Analytics Blog: September 2015

Analytics
Tag Management
Experimentation
Attribution
Audiences
Data Visualization
Insights

FEATURED

Google Analytics 360 Suite - built for enterprise.

Understand your customers by bringing all of your data together so everyone in your large organization can explore, gain intelligence and inform strategies to increase business performance. Learn more.

Top 5 ways to amplify the impact of TV dollars with digital

September 22, 2015

Today’s consumers hop from screen to screen according to their needs-of-the-moment. They don’t give a thought to what “channel” they are using to interact with your brand — they simply expect brands to keep up.

In last week’s post, we discussed the advent of TV Attribution and the new opportunity marketers have to drive more ROI in a multi-screen world. This week, we’ll discuss 5 key ways that TV Attribution can help you get more from mass media investments with digital insights.

If you want more details on any of our top tips, take a look at our recent white paper or register for our upcoming webinar.

1. Align creative across channels. If a friend was always chummy on the phone, but cold in person, wouldn’t you be confused? Don’t let a choppy brand presentation put off interested consumers who experience TV ads, search online, and visit your sites and apps. Use consistency between your online and offline presence for a clear message.

2. Empower mobile search. Knowing that TV ads inspire mobile searches, make sure digital copy aligns with verbal and on-screen messages in TV ads to ensure consumers find you online. Use mobile context — include click-to-call, highlight nearby stores, show relevant hours — to move consumers from search to purchase.

3. Connect the data. Connecting TV airings data with digital signals like search query and site traffic offers a new level of granularity and immediacy of reporting. With better insights, you can fine-tune your next TV campaign and align digital strategies to capture incremental opportunity.

4. Find your best audiences. Take the guesswork out of demographic targeting with digital insights. Search and site data reveal who is really responding to TV messages by taking online actions — so you can confirm your best audiences by behavior.

5. Understand your consumer. Analyze digital signals to understand what parts of your message consumers are retaining — or not retaining. The keywords consumers search after being exposed to your TV ad offer insights that can drive faster campaign optimization, saving time and money over traditional surveys or studies.

More insight, more opportunity

TV Attribution not only offers a new, immediate, and granular view of mass media impact — it allows you to create more cross-channel synergy. Today’s consumers want immediate gratification and have high expectations for the brands they pursue. Join us for a webinar October 28th to discuss more tips and tricks for meeting new consumer expectations, and hear how top brands are leveraging minute-by-minute TV Attribution analysis to improve cross-channel marketing. If you’re ready to dive in, register here.

Posted by Natasha Moonka, Google Analytics team

Google

Labels: Attribution

Programmatic helps brands make the most of micro-moments

September 16, 2015

The following was originally posted to the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

Google

Labels: Mobile , Related Products

How can you get more ROI in a multi-screen world?

September 14, 2015

We live in a world of instant gratification. Wherever we are, and whatever we may be doing, when we want to know, to do, to buy we pull out our phones and search for satisfaction.

For marketers, a multi-screen world offers new opportunities for ROI. While TV accounts for 42% of all ad spending, or $78.8 billion annually, we also know that 90% of consumers engage with a second screen* — think tablets and mobile phones — while watching TV.

This means that in a multi-screen world, executing separate television and digital campaigns is a strategic miss. If that’s the case, why are so many of us still doing it?

The old TV measurement problem

In the past, channel-centric thinking, competing objectives, and data silos often stopped marketers from true cross-channel measurement. Even with the advent of marketing measurement best practices like marketing mix modeling, we lived with a significant blind spot around the true impact of TV advertising.

TV airings data was hard to come by, and traditional Marketing Mix Modeling reports are often too high-level — and too slow — to offer actionable insights. So, while we’ve known for a long time that TV drives consumers online, we had no way to accurately attribute digital activity to granular TV investments.

The new TV attribution solution

Now, TV attribution makes it possible to connect the dots between TV airings data and digital activity. The resulting insights from TV attribution enable marketers to improve campaign strategies across both mass media and digital channels.

At a high level, TV attribution carefully analyzes typical search query and site activity to establish a baseline. Then, minute-by-minute TV airings data is correlated with search and site data to detect — and accurately attribute — traffic driven by each TV ad spot.

We’ve seen great results for marketers that have embraced this new marketing measurement best practice. For example, Nest assessed and improved cross-channel campaigning with TV attribution, achieving a 2.5x lift in search volumes and 5x increase in search and website responses by acting on resulting insights.

For more details, read our new infographic to learn:

How TV attribution reveals TV-to-digital behaviors
How TV attribution insights help marketers quantify TV’s business value, optimize media buys, and empower creative teams
How deeper understanding of consumers can lead to more effective cross-channel strategies

Time to improve your ROI?

Now that TV and digital data can be analyzed to reveal cross-channel behaviors, marketers have a new opportunity to improve both mass media and digital strategies. Next week, we’ll post our top 5 tips on amplifying TV dollars with digital. If you’re ready to get going on maximizing TV ROI, stay tuned.

Posted by: Natasha Moonka, Google Analytics team

*Source: Neal Mohan, Google, “Video Ads and Moments That Matter,” Consumer Electronics Show 2015.

Google

Labels: Attribution

Using Google Analytics to understand real-time messaging behavior

September 8, 2015

This is a guest post by Nico Miceli, a Google Developer Expert for Google Analytics, Technical Analytics Consultant on Team Demystified, quantified selfer, and all around curious guy. He blogs at nicomiceli.com and tweets from @nicomiceli.

Hello, my name is Nico, and I love data. I quantify everything, and the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol is my favorite way to do it.

With the Measurement Protocol, I can send, store, and visualize any data I want without having to build a backend collection system. I’ve even used it in my personal life to track my sleep patterns, the temperature in my house, and the number of times my brother’s cat actually uses his scratching post.

So when my team started using Slack, a real-time messaging app for teams, I wanted to get the stats. Which clients are contacting us most frequently? When are the contacting us? More importantly, who on our team is the wordiest and uses the most emojis? Out of the box, the app offered some data, but it wasn’t enough for me to answer all the questions I had.

After taking a look at the technical documentation for the messaging app, I realized that Google Analytics is the answer! With the Measurement Protocol and the Slack Real Time API, I could get SO MUCH DATA!! With help from fellow developer Joe Zeoli, Slackalytics was born.

Slackalytics (in beta) is a simple, open source bot for analyzing Slack messages. Built in node.js, it grabs messages from Slack (using the Slack Real Time Messaging API), does some textual analysis, and counts the occurrences of specific instances of words and symbols. Then, using the Measurement Protocol, it sends the data to your Google Analytics account.

Screenshot of the report showing the custom metrics (emoji, exclamation, word, and ellipse counts) for different Slack channels.

Because the data gets stored in Google Analytics, you can visualized and analyze within the UI or use the Google Analytics Core Reporting API. I like to combine this data with other information so I have export it all into a Google sheet using the Google Analytics Spreadsheets Add-on.

In this beta version of Slackalytics, I’m using two Custom Dimensions: User ID, Channel Name... and six Custom Metrics: Word Count, Letter Count, Emoji Count :), Exclamation Count !!!, Question Count ???, Ellipse Count...

But this is just a fraction of what’s possible. Slackalytics is open source, so you can build your own version. If you’re a developer: Fork my project on GitHub.

If you’re not a developer: Fear not. You can still create your own messaging analysis bot by following my detailed walkthrough on setting this up.

Developer or not, you can build and test your own bot by using Google Analytics and any communication app that has a realtime API. Find out when your clients ask the most questions, monitor other integrations and bots, find out who talks in