

BigQuery Google Analytics 360 exports

In addition to the v4 and v3 API functions, BigQuery exports from Google Analytics 360 can also be directly queried, letting you download millions of rows of unsampled data.

Aimed at analysts familiar with Google Analytics but not SQL, it creates the SQL for you to query common standard metrics and dimensions, using a similar interface as the API calls. See the BigQuery section on the website for more details.

Anti-sampling

To more easily fetch non-sampled data, googleAnalyticsR also features an anti-sampling flag which splits the API calls into self-adjusting time windows that are under the session sampling limit. The approach used is described in more detail here.

Get involved

If you have any suggestions, bug reports or have any ideas you would like to contribute, then you are very welcome to raise an issue or submit a pull request at the googleAnalyticsR Github repository, or ping me on Twitter at @HoloMarkeD.

Posted by Mark Edmondson, Google Developer Expert

Using Surveys to Better Understand the Customer Journey

2016-12-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

Your organization has plenty of data about customer behavior that tells you what different customers do where and when. You can see when they visit you online, how long they search, and how much they spend.

But too often the “why" behind their actions remains elusive. With the mountains of information you collect, the insights are often difficult to find, take too much time to discern, or require additional data. All this means it takes marketers too long to get important information that could make a real difference to the customer experience — and the bottom line.

“If you want to have a major impact, you need an integrated approach to see what is happening at all customer touch points and understand how effective you are,” says Joerg Niessing, a marketing professor at INSEAD.

The number of sources of marketing and customer data that a company integrates correlates strongly to performance vis-à-vis competitors, according to a recent study published by INSEAD. The study focused on customer and marketing data, including:

Digital analytics, such as optimizing email campaigns, testing content, and analyzing digital pathways to optimize website use and experience.
Customer analytics, including lifetime value and loyalty calculations, response and purchase propensity modeling, and micro segmentation.
Marketing analytics, such as demand forecasting, marketing attribution models, market mix modeling, and media budget optimization.
Sales analytics, including pricing elasticity modeling, assortment planning, and sales territory design.
Consumer analytics, including surveys/questionnaires, customer experience research, and customer satisfaction/advocacy modeling.

The study found that those companies that leverage multiple sources and focus diligently on demand generation have significantly stronger business performance, especially total shareholder return.

Straight to the source

But insights uncovered from many data sources often beg the question, “Why?” To answer that, modern marketers go directly to the source: consumers.

Traditionally, companies that use surveys and field research to try to get at the “why” behind the “what” pay a lot of money for information that is often too complex to understand and too slow to arrive. When it does come in, it is sometimes no longer relevant and leaves organizations trying to solve last month’s or last year’s problem at the expense of current ones. Attempting to get speedier or less costly results risks compromising accuracy.

But innovations in market research are changing the game. Easy-to-use survey tools like Google Surveys help marketers fill out their knowledge of customer behavior much faster than traditional surveying methods.

Companies that make use of these fast, convenient survey solutions gain insight not only into what people actually do, but also what they say they will do — and in that gap there could be opportunities. “Marrying digital and marketing analytics with consumer research from surveys gives marketers deeper insights and opens up the number of hypotheses a company can test,” says Suzanne Mumford, Head of Marketing for the Google Analytics 360 Suite. “Marketing today is in near real time and your data should be, too.”

“Marrying digital and marketing analytics with consumer research from surveys gives marketers deeper insights and opens up the number of hypotheses a company can test.”
—Suzanne Mumford, Head of Marketing, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Say your website analytics reveal that one segment of your visitors are highly engaged with your site content, but their visits aren’t converting into sales. “You can ask them directly why they keep coming back but don’t end up buying. Surveys let you take your data one step further and round out the picture of the customer so you can make informed business decisions and tailor your customer experiences,” says Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager for Google Surveys.

Supporting business decisions with surveys

Surveys are also useful if marketers find themselves in an internal debate about two campaign concepts. Before making a large investment based on subjective opinion, marketing leaders can validate messaging by asking the target audience about their preference.

For modern marketers, surveys have become an essential element in an integrated marketing approach — they produce insights that complement those uncovered by other data sources. “I want to make sure that the customer voice is front and center but that we also surround it with other data — that we can make really good, holistic business decisions,” says Stacey Symonds, Senior Director for Consumer Insights at Orbitz.

So think about what you’d most like to ask your customers — or those who visit your site but don’t buy. Survey solutions like Google Surveys allow businesses to get sophisticated, accurate data in a matter of days, not months. Because these methods are more affordable and quick, they allow businesses to continually iterate to meet customers’ needs.

“Surveys empower organizations to get answers when they matter,” Fields says. “And getting those insights quickly helps marketing stay nimble.”

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” an online Insight Center Collection of articles from Harvard Business Review, to learn how organizations are using market research to gain more consumer insights.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

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

Does Your Company Have a Data Science Strategy to Create Customer Value?

2016-12-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest challenges for marketing leaders today is not finding or hiring analytic talent, according to new research cited in a Harvard Business Review report, but rather it is finding the right ways to move the mountains of data into insights and then into action.

The study concluded that marketing organizations need analytics professionals who understand data and the technologies that collect, house, and integrate it.¹ That’s a given. But beyond that, experts say, executives need to place more emphasis on data science than on data scientists. Put another way: They should pay more attention to analyzing and acting on what they have now because analysis paralysis doesn’t create customer value.

“Data scientists are technicians who are very good at managing and manipulating data,” says Peter Fader, the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage. “But data science is about looking for patterns, coming up with hypotheses, testing them, and acting on the results.”

Machine Learning

That’s where machine learning can speed analysis and augment your analytics team’s work — by crunching massive amounts of data to identify patterns and anomalies.

A type of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms that iteratively learn from data, machine learning can surface insights without being explicitly programmed where to look for them. It makes it more efficient to crunch massive amounts of data, calling out issues before you see them and providing answers to questions you may not have even thought to ask. This speed to insight allows marketers and analysts to do more with the data that comes in and see the whole picture of the customer journey.

Accenture Managing Partner Conor McGovern says, “If you can’t make the rubber hit the road with a disciplined approach to analytics, you will end up with customer experiences that aren’t as effective or engaging as they could be. As with any source of information, you need to embed and ingrain analytics into decision-making processes to obtain the desired results.”

“If you can’t make the rubber hit the road with a disciplined approach to analytics, you will end up with customer experiences that aren’t as effective or engaging as they could be.” —Conor McGovern, Managing Partner, Accenture

How Lenovo Harnessed Data to Create Customer Value

That targeted data science approach can give companies of any size a competitive advantage. Lenovo is a prime example of a marketing team that mastered the use of advanced technology and analytics tools, driving the company to create better value for its customers.

Ajit Sivadasan, Vice President and General Manager of Global E-commerce, realized that customer data was burgeoning and Lenovo needed to harness it. He began by establishing an analytics team in his e-commerce unit that today integrates and analyzes customer and marketing data from more than 60 sources worldwide. By integrating and analyzing Lenovo’s data, Sivadasan found that there are three main drivers of customer satisfaction that correlate to loyalty:

Quality of the online experience. Sivadasan’s team tracks important variables such as how easy it is to find product information and whether Lenovo provides sufficient follow-up on the status of an order.
Meeting commitments. This second driver includes how often the company misses promised ship dates.
Experience with the product itself. By analyzing social media and direct customer feedback, Lenovo’s ecommerce team helps the company improve its products.

Competing on Analytics

In order to pursue an effective analytics strategy, executives have to clearly define business problems and what the questions are that analytics can answer. If executives don’t do this, they risk getting back data that sends the organization in the wrong direction.

For example, companies frequently find themselves puzzling over a dip in conversions among a desired demographic. Organizations need to be able to study the data, ask customers and potential customers the right questions, and experiment with offering different solutions to optimize the customer experience. Answers need to come in quickly so the organization can act quickly — ahead of the competition.

The speed to insight that machine learning offers can help companies act strategically on the data they have, homing in on the insights with impact, allowing executives to make informed decisions.

Says Joerg Niessing, Marketing Professor at INSEAD: “Executives still have to make the same strategic decisions that they have always made. They need to understand market dynamics and what competitors are doing — and then determine how the company should react. The only difference is that we now have a great deal more data and analytics to help make these decisions.”

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights: Turning Data Into Action,” an online Insight Center Collection of articles from Harvard Business Review, to learn more about using analytics to create customer value.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, "Marketing in the Driver's Seat: Using Analytics to Create Customer Value," 2015.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Marketing Analytics Can Improve the Customer Experience

2016-12-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Almost every organization today is putting customer experience (CX) at the core of its strategy, aiming to provide products and services that meet customers at every touch point. In a crowded, multichannel marketplace, companies realize that a great customer experience — consistently delivering what customers want, when they want it — can be a powerful differentiator.

But many companies fail to deliver, according to research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS). Although half of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business, just half of them said they perform well in it.

Although half of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business, just half of them said they perform well in it.¹

The problem isn’t access to data; most businesses said they collect mountains of information on their customers. The real obstacle to better customer experience, the research has found, is built into the way organizations share that data, analyze it, and work together.

Improving the customer experience is the end game, but getting there requires more than data. It requires the right data, from multiple channels, integrated to give a holistic picture of the customer journey. And that is where many companies struggle. HBR-AS found that fewer than a quarter of companies integrate customer data across channels to provide a single customer view.

Integrating data for customer value requires getting around organizational silos, which HBR-AS research has identified as the number one problem for companies struggling to improve their total customer experience. These silos prevent organizations from understanding the customers’ expectations at critical moments, and cultural resistance makes it tough to get the collaboration needed to solve the problem. As a result, respondents said the business doesn’t develop the right insights, get the information to the right people, or make the moves that could add real value.

Data-Driven Insight

By contrast, the study found that “best-in-class companies” — those with strong financial performance and competitive customer experiences — are more likely to have broken down those silos than are other organizations. And they use sophisticated analytics in a way that provides insights that open up the customer experience to the whole organization.

For example, at Progressive Insurance, the marketing team collected data on how mobile app users were behaving. These consumers, they discovered, wanted more than just helpful insurance quotes in the mobile app; they wanted to buy insurance on the spot. Progressive responded by giving them exactly what they wanted — the option to buy insurance — which vastly improved the customer experience and delivered a big win for the company. When a company creates customer value, the business benefits naturally follow.

Marketing Takes the Lead

But who is going to break down silos, connect the dots of the customer experience, and drive its improvement?

Today, marketing leaders need to make the case to the company that optimizing the customer experience requires breaking down silos and opening up collaboration, and shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach, says Erich Joachimsthaler, author of Brand Leadership: Building Assets in an Information Economy. For example, a European beverage company assigns marketing groups to consumption moments, such as a night out, instead of brands and channels. The goal is to embed marketers deeply into a particular customer experience and focus them on each step of the customer journey.

“Marketing needs to connect the dots across all customer-facing functions of a company, including partners, in order to deliver real value instead of just communicating the brand,” says Joachimsthaler.

Robust analytics and insights have given marketing teams insight into how customers interact with brands, highlighting product preferences, purchase sequences, and so forth. And they reveal how top of the funnel marketing activities — such as an online display ad or TV commercial — tie in to in-store sales or an online website conversion. Measurement and analytics allow brand marketing and performance marketing to complement each other for the customers’ benefit.

Clearly the stakes are high, and marketing leaders and their teams are challenged to think in new ways. They don’t need more data; they need to find ways to identify and supply their organization with useful insights from that data.

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review Insight Center articles, to learn how companies are using data and marketing analytics to improve customer experience.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Source: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, "Marketing in the Driver's Seat: Using Analytics to Create Customer Value," 2015.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Data Studio: DoubleClick Campaign Manager Connector

2016-11-30T08:21:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reporting!

The Data Studio team

Posted by Alon Gotesman, Google Data Studio team

Rethinking Marketing Measurement from the Ground Up

2016-11-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

From the moment smartphones touched human hands, they began to change how people interact with brands. It happened slowly at first … but today 91 percent of smartphone users turn to their phone for ideas while doing a task.¹

Consumers expect more of marketers now. They expect brands to answer their questions and deliver the exact experiences they want at the moments they need to know, go, do, or buy things. They expect this across all screens and all touch points, over hundreds of interactions on their journeys.

This means there are three questions marketers should be asking:

Is our brand useful to consumers at every touch point?
How can we measure our usefulness?
How can we be even more useful tomorrow?

To deliver, enterprise marketers need a new approach to measurement that shows them the entire customer journey and lets them see what’s working at each step along the way. The problem is that many of our measurement tools and metrics were created for a desktop world at a time when marketing focused on channel performance.

Today we need an understanding of our audiences across devices and channels. That means taking into account the impact of mobile online and offline, quickly spotting insights, and trying new ways to provide better customer experiences.

Breaking Down the Data Silos

A car shopper today can have hundreds of digital interactions — or in this case 900-plus interactions — before buying. Each one of those moments is an opportunity for a brand to be useful. And each one leaves its own data trail.

But companies that look at data channel by channel, in a silo, can miss the forest for the trees. We need to break down measurement and strategy silos and create an integrated view of the consumer’s journey. It’s likely you have found yourself in a debate with colleagues about metrics and campaign results and thought, “It’s not about what matters to channel X — we need to zoom out to see the whole picture and do what’s best for our customers.”

The truth is that the future of enterprise measurement depends on people and departments, tools and systems, all talking to each other and sharing insights in real time about what customers want most.

From Silos to Synthesis

So if we know that one session and one click doesn’t tell the full story … and if we want to connect consumer behavior dots over time … where do we start? The best place is with the classic question “What outcomes are we trying to achieve?” But then instead of saying “How do we reach our goals?” let’s ask: “How do we measure success?”

Key performance indicators (KPIs) have to reflect the new objectives of the mobile-first world. Marketers who link their metrics to business results are three times more likely to hit revenue goals than those who don’t, according to a Forrester report.²

And while more data is always great, what marketers really need are more insights. That’s why the question “What’s working?” is so crucial. If that car buyer sees a TV commercial for a small sedan or pickup truck and searches for reviews and mileage ratings on his or her mobile phone, watches videos about special features, visits a dealer for a test-drive, and then finally buys a month later, marketers must find a way to bridge the gaps between TV airings and search lift, and display ads and video views, to see where the real influence happened.

How much credit should mobile get? How many touch points were there? Marketers need to know. And if the gaps can’t be filled perfectly, we should get comfortable with new proxies that will give us a sturdy estimate instead.

Marketers, Mobile, and Tomorrow

Evolution is a good thing, even if measuring in new ways can be awkward at first. Measurement and marketing go hand in hand — both have to keep pace with the vastly rising expectations of mobile-first consumers. Discomfort means you’re working to stay ahead.

So, take stock of what you measure and how you measure. Ask if those KPIs account for all the ways consumers may engage with your brand. If not, ask yourself why you’re measuring them in the first place. Focus on the outcomes you want and map your new metrics back to your strategy.

Smartphones have already changed how people interact with brands, and they’ll surely alter those interactions even more in years to come. We can’t predict how. But we can say that the brands that measure the results of those changes first will have a major edge over those that don’t. Measurement isn’t what happens at the end; it’s where the smarter and more successful future begins.

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review Insight Center articles, to read more about best practices and case studies on enterprise marketing and analytics.

A version of this article first appeared as sponsor content on HBR.org in August 2016.

¹Source: Google/Ipsos, “Consumers in the Micro-Moment” study, March 2015.

²Source: Forrester, “Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Performance,” March 2016

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director of Marketing, Performance Ads at Google

Falling in Love With Measurement

2016-11-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Why aren't more marketers measuring their campaigns?

If Marketing and Measurement had a relationship status in today’s mobile-first world, it would be: "It's complicated." They've been sitting at the same table at lunch, there's been some small talk in the hall … but they haven't really gotten comfortable together.

Which is a shame, because these two are perfect for each other.

Connecting the dots

Consumers often have dozens or even hundreds of digital interactions before they buy something today. The sheer amount of data created is staggering. There are more than enough dots to be connected for full visibility into the customer journey.

But, as much data as marketers collect today, the truth is many still struggle to make sense of it all. In some companies, you could say Marketing and Measurement find themselves sitting at opposite ends of the couch.

Only 5 out of 10 marketers said they think about measurement while developing campaign strategy, a recent survey of marketing decision-makers shows.¹ If you don't define your measurement goals from the beginning, you may not collect the right data — and understand what's working and what isn't.

Marketing and Measurement should get cozier sooner: at the front-end of the campaign process, while developing strategy. Yet, too many marketers said they think about measurement while building materials and assets (nearly 16%), after the campaign has deployed (9%), or even after the campaign has finished (nearly 6%). What’s more, 16% of the survey respondents said they don’t measure their campaigns at all.²

Clearly, it's time for a relationship makeover. If you're ready to play matchmaker in your own organization, try starting a strategic conversation between Marketing and Measurement with these three questions:

Are we measuring the consumer interactions that really matter?
How quickly can we spot the key insights hidden in this data?
How do we turn those insights into better customer experiences?

When we close the gap between Measurement and Marketing, we can not only answer the question “How are we doing?” but also the more important question, “How can we do better?”

Going steady

It doesn't have to be complicated. When Marketing and Measurement go hand-in-hand throughout the customer journey, it can lead to more useful insights, higher revenues, and better experiences for everybody.

As Matt Lawson, Google's Managing Director of Ads Marketing, says, “Measurement isn’t what happens at the end; it’s where the smarter and more successful future begins.”³

Download “Measuring Marketing Insights,” a collection of Harvard Business Review articles offering best practices and insights on measurement, analytics, and how to turn data into action.

^1-2Source: Google Surveys, "Measurement in Campaign Timeline", Base: 1,092 marketing executives, U.S., August 2016.
³Harvard Business Review, “Rethink Measurement From the Ground Up,” sponsor content from Google Analytics 360 Suite, August 2016.

Posted by Karen Budell, Content Marketing Manager, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Introducing the Firebase Demo Project

2016-11-10T11:45:00.001-08:00

"All genuine learning comes from experience" - John Dewey

Earlier this year we introduced Firebase: a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It includes tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. There are many resources available to learn Firebase, from documentation, guides and free training courses (Android and iOS) we created, to advice from the Firebase community. However, there is nothing quite like learning through practical experience. To address this we’ve launched a fully functional Firebase Demo Project, available to everyone from today (get access here).

The Demo Project includes data from Flood It! (Android and iOS), a real puzzle game in which you have to flood the whole game board with one color in less than the allowed steps. Therefore, the data in the Firebase demo project is typical of what you might see for a gaming app with in-app purchases. It includes the following kinds of information:

Analytics: Attribution data, key events, cohorts and funnel reporting. This includes data about first opens (think of these like installs), in-app purchases, and more.
Remote Config: The parameters that control the app experience as well as the conditions which define which users receive which parameter values.
Test Lab: The automated test results from running the app on numerous device/OS combinations for quality assurance purposes.
Crash: Details on various crashes which have occurred in the app, including callstacks and device information.
Notifications: The notification campaigns that were sent to users to re-engage them. This includes data about the number of messages sent, opened and the number of conversions attributed to each campaign.

Firebase Demo Project: Analytics Dashboard

"Since the launch of Firebase we have been excited to continually build hands-on experience with its many features. Especially with the freely included and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps, Firebase Analytics. The Firebase Demo Project has helped our team do just that and similar to what we've done with the Google Analytics Demo Account, we've incorporated the Firebase Demo Project within our training programs. This plays a critical part in helping our clients maximise their familiarity with Firebase." - Ben Gott, Analytics Director, Periscopix

Self-Learning

The Demo Project is useful for exploring Firebase features and reports. Here are a few things you can do with it:

View all standard Analytics reports populated with real data from the Flood It! app
Dissect Analytics reports by applying a variety of filters
See which ad campaigns are driving the most valuable users to the app
Track crashes and their impact on end users, and understand the steps that led to them
See the full notifications funnel for notifications sent from the Firebase Console
View Remote Config parameters to see how values are varied based on targeting parameters, especially feature flags and percent targeting for staging and Analytics audience targeting for customization
See test results from testing the app on real physical and virtual devices in the Firebase Test Lab

Education Programs
If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Firebase then we encourage you to use the Demo Project within your course. For example, you can create practical exercises that students can complete using the Demo Project.

Access the Demo Project
You can get access to the Demo Project and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help, or have ideas to make the Demo Project more useful, please share it with the Google Analytics Community. We hope the Demo Project gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Firebase.

Happy analyzing!
Posted by Deepak Aujla & Steve Ganem, Google Analytics team

Why Building a Culture of Optimization Improves the Customer Experience

2016-11-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

How can we be more useful to our customers today?

That's the simple question that drives any marketing organization focused on testing, improvement, and growth.

But answering the question is not always so simple in our data-rich world. The old challenge of gathering enough data has been replaced by a new one: gleaning insights from the mountains of data we’ve collected — and taking action.

In response to this flood of data, many of today's most successful businesses have turned to a new approach: building what's called a culture of growth and optimization.

This growth-minded culture is one where everyone is ready to:

Test everything
Value data over opinion
Keep testing and learning, even from failures

Most companies have a few people who are optimizers by nature, interest, or experience. Some may even have a “growth team.” But what really moves the dial is when everyone in the company is on board and embraces the importance of testing, measuring, and improving the customer experience across all touchpoints.

"We refuse to believe that our customers’ experiences should be limited by our resources." - Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics, APMEX

Why should marketers care?
Because they'll be leading the revolution. 86% of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020, according to a recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit.¹ And a culture of growth and optimization offers an excellent path to major gains in those experiences.

As testing and optimization proves itself, it tends to generate higher-level investments of support, talent, and resources. The payoff arrives in the form of more visitors, more sales, happier customers and a healthier bottom line.

If you're curious about building a culture of optimization in your marketing organization, register for our Nov. 10 webinar, Get Better Every Day: Build a Marketing Culture of Testing and Optimization.

This webinar will cover:

The critical elements of a culture of optimization
Tips for building that culture in your own company
A case study discussion with Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics at APMEX, a retailer that boosted revenues with continuous testing and optimization

This kind of culture doesn't happen by command, but it’s also simple to start building.

We look forward to sharing tips on how you can get started. Happy optimizing!

The Economist Intelligence Unit, "The Path to 2020: Marketers Seize the Customer Experience." Survey and a series of in-depth interviews with senior executives. Survey base: 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, global, 2016.

Posted by Jon Mesh, Product Manager, Google Optimize and Google Optimize 360

Google Tag Manager: Giving Mobile Tagging a Little Extra Love

2016-10-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Over the last several months, we have talked about Google Tag Manager’s improvements to enterprise workflows, enhanced our security features, and made great strides to bring more partners into our Vendor Tag Template Program. Tag Manager also launched a new mobile SDK at Google I/O in May that builds on the power of Firebase, Google’s mobile app developer platform. Today, we’re excited to announce our latest efforts to make mobile tagging easier than ever with Google Tag Manager.

Welcoming AMP to the Tag Manager family

We are excited to launch support for ⚡ Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google Tag Manager! AMP is an open-sourced initiative to make the mobile experience better for everyone. Early data shows that AMP pages load 4x faster and use 10x less data than equivalent non AMP pages. Starting today, you can start using Google Tag Manager to simplify your tag deployment on AMP sites.

While implementing measurement solutions on AMP pages has already been possible, it can be confusing and cumbersome for folks who are new to AMP or who have tagging needs beyond tracking a basic page view. That’s why, in addition to Google Analytics, AMP containers in Tag Manager provide support across Google’s ad platforms including AdWords and DoubleClick. You will find more than 20 tag types available out of the box including a variety of 3rd party vendor tags. We also made sure that firing your tags is a breeze with great coverage of AMP’s triggers as readily available built-in Tag Manager triggers:

When setting up tags, it’s common to want to collect additional values such as how far the user has scrolled down the page or the page’s title. AMP Analytics’ variables serve this purpose and are available in Google Tag Manager as built-in variables ready to be integrated into your tags. You can head over to our support pages for a full list of supported tags and information on how to use built-in variables.

Getting started is as easy as it sounds:

Create a new container for your AMP site
Drop the Tag Manager snippet on your AMP pages
Create your first tags
Preview & Publish

AMP containers are built with the familiarity and flexibility that existing Google Tag Manager users already depend on. As with our other solutions in Tag Manager, AMP containers “just work” out of the box.

Improving Tag Manager for mobile apps

When we announced Google Tag Manager’s new SDK at Google I/O, we brought an integration method to Android and iOS apps that builds on the power of Firebase. This integration makes it easier than ever for developers and marketers to manage where their app data is sent, both within Google and to our supported Tag Template Vendors.

New triggers for events Firebase automatically detects

Today, we are making our mobile app containers even more intuitive and easy to use by tapping into the events that Firebase detects automatically. Now, when you are in a Firebase mobile container, you will see several new options when setting up triggers. Whether your container targets Android or iOS, you will see a new section called “Firebase Automatic Events” which contains the supported automatically detected events for the respective platforms. You can also find built-in variables for each of those events’ parameters, so setting up your tags should be a cinch.

Find parameters when you need them

In addition to the events Firebase can detect automatically, developers are encouraged to implement general events for all apps as well as suggested events by app type to help them fully take advantage of Firebase features. Once implemented, you’re able to use the parameters from these events in your tags: just create a new user-defined variable and select “Event Parameter.” With this new feature, you no longer have to remember which parameters are available for which events. Select the event you’re working with, and you get a list of available parameters.

We are dedicated to providing you with best-in-class tag management. As consumers shift to mobile, our priorities include developing simple, easy-to-use solutions for the latest mobile technologies.

Whether you are building mobile apps or adopting the AMP platform, we’ve got you covered.

Posted by Ben Gram, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

How to Apply Holiday Shopping Insights to Your Analytics Strategies

2016-10-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

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

Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

2016-10-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Google Surveys, a new product from Google Analytics Solutions, launched on Wednesday. Google Surveys makes it easy to get fast, reliable opinions from consumers on mobile devices and across the internet. The goal, as always, is to help you make more informed business decisions, understand your marketing impact, and take the pulse of your brand.

Today we're excited to talk with Dylan Lorimer, Lead Product Manager for Google Surveys, about how this product fits in with the rest of Google Analytics Solutions and what the future looks like.

Q: What is Google Surveys?
Lorimer: Google Surveys is a online market research tool for making fast, informed, data-driven business decisions. It gives businesses access to conduct research against a representative sample of users on the web and on our mobile app, Google Opinion Rewards. It’s the evolution of Google Consumer Surveys, a product that’s been in the market since 2012 and fields 1M surveys a week.

Q: How does Google Surveys differ from Google Surveys 360?
Lorimer: Google Surveys 360 is our enterprise research product; it's a fully-supported research tool that is integrated into the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Users get advanced audience targeting, dedicated support and consolidated billing, all of which make it easy for big organizations to use. Google Surveys has fewer advanced targeting features, but it's a pay-as-you-go product so that anyone can use it. Google Surveys is currently available in U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Google Surveys 360 is available in U.S. and Canada.

Q: How is Google Surveys different from other market research tools?
Lorimer: Traditional market research research often involves long, time-intensive surveys answered by individuals who have signed up to respond to surveys for compensation. The process is typically slow, costly, and out of reach for most businesses who want to make a quick and informed decision. Google Surveys aims to make high-quality research more accessible, and to bring the customer voice into the process of media performance measurement.

Q: Why is Google Surveys now part of Google Analytics Solutions?
Lorimer: Google Analytics Solutions is a set of powerful tools that helps marketers use data to understand their consumers and how they behave. Google Surveys bridges the gap between metrics-based performance measurement and the need many marketers have to get qualitative feedback from their customers on their cross-channel, cross-media marketing campaigns. Google Surveys has grown on its own over the past few years. When we saw the investment Google was making with Google Analytics Solutions to empower the marketer — something we’ve been focused on with Google Consumer Surveys for a few years now — it felt like the obvious choice to provide a missing tool in the portfolio.

Q: What are some examples of how customers are using Google Surveys?
Lorimer: YouVisit, a leading virtual reality company, just used us to find out how many of their clients were aware of virtual reality. They suspected a significant number of consumers were at least aware of the concept, and that some percentage would want to try it. But to convince clients to invest in virtual reality content, YouVisit needed hard facts. How many people wanted to try virtual reality? How many were even aware of it? YouVisit turned to Google Surveys to gather those numbers, and they were pleasantly surprised. A statistically significant sample from Google Surveys let them extrapolate that 23 million Americans had already tried virtual reality. With this data, YouVisit can confidently educate clients on virtual reality’s power to engage consumers.

“Google Surveys empowers YouVisit to accomplish our mission by better understanding what the end customer wants in immersive experience — so we can create those experiences that emotionally engage, that are impactful, that drive a real-life action.”

– Suzanne Sanders, Senior Marketing Communications Manager, YouVisit

Q: What does the future look like for Google Surveys?
Lorimer: The future is bright! We see immense potential and we're excited about new ways we can help marketers and even developers reach their target audience, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure. We're already serving surveys to over 10 million respondents, so in some ways pulling insights from that is a big data challenge for us — which is the kind of puzzle we like to solve best at Google. So there’s a lot we think we can do to be proactive about providing actionable data to our customers. Google Surveys as a research tool is just the beginning.

We hope you found this additional information useful. Ready to get started with Google Surveys? Learn more at g.co/surveys.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Marisa Currie-Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google Surveys

Spotlight on Google Surveys 360: Getting to “Why” is now easier and faster than ever before.

2016-10-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we launched Google Surveys 360, a powerful new part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Sometimes it's enough to know what your customers are buying, where they're going, and how they're purchasing. But to really understand their decisions, you want to answer a harder question: Why are they doing it? To get the answer, it turns out you just have to ask.

That’s why we introduced Surveys 360: to provide a quick, cost-effective way to ask why. The new Surveys 360 is designed to help you get more out of market research by making it easy to create online and mobile surveys that help you make more informed business decisions, faster. You ask the questions, and people browsing the web will answer them as they wait to access premium content like news articles or videos, or as they use the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app.

Surveys 360 offers several advanced features that help you reach high-priority audiences, test markets, and gain a better understanding of your impact. They include:

User list to help you measure the effectiveness of your media campaigns by surveying people exposed to your ads and videos
ZIP Code targeting that delivers your surveys to high-priority or test markets
Custom Audience panels that take the pulse of brand perception among key consumer groups
Occupation and industry targeting to help you do business-to-business research with hard-to-reach professional audiences

Surveys 360 quickly analyzes your data and delivers it in easy-to-navigate graphs, demographic segmentations, and cross-tabs. That makes it easy to find fresh insights and help your business thrive.

BuzzFeed improves client campaigns with Google Surveys 360

BuzzFeed is one company using Surveys 360 to measure campaign performance and improve its ad effectiveness.

BuzzFeed is a global news and entertainment company that creates content intended for sharing, and helps advertising clients tell brand stories with engaging video campaigns. Campaign videos are less like advertisements and more like content people want to share. As they get shared, the campaign reach is extended.

To prove the impact of this innovative ad strategy, BuzzFeed turned to Surveys 360. As BuzzFeed launches each video campaign, it also releases surveys across the Google Surveys Publisher Network and the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app. They ask people exactly what their client brands want to know: Are the campaign videos memorable and understandable? What messages mattered most and why? Did they motivate sharing? What do consumers want to know next? BuzzFeed uses the Surveys 360 user list targeting feature to automatically put the right surveys in front of the right respondents: people who have seen or interacted with campaign videos.

Low-cost, high-quality survey data from Surveys 360 lets BuzzFeed give its clients a complete picture of campaign performance, fast. It helps them prove the value of the current campaign and even suggests strategies for the next campaign.

“With Google Surveys 360, we get more timely results. Everybody seems to want to run these studies to get an understanding of how their campaigns are performing … and what things should we do to make it more impactful in the future.”
– Margo Arton, Director of Ad Effectiveness, BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed’s culture of data-driven experimentation creates success for their clients. Watch our BuzzFeed video case study for more details.

This is only the beginning! We'll continue to iterate and offer new features for Surveys 360 in the coming months. It's available for purchase today in the accounts of all Analytics 360 Suite users in the U.S. and Canada. Go to g.co/surveys to learn more.

Happy surveying!

Posted by Michael Cumberbatch, Product Manager, Google Surveys 360

Announcing: Google Surveys 360, the newest product in the Google Analytics 360 Suite

2016-10-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

Today we’re excited to announce a major addition to the Google Analytics 360 Suite and a big step toward bridging brand and performance marketing — the arrival of Google Surveys 360.

Now for the first time, marketers of all types can get fast, accurate market research — in combination with their marketing performance and analytics data — to help them make key business decisions at the speed of today's digital world. Google Surveys 360 makes doing market research as easy as buying an airline ticket with your favorite app. It's available for purchase today in the U.S and Canada as part of the Analytics 360 Suite.

“Nest uses the Google Analytics 360 Suite and recently beta tested Google Surveys 360. By using our website analytics data, we surveyed shoppers who browsed our product pages but left without purchasing. As marketers we wanted to know: why did shoppers leave our site without purchasing? And that’s exactly what we learned. This insight has given Nest an opportunity to address buyers needs -- adding more in-depth product information to our site, turning browsers into buyers.”

-Harry Tannenbaum, Head of Analytics, Nest

Why surveys? Why now?

We launched the Analytics 360 Suite earlier this year with a big goal: to bring enterprise-class marketers the full and integrated set of data and marketing analytics products they need to compete in today’s multi-screen and hyper-speed world.

Mobile continues changing the customer journey, as 96% of us now use smartphones to get things done.¹ More devices, more channels, more choices: the shift is affecting every phase of the funnel from awareness to purchase. And that's changing the nature of marketing itself. Marketing organizations that used to be divided into brand and performance teams — one for perceptions and trust, the other for sales and leads — are seeing those worlds come together. Marketers are realizing that brand and performance are inherently tied together, with data as the bridge.

In these conditions, market research has been slow to adapt. Companies spend a lot of money to get to the “why” behind the what, how and where, but traditional research means hiring a research firm, waiting three months or more, and then getting data that's siloed and may not be sharable.

This is exactly why we’re integrating Google Surveys 360, previously called Google Consumer Surveys, into the suite. With a panel of 10M+ online respondents and 1M surveys fielded weekly, it offers enterprise marketers (of all types) access to a brand new layer of data and insights into what consumers are doing and thinking.

An entirely new type of consumer insight

Whether you're a market researcher or a digital or brand marketer, Google Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone in the organization to create a survey, find a specific audience sample, and generate statistically significant results — in just a few days. It's flexible and powerful, with advanced features that include custom panels to survey specific audiences and the ability to measure ad effectiveness, target by geography (ZIP code), industry, and occupation.

But that’s just the beginning. Let’s take a look at an example of how integrating Google Surveys 360 into the Analytics 360 Suite drives real value for marketers: tying brand marketing to performance marketing and measuring offline and online interplay, such as consumer response to TV ads.

TV advertisers and digital marketers now have a fresh way to view performance across every stage of the funnel — all in a matter of days. Google Surveys 360 makes consumer ad awareness and interest research possible: just deploy an online survey to a validated, representative sample of respondents in the geography of your choice. Google Surveys 360 can ask questions about TV ad recall during and after broadcast, then follow up with questions on topics like intent and favorability. Combine this with data modeling and analysis by Google Attribution 360, and the result is a full-funnel view of marketing performance, from awareness to action. (See how Google executed this strategy during the 2016 Summer Olympics.)

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

What's next?

Google Surveys 360 is a big addition to the Analytics 360 Suite family. It's also a cousin to Google Surveys, our pay-as-you-go online market research tool — available in 12 countries. We're excited about the ways both of these products can help businesses make fast, informed data-driven business decisions.

Marketers and developers can finally reach the target audience they want, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure, in days rather than months. There’s much more we think we can do to provide actionable data to our Analytics 360 Suite customers and integrate survey data even more with the other products in the suite.

To learn more, watch this blog for the next couple of days! We’ll dive deeper into this new product and show you how it works. Additionally, as part of this update, we’ll begin to sunset our older information hubs so check out these new resources:

Happy surveying!
¹ Google “How Mobile Has Changed the Way We Get Things Done” study, September 2016.

Posted by Dylan Lorimer, Product Manager, Analytics Solutions and Measurement at Google

Digital Analytics Association Symposium in San Francisco presents ‘Stranger Things: What’s Lurking in Your Data’

2016-10-18T09:25:00.001-07:00

You can avoid the Demogorgon of Digital Analytics by attending the DAA SF Symposium on November 9th where you’ll get tips and tricks on personalization and how to survive Black Friday from your friendly neighborhood Digital Analytics practitioners. Join us for a full day of great topics covering the latest from the struggles to the new developments in our world and come out prepared to face the stranger things lurking in your data. You’ll meet an awful lot of awesome people (like you) who can help you avoid the Upside Down of Analytics. We won’t let you end up like Barb.

Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting awesome tips and real-world solutions to the challenges we all face everyday. Our lineup includes:

June Dershowitz, Head of Data Governance, Twitch
John Wallace, Analytics Entrepreneur
Kevin Dalias, Director of Predictive Data, RadiumOne
Josephine Foucher, Product Manager, Hotwire
Zann Aeck, Director of Digital Marketing, Net App
Martijn Scheijbeler, Director of Marketing, TheNextWeb
John Mesh, Google Product Manager, Optimize 360
Caitlin Anderson, Web Optimization Analyst, American Eagle
Anita Fong, Analytics Manager, Clorox
Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google

For the first time, the DAA San Francisco Symposium will also be hosting a “Women in Analytics” lunch, sponsored by Google. This lunch is open to all symposium attendees and will feature a panel of esteemed women in the analytics industry who will share their thoughts on the industry, career, and the future. Questions and participation encouraged! Can’t make the whole day? Join us just for lunch!

Theme: Stranger Things: What’s Lurking in Your Data

When: November 9th, registration starts at 9:30am, program 10:00am to to 4:30pm, followed by a networking reception

Where: Galvanize San Francisco-SoMa, 44 Tehama Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

Cost: Members of the DAA: Early Bird $75 | Standard $99 | Onsite $124 Non-Members: Early Bird $99 | Standard $124 | Onsite $149 Lunch-only: $20 (includes catered box lunch and panel speakers/discussion)

Event website and registration: register here.

Space is limited so register early!

This Symposium is organized by local DAA members and volunteers. We encourage you to become a member of the DAA and join our local efforts. Become a member and reach out to one of the local chapter leaders, Krista, Charles or Prolet.

Posted by Krista Seiden, Google Analytics Advocate

Never Leave Your Data Unattended: 6 Custom Alert Areas You Shouldn’t Miss

2016-10-14T02:10:00.000-07:00

Alexander Rehnborg works as SEO Specialist at Visma Spcs, a Google Analytics 360 customer, supplying over half of all small business owners in Sweden with accounting software.

Did you ever log on to Google Analytics to casually explore statistics, only to discover you’d missed out on important changes? As marketers we cannot afford to be “too late.”

Changes to consumer behavior, website performance and traffic trends often occur quickly without much notice. Still, a lot of marketers only explore their analytics data manually during certain days of the week or even month. Imagine your important AdWords campaign or product page suddenly taking off, and you’re not in the control room to react?

With that in mind, I will discuss six vital areas you should monitor automatically with what I believe to be a the vastly underused feature in Google Analytics: “Custom Alerts.” If you didn’t read yet, check out last week’s announcement on the home of Custom Alerts.

Automated and Custom Alerts

Luckily, Google Analytics offers several features to monitor important data changes and alert you instantly. Two of the most important features are Custom Alerts and Automated Insights. The latter is a newly introduced part of the GA Assistant app for Android and iOS, using machine learning to discover critical insights among your data and alert you instantly.

In addition to the automated insights, you have the ability to set up your own custom alerts according to the KPIs you’re especially interested in, and be alerted by both email and sms. Once you receive the alerts, you may click on the link for the report to be taken straight into a dashboard, only displaying the metrics changes you’ve been alerted about.

This gives you complete focus on quickly understanding what has contributed to the change in data. You will find the Custom Alerts under the customization tab in the left sidebar of the View you want to monitor (see screenshot below).

You will find Custom Alerts under the Customization tab in the left sidebar.

6 Custom Alert Areas You Shouldn’t Miss

The scope and magnitude of the data change you’re monitoring will vary according to each business. Therefore it’s important to continuously refine the alerts guided by the common data movements you’ve seen historically for your site. Let’s start out with the six basic areas of metrics we want to monitor, inspired by LunaMetrics’ excellent guide.

1. Emergency

This is one of the main reasons you want to monitor your data in the first place – if something goes wrong, you want to know as soon as possible. Since the quickest alert you may receive is being sent daily, it’s recommended to pay extra attention to the Automated Insights function inside the Google Analytics Assistant app. Each of these alerts will be set to a daily time period.

Average Page Load time > 10 seconds Today

Be sure to set a couple of these alerts, one for the entire site and one for each page critical to your business. Slow load times not only affect engagement and conversion, it may affect your organic search ranking as well. Regular problems with load time may point to technical problems that should be addressed. Unsure of how well your site is performing today? Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

No Sessions Today

If this alert goes off, you’ll probably have some investigative work to do.

No Conversion / Goal X Today

If you’re running an e-commerce platform, this value might be a purchase, trial or demo download. For businesses offering services, no events triggered by contact forms may be the most important conversion metric. Whatever your key conversion KPIs are and depending on how often conversions normally occur, you want to monitor this daily or weekly.

2. Performance

Monitoring the performance of your site is like having a doctor constantly checking up on your health. Even though irregularities occur naturally, many sites suffer from poor server performance, cluttered or poorly written web code and other factors directly affecting your business online. These alerts you may set to weekly or monthly, depending on your traffic and needs. For every alert about an increase, you also need one for a decrease.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Page Load Time Compared to Last Month

A monthly check-up here is just what every site needs. It’s recommended to manually look for the top-5 or top-10 pages on your site with the slowest load time, and adding these under a custom alert for special monitoring.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Redirection Time Compared to Last Month

Especially larger businesses that perform redirects regularly ought to make sure these do not slow down the response time for the visitor. Some web servers don’t handle larger volumes of redirects all too well.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Server Response Time Compared to Last Month

More businesses should demand high performance from their web servers. Especially small businesses often make the mistake of purchasing web space from providers that underperform.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Page Download Time Compared to Last Month

This is a useful alert for the entire site when working with content marketing. When working in a large team of editors, it’s not unusual to discover unnecessarily large images embedded into pages, effectively prolonging the page download time.

3. Traffic

Without it, your online business dies out. Monitoring traffic is essential to develop your content marketing efforts and understand which parts of your site are really delivering as you expect. Alerts set to a weekly time period should work out fine.

> 10 Non-Domain Sessions Today

Possibly not alarming, but if you’re receiving sessions from unknown/unidentified domains, you may be target of spam. Apply the value “(not set)” with regex to Hostname.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Content Sessions Compared to Last Week

Weekly monitoring for sites focusing on content marketing, volumes might vary between businesses. If you’ve got several URL paths with content, you may use regex to define those paths, such as “content-a|content-b|content/small-business”.

> 20% More / Fewer New Sessions Compared to Last Week

This gives you insight into the nature of your traffic over time. If you ran a PR campaign the previous week, did you manage to deliver a great portion of new sessions?

> 20% Increase / Decrease in AdWords Clicks / Cost / CPC / CTR / Impressions Compared to Last Week

Your search engine marketing professional will love these automatic alerts, giving you weekly feedback on the paid search traffic and which campaigns contribute to any significant changes.

4. Engagement

Your focus here may lie entirely on classic metrics for user engagement, or you may add a mix of social media metrics to measure your efforts in those channels. Both daily and weekly alert periods make sense here.

> 5 Social Shares Today

This will vary according to your business, but following social shares of your content from your site ought to be a part of all content marketing reporting.

> 10% Increased / Decreased Bounce Rate Compared to Last Week

This debated but still interesting metric may point to engagement improvements or issues, especially if applied to specific landing pages with individual alerts.

> 20% Shorter / Longer Average Session Duration Compared to Last Week

Like with bounce rate, this may or may not point to deeper improvements or issues with user engagement. Clicking on the report link from the alert will highlight which pages contributed to the change.

5. Conversion

If you’re running a larger e-commerce website, you’ll want to measure a lot more than just a general conversion rate. You may experiment with alerts for average order value (AOV), revenue and pure number of transactions. Because metrics like AOV may change a lot depending on your product offerings online and sales trends, you may want to choose monthly alerts summarizing broader changes.

> 10% Increase / Decrease in Conversion Rate Compared to Last Week

Depending on how many conversion goals you’ve got set up, this may point to an overall conversion rate, or consist of several individual alerts for all your important conversion goals.

6. Settings

Some traffic changes are simply down to how it’s attributed. Keep a watching eye on these and related metrics.

> 20% Increase in Not Set AdWords Keywords Compared to Last Week

Here you use the value “(not set)” with exact match for Keyword. If you’re alerted about this, you need to talk to your search marketing professional to make sure all campaigns are correctly set up.

> 100 Sessions Missing Campaign Parameters Last Week

Even though it may be difficult, it’s never ideal to run ad campaigns without tagging the campaign links correctly. The volume and time period will vary between businesses, but a suggestion is to apply the value “(not set)” with regex to Medium. From here on you may dive deeper to discover unattributed traffic.

Closing Thoughts

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Google Analytics professional with years of experience or a beginner currently attending the Google Analytics Academy. Automatic monitoring of your analytics data is an essential part of digital marketing today. Over time you may find that it’s more effective to be alerted about actual changes, rather than “looking” for them. With that said, when alerted you need to do what you’ve always done, which is to manually explore the data in detail and dig out the insights.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Valentina Borovaya, Google Analytics team

Improvements coming to the Google Analytics desktop UI

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

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

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

1. Simplified navigation

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

Admin is now pinned to the bottom of the navigation

Resizeable left navigation to allow for more space in the canvas

2. Customization, all in one place

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

3. Simplified Google Analytics View switching

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

4. A streamlined login flow

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

5. An adjustable default date range

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

6. Goodbye to a couple of pages:

Intelligence Events:

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

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

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

Spotlight on Google Tag Manager: Open and Secure Tag Management

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

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

New third-party tag templates

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

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

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

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

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

Some recent additions include:

(See the full list of supported tags)

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

Secure container loading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy tagging!

Posted by Scott Herman, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get started today so you can:

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

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

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

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

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

Get started for free.

Happy reporting!
The Data Studio team

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

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Data Studio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it easy …

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

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

… And powerful

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

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

Ready to deliver better site experiences?

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

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

Happy testing!

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

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

Announcing: Smart, Fast-Acting Analytics — For Everyone

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

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

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

Businesses of all sizes need tools to measure and succeed

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

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

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

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

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

Martijn Scheijbeler

Director of Marketing - The Next Web

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

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

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

Modern measurement for everyone

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to set up Analytics on your AMP page

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

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

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

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

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

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

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics">

{

"vars": {

"account": "UA-YYYY-Y"

"triggers": {

"defaultPageview": {

"on": "visible",

"request": "pageview",

"vars": {

"title": "Name of the Article"

}

</script>

</amp-analytics>

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

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

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics">

{

"vars": {

"account": "UA-YYYY-Y"

"triggers": {

"defaultPageview": {

"on": "visible",

"request": "pageview",

"vars": {

"title": "Name of the Article"

}

"clickOnHeader": {

"on": "click",

"selector": "#header",

"request": "event",

"vars": {

"eventCategory": "examples",

"eventAction": "clicked-header"

}

</script>

</amp-analytics>

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

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

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

Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, Google AMP Specialist

Improving Google Analytics Events with Unique Events

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

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

Some benefits of Unique Events include:

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

How Unique Events Work

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

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

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

Learn more in our Help Center article here.

Posted by Breen Baker, Google Analytics Team