Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Data Studio: New Google Cloud SQL and MySQL connector

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

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

Example report accessing sales data by sales person from MySQL database 

To use the connector, select one of our new connectors. 
List of connectors now includes Cloud SQL and MySQL

Specify your database name, URL, username, and password, and click connect. 
Configuration screen to access your SQL database 

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

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

Posted by Anand Shah and Nick Mihailovski, Product Managers

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

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

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

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

Awareness

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

Coca Cola was the big winner with almost 35% of respondents having remembered seeing the ad when prompted—a result that outpaces typical recall rates in the 20%-25% range. Not a surprising result from a top CPG brand. Samsung, Chevy, United, and Visa rounded out the top five with respectable recall rates.
TV Ad Awareness Metrics
35% of respondents remembered seeing the Coca Cola ad.
Additionally, of those respondents recalling the ad, only 40% could recall the specific product or service featured in the ad. The net is that only about 8% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement. For many of the ads this was the first airing and it is reasonable to expect these numbers to improve substantially with increased exposure over the next couple of weeks.

Interest

Advertisers also want the ad to shift perceptions and create interest in the product or service featured. By surveying both viewers who saw the ad (exposed) and those who did not (unexposed), we are able to get insights into the impact of each ad’s messaging and creative. Overall, the results were impressive. On average, respondents who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the associated brands than those who did not. Likewise, respondents who saw the ads were 16% more likely to find out more and/or purchase the product being advertised.
TV Ad Interest Metrics
Consumers who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the brand and were 16% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ad.
Interestingly, the baseline favorability and purchase intentions for both non-sponsors and Olympic sponsors are relatively equal. And for the most part, the ad’s impact on both factors was the same across non-sponsors and sponsors.

Desire

These commercials don’t just make us laugh or make us feel better about the brand—they also make us search and visit websites. Second-screen searching—whether it’s to re-engage with the ad or to learn more about the product—is a powerful indication of desire. By measuring incremental search queries on Google and YouTube during the broadcast that are specific and modeled to be attributable to ads shown, we are now able to include responses in our analysis. During the opening ceremonies, TV ad driven searches were almost exclusively on mobile—94% compared to an average of 56% for those brands when the ads were not airing. For brands, that means a presence on the TV screen isn’t complete without a strategy for small screens, as well.
"94% of searches on Google and YouTube as a result of seeing the ads occurred on mobile devices."
McDonald’s took the top spot on the podium with 42% more searches than the average. BMW and Samsung fought it out for second and third with 14% and 12% respectively. The answer to the question “Do emotional and inspiring ads work?” is, in this instance, “Yes.” But so do product-featured ads. Both inspiring and product ad creatives drove 10% more searches on average. Also, ads by sponsors drove 14% more searches than their non-sponsor counterparts.
TV Ad Response Metrics
Compared to the average of the top 10 ads studied, McDonald’s drove 42% more searches.
Finally, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 ad was the overall winner with strong full-funnel performance placing in the top three across all three funnel stages. Whether people are tuning into the Olympics or their favorite TV show, they use their smartphones to search for information triggered by what they’re seeing. That means if you advertise on TV, you can now get a new view of performance across each stage of the funnel—using a combination of consumer surveys and digital response, all in a matter of days. Armed with these new insights, advertisers are now able to better understand and improve the performance of these investments in concert with their digital media.

Sourcing

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

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

4 steps to build a strong brand experience

Exposing your audience to a rock solid brand leaves a lasting impression on your site’s visitors, and helps separate you from your competitors. To establish brand consistency across multiple touch points, it’s important to create and stick to guidelines unique to your brand.

Building a strong brand experience comes down to four things:



1. Find your voice



A brand’s voice means more than just the tone you use in your content and communications. It also applies to style, colors, and graphics. Is your brand bubbly, bright, and fun? Or is it straight to the point with clean lines and a matter-of-fact tone? Often times, the type of product or services you're selling as well as your company philosophy can help you determine an appropriate tone. There’s no secret for determining what an audience will respond best to, as all styles can be effective in their own way. So choose what works for you and your creative vision.



2. Be consistent



Once you’ve laid the groundwork for what defines your brand, it’s important to stick to these principles. This applies to your website, emails, social media posts, and any other place users come into contact with your brand. Taking the time to stick to an easy to read font, finding a color scheme that draws the eye and guides your readers, or having consistent verbiage can do wonders to further cement your brand’s presence and make it memorable.




3. Know your audience



While it’s important to decide what your brand is, it’s also important to know your audience, their interests, and how they prefer to communicate. For example, if you’re targeting busy, high-level decision makers, they may prefer something short and sweet—perhaps bullet points are the way to go. If you’re targeting creative individuals, it may be worth investing in a personalized logo and site. Highly visual assets such as videos would also be a great way to go. The more you know and cater to your intended audience, the more successful your brand will be.


To understand your users’ interests, use Google Analytics to view your bounce rates, time on pages, and pageviews—three indicators of user engagement. Understand where you stand in comparison to other sites and, if needed, improve on these rates by creating a stronger connection between your site and your audience, i.e. creating content relevant to your audience’s interests.



4. Prove your Worth



Having a particular value that you provide to your customers (not to be mistaken for price) can help separate your brand from competitors. For instance, what do you provide to your customers that is different or special? This can include everything from innovative products to great customer service and can also be an emotional value (think Kleenex being associated with comfort and support). Just make sure to deliver on any and all promises made on your site.

To learn more about how to develop your user experience, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.





Posted by Jay Castro
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

Source: Inside AdSense


Data Exploration with Google Data Studio

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

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



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



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

Happy visualizing!


Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Introducing the Google Analytics Demo Account

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not - Albert Einstein


There are many resources available to learn Google Analytics, from the courses and training we offer, to advice from the community, or from the many books, guides, and articles written about Google Analytics. However, we’ve heard many of you would also like a resource so you can learn through practical experience and to apply your theoretical analytics knowledge. It can be difficult to gain practical experience since not everyone has access to a fully-implemented Google Analytics account. To fix this we’re introducing a fully functional Google Analytics Demo Account, available to everyone (get access here).


The Demo Account includes data from the Google Merchandise Store, an active Ecommerce site that sells Google branded merchandise. The ongoing Google Analytics implementation which will be completed this month already includes all the major features you would typically implement, like AdWords linking, Goals and Enhanced Ecommerce. The result is a fully functional account, with real business data.


Demo Account: Checkout Behavior Analysis Report


“Have you wondered why you've always gravitated towards people with real-world experience rather than on-paper experiences? The real-world part :) So while it hurts my feelings a bit to say that my best selling analytics books are not enough, I'm massively excited that the GA team has figured out a solution for the entire universe to get real-world experience. Get the access, download my awesome bundle of segments, dashboards and custom reports, and really start your learning experience!”
- Avinash Kaushik, Author - Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics : An Hour a Day


Self-Learning
You can use the Demo Account to learn about Google Analytics features and functionality, for example:


  1. Access all the Standard reports to see which ones are useful to you
  2. Get inspiration from predefined dashboards and segments imported from the Solutions Gallery to create your own
  3. Alter reports by adding table filters and secondary dimensions, and by changing the report type
  4. Learn how to compare audience, acquisition, behavior and conversion performance to a previous date range period
  5. Create your own personal assets such as custom reports, annotations, shortcuts and custom alerts
  6. Become familiar with the predefined attribution models and even create your own
  7. Determine whether features you don't haven’t implemented could be beneficial to you e.g. AdWords and Search Console integrations
  8. Use it as a companion when following a training course


Education Programs
If you’re an educator trying to teach others to use Google Analytics then we encourage you to use the Demo Account as a tool. You can use it to create tests, quizzes, and other learning materials for your students. In fact, we’re excited to announce that some organizations are already starting to integrate it into their learning materials.


General Assembly offers courses both online and at their campuses around the world that will help you master new skills in design, marketing, technology, and data. Their Digital Marketing course includes a unit covering Marketing Analytics that utilizes the Demo Account.


Google Analytics Partners, including E-Nor and Loves Data, use the Demo Account to provide online and classroom style trainings to cater to beginners and advanced analytics users. Their specialists will provide actionable training to create and improve your analytics configuration, implementation and marketing performance.


Access the Demo account
You can get access to the Demo Account and learn more about it, from this help article. If you need some help please let us know within the FAQs post and share any feature requests or ideas to make the Demo Account more useful within the Feature Requests post. We hope the Demo Account gives you a practical way to try new features and learn about Google Analytics.


Happy analyzing!
Posted by Deepak Aujla, Program Manager, Google Analytics




Autotrack turns 1.0


The following was originally posted on the Google Developers Blog.

Autotrack is a JavaScript library built for use with analytics.jsthat provides developers with a wide range of plugins to track the most common user interactions relevant to today's modern web.
The first version of autotrack for analytics.js was released on Github earlier this year, and since then the response and adoption from developers has been amazing. The project has been starred over a thousand times, and sites using autotrack are sending millions of hits to Google Analytics every single day.
Today I'm happy to announce that we've released autotrack version 1.0, which includes several new plugins, improvements to the existing plugins, and tons of new ways to customize autotrack to meet your needs.
Note: autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for Google Analytics 360 support. It is maintained by members of the Google Analytics developer platform team and is primarily intended for a developer audience.

New plugins

Based on the feedback and numerous feature requests we received from developers over the past few months, we've added the following new autotrack plugins:

Impression Tracker

The impression tracker plugin allows you to track when an element is visible within the browser viewport. This lets you much more reliably determine whether a particular advertisement or call-to-action button was seen by the user.
Impression tracking has been historically tricky to implement on the web, particularly in a way that doesn't degrade the performance of your site. This plugin leverages new browser APIs that are specifically designed to track these kinds of interactions in a highly performant way.

Clean URL Tracker

If your analytics implementation sends pageviews to Google Analytics without modifying the URL, then you've probably experienced the problem of seeing multiple different page paths in your reports that all point to the same place. Here's an example:
  • /contact
  • /contact/
  • /contact?hl=en
  • /contact/index.html
The clean URL tracker plugin avoids this problem by letting you set your preferred URL format (e.g. strip trailing slashes, remove index.html filenames, remove query parameters, etc.), and the plugin automatically updates all page URLs based on your preference before sending them to Google Analytics.
Note: setting up View Filters in your Google Analytics view settings is another way to modify the URLs sent to Google Analytics.

Page Visibility Tracker

It's becoming increasingly common for users to visit sites on the web and then leave them open in an inactive browser tab for hours or even days. And when users return to your site, they often won't reload the page, especially if your site fetches new content in the background.
If your site implements just the default javascript tracking snippet, these types of interactions will never be captured.
The page visibility tracker plugin takes a more modern approach to what should constitute a pageview. In addition to tracking when a page gets loaded, it also tracks when the visibility state of the page changes (i.e. when the tab goes into or comes out of the background). These additional interaction events give you more insight into how users behave on your site.

Updates and improvements

In addition to the new plugins added to autotrack, the existing plugins have undergone some significant improvements, most notably in the ability to customize them to your needs.
All plugins that send data to Google Analytics now give you 100% control over precisely what fieldsget sent, allowing you to set, modify, or remove anything you want. This gives advanced users the ability to set their own custom dimensions on hits or change the interaction setting to better reflect how they choose to measure bounce rate.
Users upgrading from previous versions of autotrack should refer to the upgrade guide for a complete list of changes (note: some of the changes are incompatible with previous versions).

Who should use autotrack

Perhaps the most common question we received after the initial release of autotrack is who should use it. This was especially true of Google Tag Managerusers who wanted to take advantage of some of the more advanced autotrack features.
Autotrack is a developer project intended to demonstrate and streamline some advanced tracking techniques with Google Analytics, and it's primarily intended for a developer audience. Autotrack will be a good fit for small to medium sized developer teams who already have analytics.js on their website or who prefer to manage their tracking implementation in code.
Large teams and organizations, those with more complex collaboration and testing needs, and those with tagging needs beyond just Google Analytics should instead consider using Google Tag Manager. While Google Tag Manager does not currently support custom analytics.js plugins like those that are part of autotrack, many of the same tracking techniques are easy to achieve with Tag Manager’s built-in triggers, and others may be achieved by pushing data layer events based on custom code on your site or in Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager. Read Google Analytics Events in the Google Tag Manager help center to learn more about automatic event tracking based on clicks and form submissions.

Next steps

If you're not already using autotrack but would like to, check out the installation and usage section of the documentation. If you already use autotrack and want to upgrade to the latest version, be sure to read the upgrade guide first.
To get a sense of what the data captured by autotrack looks like, the Google Analytics Demos & Tools site includes several reports displaying its own autotrack usage data. If you want to go deeper, the autotrack library is open source and can be a great learning resource. Have a read through the plugin source code to get a better understanding of how some of the advanced analytics.js features work.
Lastly, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know. You can report bugs or submit any issues on Github.

Posted by Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer

Behind the Scenes with Google Data Studio

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

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

The first recording in this series, hosted by Product Manager Nick Mihailovski and Louis Gray, is now available, and shares:
  • An introduction to Google Data Studio 
  • The perspective of our product manager on Data Visualization 
  • Walkthroughs and sample reports 
Watch the first video in this series via the embed below or on YouTube here.


Posted by Louis Gray, Google Analytics Team

Measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans



With the summer kicking off, it’s a great time to freshen up your content and try new things to #drawthecrowds. Google Analytics can help you measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans. Here are a few simple and effective places to get started.


1. Find out where to focus
Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all sneakers at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into soccer boots, golf shoes, tennis shoes and so on. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title.




Know what topics have the best AdSense CTRs (Click-through-rate)
  • Group content by topic (such as food, politics and sport). 
  • Use the AdSense Pages report to view metrics.
Once you discover which topics have the best click-through rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics.

Know which content groups have slow-loading pages
  • Use Site Speed reports to look at page load performance. 
  • Group products by type (such as shirts and shoes).
Are some pages very slow to load? You might focus on fixing uncompressed images to improve the user experience (and potentially your AdSense revenue). Check out Google’s PageSpeed tool to test the speed of your mobile site.

Content Groups are easy to set up. Learn how to create them and then follow these best practices from Google Analytics evangelist, Justin Cutroni.



2. Understand where your users enter and leave on your site The Landing Pages report can show you how engaged visitors are with your content. You can analyze individual pages or Content Groups.

Know what pages cause visitors to leave
  • Look for pages with high bounce rates. This usually surfaces content that isn't appealing to visitors or is irrelevant to their needs.
  • Try changing the headline of your article or finding different images to see how that affect bounce rates.
  • Look at Google Trends to see what the world is interested in, then think about how you can incorporate it into your content. Sport is sure to be high on the agenda this summer.
  • You may also want to analyze the page speed for pages with high bounce rates; visitors may be giving up on a very slow-loading page. Studies have shown that 74% of mobile web users are only willing to wait 5 seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site.
Both Content Groups and Landing Page reports can help you find underperforming pages on your site and take action to fix them.



3. Get to know your users 

Demographics and Interests data helps you understand the age and gender of your users, as well as their interests based on their online browsing and buying.


Know who your visitors are:
  • Click on Demographics Report; Select a demographic category.  
  • Check the bounce rate. If it’s high, consider changing the headline or the visuals to make your pages more relevant and engaging for your target audience.
Know what your users are interested in:
  • Generate and analyze an Interests report.
  • Then shape your content based on the user interests you see. If viewers of your bakery blog are interested in a big sports event, see how you can incorporate that theme into your baking content.
To get started with the Demographics and Interests reports, you will need to enable them in your Analytics account.

The key to making your site better this summer is to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment. If you can find out what works and do more of it, you’re sure to draw the crowds. Have any ideas to share about using these reports? Add them in the comments below!



Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team




Source: Inside AdSense


Google Data Studio for Ecommerce Businesses

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

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

Report created using Google Analytics data on Google Data Studio 

Let’s go over some of the elements you see in the screenshot above.
  1. Header: it is always helpful to provide some info and controls in the top of the report. In this case you will see the website logo, a time range control and a series of four filter controls, with which you can segment your reports by Device, Country, Source or User Type.
  2. Trend charts: the four line charts in the top left will show how the business is performing over time (also compared to the previous period). This is important to understand drops and spikes in the data.
  3. Scorecards: the overall stats (green background) show in a glance how the business is doing, they provide a quick and effective way to understand the bottom line.
  4. Detailed information: tables are the best way to represent data in a detailed way. As seen in the report, the tables provide more information about the products being sold and also the traffic sources bringing the most users.
  5. Additional info: depending on your business, you might want to add special metrics and dimensions to enrich your report (e.g. custom dimensions & metrics). In the report above you will find some additional information on the bar and pie charts in the bottom right corner.
We hope that this sample report helps you get up and running. Feel free to share your own report in the comments, we would love to learn how you are using Data Studio to report and visualize your data!

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

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Data Studio: New, Simplified, AdWords Connector

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

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


Report built with the AdWords connector in Google Data Studio 

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


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

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


Customizing a table with AdWords data in the Report Editor 

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

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

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

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Data Studio team