Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Pelican Water System Sees 130% Higher ROI with Google Analytics

This post was contributed by Michael Loban, CMO at InfroTrust, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

For many years, Pelican Water Systems has catered to the needs of people by providing them with safer, cleaner, and improved water for their homes. Pelican Water Systems sells their water purification systems via their website and via a call center. However, the company was unable to tie online marketing channels to the offline sales placed via a call center. They lacked a complete picture of the customer journey. That’s when they turned to InfroTrust, a Google Analytics Certified Partner that specializes in the system integration and Omni-channel analytics.



Together, Pelican Water Systems and InfoTrust implemented Google Analytics to enhance the sales attribution and probe deeper into the shopping styles of customers. The main challenge that the two noticed was that some customers would see online ads and purchase online, while others would call customer service representatives to complete their orders (offline). Compared to the online campaigns, 0% of the offline sales were attributed to online marketing campaigns.

To address this, InfoTrust used the Google Analytics User ID feature. A unique User ID is carried across Google Analytics, DialogTech and Salesforce.com to identify online visitors and associate their online and offline activity. The Measurement Protocol was used to upload all offline order information (e.g. products sold, revenue, tax, etc) to Google Analytics.

With Google Analytics, Pelican Water Systems got better reports to understand which of their orders offline were being generated by marketing campaigns online. This lead to the discovery that up to 15% of overall conversions placed offline were influenced by different AdWords campaigns. With this discovery, Pelican Water Systems now has the ability to budget and plan its campaigns accurately.
“Offline transactions which had 0% visibility and were dependent solely on inaccurate or incorrect customer feedback are now fully attributable to their proper marketing channel. This allows us to make quick, smart decisions on trends across all forms of marketing, both online and offline, and how consumers jump from desktop to mobile and office computers.”  — Robert Prentice, Director of Marketing & Product Development, Pelican Water Systems.
To learn more about InfoTrust and Pelican Water Systems work together to achieve these results, download the full case study.


Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate, and Pratik Mungasuvalli, Account Manager

Efficient Campaign Tagging

To evaluate campaigns and analyze the impact of various media channels, you need to be able to identify every source of traffic. You probably are already doing this now by connecting Google Analytics with your AdWords account and by customizing links from other purchased channels with custom campaign parameters. Google’s URL builder is often used to generate these links containing campaign parameters.

In large organizations, it is not uncommon for different parts of the organization to purchase and drive traffic to the website. One group might be responsible for paid search, another for affiliates, and a third for driving traffic from social media. This division places high demands on the structure of your data if you want to be able to compare the various media channels or see the combined effect of a campaign – no matter which channel the message was communicated in.

To set a naming convention for campaign names and decide how to name all media channels is challenging when many people within the organization must comply to the naming guidelines. Without having consistent definition of the site’s traffic sources, it is also more difficult to create attribution models, as these require good-quality data in order to be reliable.

To simplify the generation of consistent links tagged with custom campaign parameters Outfox, a GACP and Google Analytics 360 Reseller, have developed GA Campaign URL, an add-on for Google Sheets. This tool helps you to create tag sheets, where you can guide users regarding which parameters are to be used and let users select, for example, the medium, sources, and campaigns in drop-down lists. Since you can easily share the spreadsheet among various users and control (by using permissions) which users can add and change the values in drop-down lists, you can create tag sheets tailored to the needs and organization of your company. 

Read more about how to use GA Campaign URL on our Help page or install it for Google Sheets!

Posted by Christoffer Lutheran, Director of Analytics at Google Analytics Certified Partner Outfox

Deeper Integration of Search Console in Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps brands optimize their websites and marketing efforts for all sources of traffic, and Search Console is where website owners manage how they appear in Google organic search results. Today, we are introducing the ability to display Search Console metrics alongside Google Analytics metrics, in the same reports, side by side - giving you a full view of how your site shows up and performs in organic search results.

For years, users of both Search Console and Google Analytics have been able to link the two properties (instructions) and see Search Console statistics in Google Analytics, in isolation. But to gain a fuller picture of your website’s performance in organic search, it’s beneficial to see how visitors reached your site and what they did once they got there.

With this update, you’ll be able to see your Search Console metrics and your Google Analytics metrics in the same reports, in parallel. By combining data from both sources at the landing page level, we’re able to show you a full range of Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion metrics for your organic search traffic. This feature out is rolling out over the coming few weeks, so not everyone will see it immediately.


New Search Console reports combine Search Console and Google Analytics metrics

New Insights

The new reports allow you to examine your organic search data end-to-end and discover unique and actionable insights. Your Acquisition metrics from Search Console, such as impressions and average position, are now available in relation to your Behavior and Conversion metrics from Google Analytics, like bounce rate and pages per session.

Below are some new capabilities resulting from this improved integration:
 • Find landing pages that are attracting many users through Google organic search (e.g., high impressions and high click through rate) but where users are not engaging with the website. In this case, you should consider improving your landing pages.

 • Find landing pages that have high site engagement but are not successfully attracting users from Google organic search  (e.g., have low click through rate). In this case, you might benefit from improving titles and descriptions shown in search.

 • Learn which queries are ranking well for each organic landing page.

 • Segment organic performance by device category (desktop, tablet, mobile) in the new Devices report.
 

New Landing Page report showing Search Console and Google Analytics metrics

 

Additional Information 

Each of these new reports will display how your organic search traffic performs. As data is joined at the landing page level, Landing Pages, Countries and Devices will show both Search Console and Google Analytics data, while the Queries report will only show Search Console data for individual queries. The same search queries will display in Google Analytics as you see in Search Console today.

As mentioned in our Search Console Help Center, some data may not be displayed, to protect user privacy. For example, Search Console may not track some infrequent queries, and will not display those that include personal or sensitive information.

Also, while the data is displayed in parallel, not all Google Analytics features are available for Search Console data - including segmentation. Any segment that is applied to the new combined reports will only apply to Google Analytics data. You may also see that clicks from Search Console may differ from total sessions in Google Analytics.

 To experience the new combined reports from Search Console and Google Analytics, make sure your properties are linked, and then navigate to the new section “Search Console”, which should appear under “Acquisition” in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics.

Posted by Joan Arensman, Product Manager, and Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Move beyond last click attribution in AdWords

People often see many ads across different devices before making a purchase, booking a flight, or signing up for an account. Because of this, advertisers know that last click attribution may not always tell the full story. In 2014, we released the Attribution Modeling Tool in AdWords to share insights about how users interact with your ads. Later this month, you’ll be able to integrate the attribution model of your choice with your conversion data and bidding.

For each conversion type, use a simple drop­down menu in Conversion settings to select one of six different attribution models ­­ last click, first click, linear, time decay, position­based, or data driven. When you pick a new model, credit will be reassigned across the conversion path for all search or shopping ad clicks on Google.com, and your conversion stats will change moving forward. You can adjust bids based on your new way of counting conversions, and if you’re using automated bidding for search ads, your bids will be optimized automatically to reflect your new model. To learn more, visit our Help Center.
For the first time, AdWords advertisers with sufficient data will also be able to select the new data driven attribution model as a public beta, which is also available in Analytics 360, Attribution 360, and DoubleClick. Unlike rules­based models, data driven attribution uses machine learning to evaluate all the converting and non­converting paths across your account and identifies the proper credit for each interaction. The model considers the number of ad interactions, order of exposure, ad creative, and many other factors to determine which keywords and clicks are the most effective at driving results.

To help advertisers succeed with attribution, we’ve created a new best practices guide: “Beyond Last­Click Attribution.” The guide will show you how to:
  • Determine how important moving beyond last­click attribution is to your business 
  • Choose a model that best fits your needs 
  • Value early influencer keywords appropriately 
  • Act on attribution 
  • Evolve your approach to attribution as measurement gets better 

We hope the new functionality and guide will help you optimize your marketing campaigns and drive stronger results, and our goal is to expand beyond search soon.  

Posted by:
Joan Arensman, Product Manager
Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager

Track what matters to you easily in AdWords Express

If you own a small business, a visit to your website is only the first step to getting more customers. Whether they subscribe to your newsletter, make an online purchase, or click to email you directly, the next step a customer takes on your website is an important indicator of how you’re doing online. However, setting up tracking for the things you care about can be complex, especially for business owners with little time to spare.

That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature for tracking these goals in AdWords Express. AdWords Express advertisers can now access the power of Google Analytics right from their campaign dashboard. Connect a current Analytics account or set up a new one in minutes right from the AdWords Express dashboard. Once you set the goals for your website, you’ll be able to see how customers who click on your ad go on to interact with your website.
Analytics will show you how your ad is contributing to the website goals that matter to you
Google Analytics has been an invaluable resource for small business owners looking to understand these key interactions. For Carrie Sullivan, co-owner of Telaya Wine Co. in Idaho, understanding how visitors interact with her website has been key to her company’s success online. “Being a small business, we wear many different hats and we have a small staff, so we don’t have someone to just focus on our website. Google Analytics does that for us.”

With the introduction of this feature, we’re excited to bring all these benefits to AdWords Express advertisers. Take your performance to the next level by understanding how your online spending impacts the website goals you care about at google.com/adwords/express, or visit our help center to learn more.

Posted by Zhouzhou He, AdWords Express Product Manager

Better insight into your customer interactions with Google Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Gene Chan, Google Analytics Team

Adapting Measurement Strategies for Modern Marketing

Last week Forrester Research hosted a Forum for Marketing Leaders in New York City. I had the pleasure of speaking with top enterprise executives about data and analytics strategies to help them harness the exponential increase in data volume — caused by new devices, channels, and fragmented audiences — and turn data into useful insights.

Mobile has changed everything for everyone. For marketers, mobile has presented an opportunity to learn much more about consumer behavior. Marketers can then use those insights to deliver useful brand experiences in intent-rich moments when consumers are looking to buy.

But it’s not easy. Mobile has fractured the customer journey into little pieces (of data) and most legacy systems are ill-suited to organize, process, and make sense of all this data. Businesses could never hire enough people to mine all this data because it is growing and compounding so quickly — it’s just not practical. It’s estimated that 90% of the world’s data was created in the past two years. Think about that.

While conducting a recent research study we discovered the top challenges enterprise marketers are facing in a mobile-dominated world. We studied these challenges, spoke with executives at leading organizations, and brainstormed with our own engineers to develop strategies and products to help marketers win in today’s modern world.
  1. Understand the customer journey. Marketers need complete data to see what’s happening across the entire customer journey. Views of performance based on sessions, devices, and channels are no longer sufficient. The new view of performance means putting customers at the center of marketing strategy, which requires a data toolset that’s integrated across channels, touchpoints, and devices.
  2. Get useful insights, not just more data. The masses of digital information produced each day mean marketers need enormous computing power, data science, and smart algorithms all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. Tools that can perform ongoing automated analysis and spotlight opportunities for marketers are essential to ensure future success.
  3. Share insights with everyone. Putting data into everyone’s hands gets the whole company on the same page, strengthens cross-functional goals, and drives smarter decision-making. Data isn’t just for analysts anymore. For organizations to truly adapt for success, they need more people using insights and more people collaborating to spark great ideas. Tools offering data visualization and instant sharing help foster a truly data-driven culture.
  4. Deliver engaging experiences to the right people. When organizations provide customers with personal and relevant brand interactions — that deliver real value — it naturally leads to better marketing performance. The consumer wins and the marketer wins. Achieving this state depends on seamless data integrations across multiple technologies and platforms — and on executing instantly. Tools that swiftly integrate well with others will lead the way.

These four strategies work together to create a virtuous cycle that drives marketing results and a competitive advantage. We built the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help marketers execute on these strategies and overcome today’s challenges and win in the multi-screen world.

Learn how Progressive is using the Google Analytics 360 Suite to improve their customer experience and turn browsers into buyers.

Posted by Paul Pellman, Director of Data and Measurement at Google

Spotlight on Attribution 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Your marketing strategy isn’t single channel so why should your measurement practices be? 

Looking at marketing performance one channel at a time no longer makes sense. In today’s complex, micro-moment, cross-screen landscape, the lines between marketing efforts are blurred. Traditional marketing and digital marketing overlap, with investments online delivering results offline, and vice versa. Cross-channel marketers have an opportunity to shift away from channel-by-channel thinking to better understand how to optimize their entire marketing strategy.

Google Attribution 360 allows you to measure and optimize marketing spend for all channels, online and off, at once. Use it to uncover insights, make a true impact on the customer journey, and improve ROI.


The Digital Attribution, Marketing Mix Modeling, and TV Attribution capabilities within Attribution 360 allow you to analyze all your available data streams and create a highly accurate model of your full marketing efforts.

  • Digital Attribution helps you combine and interpret siloed data sources, apply data-driven attribution modeling, and optimize your digital marketing mix. Rather than using a limited first-touch, last-touch, or arbitrary rules-based model, Digital Attribution awards the appropriate credit to each and every touchpoint on the customer journey. 
  • Marketing Mix Modeling adds a top-down, aggregated view of performance across all channels, including media such as radio, television, print, out-of-home, and digital. You’ll also get insights into how external factors such as economic conditions, seasonality, and competitive actions impact your marketing efforts. 
  • TV Attribution helps business relying on TV to build awareness and demand to integrate digital and broadcast data and understand their cross-channel performance. Down-to-the-minute TV ad airings data is analyzed alongside digital site and search data to reveal the attributable impact of specific broadcast ad placements. 
Here’s how one of our customers, Open Colleges, uses Attribution 360 to make the connection between TV and digital advertising.

Google Attribution 360 helps Open Colleges see how TV ads turn into online leads 

Open Colleges, Australia’s leader in online learning, felt television advertising could be a powerful tool to reach its audience, but in a data-driven and lead-driven culture they found it difficult to measure and justify the actual impact of TV ads. They wanted to see how TV ads translated into real leads, understand the cross-channel customer journey, and find new opportunities in their marketing mix. That’s when they turned to Google Attribution 360.

For three months in 2015, the team tested Attribution 360 with a series of TV campaigns focused on their key user base of women aged 25-54 who are looking to enhance or change their careers. They ran ads on a variety of TV programming — cooking shows, series, soap operas, and news and morning shows.


Getting results 

With Attribution 360, the Open Colleges team could see clearly what was engaging TV viewers and driving them to search. While news and morning shows delivered larger impression volume, light entertainment shows like Ellen and Grey’s Anatomy had higher impact on leads. Open Colleges also learned that while Saturday was their most engaged day, Monday and Tuesday spots were more cost-efficient by an average of 12%.

“We gained insights into day-parting, 15-second versus 30-second spots, and campaign flighting — just a level of insights we’ve never had before,” says Matt Hill, Head of Brand & Communication for Open Colleges.

They also learned that dual-screen TV viewers were far more engaged on mobile than on desktop, and far more engaged on smartphones than on tablets.

“People sitting on the couch who see a TV ad, they’re not going to run and get their laptop,” notes Hill. “They pull out their phone and search for us right there.” In prime time (6-10pm), for example, 81% of attributed visits were from mobile.

Making adjustments 

As results came in, the Open Colleges team made adjustments to campaigns, ad buys and creatives to capitalize on what they learned. The realized they had to make sure their online ads were at or near top position for web searches using keywords like online courses any time their TV ads were driving response. “Your search bidding strategy has to be aligned with your TV activity,” says Hill. “If your TV ad drives a mobile user to search for online education and you aren’t there, you won’t make the most of your investment.”

In the first three months, Open Colleges saw a significant uplift with its key target audience of women aged 25–54. As a result, the team is now testing many new approaches, like targeting smaller audiences in Western Australia, trying programming alternatives at off-peak hours, and exploring the hours where 15-second ads get the best ROI.

“Traditional metrics just don’t cut it anymore,” says Hill. “You need to understand what your marketing dollars are doing for you in detail, and TV attribution has given us the visibility and confidence that TV does deliver against hard business metrics. If you’re serious about understanding the pathways to conversion and the full impact of your offline spend for maximum ROI, Attribution 360 is a must.”

Read the full case study with Open Colleges for more details.

Stay tuned for more updates on Attribution 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities.

Posted by Dave Barney, Product Manager, Google Attribution 360

Redesigned Google Analytics mobile app now available for both Android and iOS

Never be more than a “tap” away from your data 


The world doesn’t stop moving when you’re not at your computer. We're making it easier to monitor and share your key Google Analytics data on the go with a new, updated Google Analytics mobile app.

You can now download the new and improved Google Analytics mobile app for Android and iOS. The app works on all modern phones and tablets, in 39 languages and in all countries currently where Google Analytics is available.

Here’s just a few of the highlights about the new app:
  • Easy access to a full overview of your Google Analytics data 
  • See what is happening now with real-time business data 
  •  Go deeper into your reports with segments 
  •  Customize your own mobile dashboard 
  •  Easily share your insights with others 

Digging deeper into the app 

The new Google Analytics mobile app simplifies Google Analytics reports into a small screens format that puts an incredible depth of data at your fingertips.



Want to track a specific key metric that's not there by default? You can now build or modify a report quickly and save it to your mobile dashboard.



Find something interesting? Share it with anyone via email, social, messaging or in any manner supported by your device.



Here's a quick walkthrough to show how the new Google Mobile analytics app looks in action:



Now you can keep up with what is happening with your sites and mobile apps anytime, anywhere. Download the Google Analytics mobile app today on Google Play (Android) or Apple iTunes (iOS).

Note: The app currently supports portrait (upright) orientations on tablets and phones. Landscape support is coming soon.

Posted by Ajay Nainani, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Join us as we announce the latest Ads and Analytics innovations on May 24th

Tune in live to the Google Performance Summit Keynote on Tuesday, May 24 at 9am PT / 12pm ET to hear the latest Ads and Analytics innovations.


We live in exciting times when technology seems to upend everything as we know, every few years. And nothing has changed consumer behavior and business innovation as much as the mobile phone. People are attached to their phones, tapping and swiping their way through places to go, stuff to buy, and things to do. This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to connect with customers in more meaningful, relevant ways. And Google is a key partner for advertisers, providing the media and tools to help you make those connections and measure the results.

To ensure we are building the right products for consumers and businesses all around the world, my team and I make it a priority to regularly visit our ads and analytics customers. Last year, we met with advertisers in India, Japan, China, the UK and Germany, and gained new insights from every country.

For example, in Europe, we learned that universal app campaigns are effective at growing installs across a broad range of app users. Now, advertisers want the ability to reach very specific audiences. In Asia, home to three of the five top smartphone markets, advertisers asked for more control and flexibility on mobile devices for both creatives and bidding. And in every country we visited, we saw customers working hard to integrate data from across their organizations and transform it into actionable insights. Marketers want better data to understand the customer journey across devices, contexts and channels.

We were all grateful for these insights and have been using them to build a whole new generation of Ads and Analytics products. We look forward to sharing many new innovations with you at the Google Performance Summit on Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 9am PT / 12pm ET.

Register for the livestream here.

Until then, follow us on our +GoogleAds page for sneak previews of what’s to come.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce