Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Why Building a Culture of Optimization Improves the Customer Experience

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 The old challenge of gathering enough data has been replaced by a new one: gleaning insights from the mountains of data we’ve collected — and taking action.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!


  1. 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

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:

  1. Create a new container for your AMP site
  2. Drop the Tag Manager snippet on your AMP pages
  3. Create your first tags
  4. 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

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


  1. Google/ Ipsos, Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study - Total Shoppers Report, Jan 2016, Base: US Holiday Shoppers, n=1,500
  2. Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000, Same store shoppers = 801
  3. Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000
  4. Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000
  5. Google-commissioned Ipsos Brand Building on Mobile Survey, U.S., December 2015 n=1000, 18-54 year olds
  6. Google/Ipsos, "Consumers in the Micro-Moment," Wave 3, U.S., n=1291 online smartphone users 18+, August 2015
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000
  12. Google Analytics Shopping category data, Nov 1, 2015–December 14, 2015, United States


Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

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.

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

    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’

    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

    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

    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

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    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:

    Pitch 2.png

    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

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    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:
    • 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

    Android Developer Story: Papumba grows revenue globally by localising its family titles on Google Play

    Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

    Papumba is an educational games developer based in Argentina, with a core team of four people and a vision to grow a global business.

    Watch Gonzalo Rodriguez, CEO, and Andres Ballone, CFO, explain how working with a team of experts from across the world and adapting their games to local markets helped them find success globally.

    Learn more about localized pricing and translation services to grow your app or game business globally on Google Play. Also, get the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date on new features and learn best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.