Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, Powered by Google Analytics

Today we’re excited to announce you can use audiences (previously remarketing lists) created in Google Analytics to reach your customers on Google Search, with no tagging changes required. 

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) allows you to tailor your search ads and based on your visitors' past activity on your website. Now you can leverage more than 200 Google Analytics dimensions and metrics to create and activate your audiences for remarketing, then use those audiences to reach and re-engage your customers with a consistent message across both Google Search and Display.

TransUnion cuts CPA in half with RLSA

In order to find more customers while reducing waste in their search campaigns, TransUnion, a leading financial services provider, used the audience creation capabilities in Google Analytics to spend more efficiently on Google Search.

TransUnion started by creating two audiences. The first was for new customers―those who had visited the site and started, but not completed a credit application. The other included customers who had already converted. Splitting the audience between new and existing customers allowed TransUnion to bid higher on Google search ads for new customers and spend less on converted customers.

The new RLSA capabilities in Google Analytics yielded impressive conversion rates and cost efficiencies for TransUnion's search campaigns. RLSA visitors had a lower bounce rate and viewed twice as many pages per session compared with regular visitors. 

By using more tailored text with their remarketing lists, TransUnion increased their conversion rate by 65% and average transaction value by 58%. Meanwhile, CPCs for existing customers dropped 50%, resulting in a roughly 50% drop in their cost per transaction. Read the full case study here. 

How to get started

Getting started with RLSA is easier than ever before thanks to Instant Activation. Within the Admin tab, simply click Property, then Tracking Info, and finally Data Collection. Ensure that Remarketing is set to ‘ON.’


Once you’ve enabled this setting, all your eligible audiences will begin to populate for RLSA.

Building Audiences

If you’d like to create new audiences, there are three ways to get started. 

First, you can create a new audience using the Audience builder in the remarketing section of the Admin tab. Make sure you select the relevant AdWords account to share your audience with for remarketing.

Admin Remarketing.png

If you have an existing segment you’d like to turn into an audience, simply click on the segment options and select “Build Audience” right from within reporting. This option will take you directly to the audience builder as above.  

Segment Remarketing.png
Finally, you can get started quickly and easily by importing audiences from the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

Activating audiences in AdWords

Once you have shared an audience with AdWords, it will appear instantly in your AdWords Shared Library and will show eligible users in the column List size (Google search).  Keep in mind that an audience must accumulate a minimum of 1,000 users before you can use it for remarketing on Google Search. To get started, follow the instructions in the AdWords Help Center. 


Support for RLSA with Google Analytics is part of an ongoing investment to provide powerful ways to activate your customer insights in Google Analytics, along with recent features like Cohort Analysis, Lifetime Value Analysis, and Active User Reporting. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Happy Analyzing,
Lan Huang, Technical Lead, Google Analytics,
Xiaorui Gan, Technical Lead, Google Search Ads

Learn to optimize your tag implementation with Google Tag Manager Fundamentals

We're excited to announce that our next Analytics Academy course, Google Tag Manager Fundamentals, is now open for participation. Whether you’re a marketer, analyst, or developer, this course will teach you how Google Tag Manager can simplify the tag implementation and management process.

You'll join instructor Krista Seiden to explore topics through the lens of a fictional online retailer, The Great Outdoors and their Travel Adventures website. Using practical examples, she’ll show you how to use tools like Google Analytics and Google AdWords tags to improve your data collection process and advertising strategies.


By participating in the course, you’ll explore:
  • the core concepts and principles of tag management using Google Tag Manager
  • how to create website tags and manage firing triggers
  • how to enhance your Google Analytics implementation
  • the importance of using the Data Layer to collect valuable data for analysis
  • how to configure other marketing tags, like AdWords Conversion Tracking and Dynamic Remarketing
We're looking forward to your participation in this course!

Sign up for Google Tag Manager Fundamentals and start learning today.

Happy tagging!

Post By: Lizzie Pace & The Google Analytics Education Team

BT Increases Sales Volume and Efficiency Using DoubleClick Bid Manager With Google Analytics Premium

Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

Modern marketers live in a world that’s dominated by data. Advancements in programmatic buying enable marketers to leverage data and analytics to connect precisely, in real time. Advertisers who are smart about organizing, segmenting, and acting on this data are realizing the benefits of more personalized marketing. BT, a leading telecommunications firm in the UK, did just that and saw fantastic results.  

BT wanted to increase the relevance of their remarketing campaigns by creating more precise audience lists. With the help of their media agency Maxus, BT found that using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager offered the ideal solution. 

Google Analytics Premium gave BT the ability to create granular audience segments based on site behavior metrics such as recency, frequency, referral source, and stage of cart abandonment. Once these audience lists were created, the native integration between Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager meant they could be shared with the platform to make more precise media buys in just a few clicks.

Using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager put Maxus and BT in the driver’s seat of their media campaigns. They not only gleaned full transparency with a single customer view and de-duplicated metrics across all channels, but also saw better measurement through unified reporting, and the ability to optimize based on the results.



”Our goals were to build up ‘best practices’ of programmatic display remarketing techniques with a focus on driving post-click sales,” says Alison Thorburn, Head of Digital DR Media at BT. “The DoubleClick suite of products enabled us to do this quickly and efficiently as audience data can be easily organized and utilized.” 

The new analytics-driven approach produced a 69% increase in post-click sales and an 87% reduction in post-click cost per acquisition compared to the previous year’s remarketing activity. It also compared favorably to the remarketing activity that ran simultaneously outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager; post-click sales were 30% higher and post-click cost per acquisition was 42% lower. BT has now consolidated its display remarketing through DoubleClick BidManager.
Read the full case study here.

Posted by-
Kelley Sternhagen, Product Marketing, Google Analytics
Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Daily Data-Informed Decisions With Google Analytics Premium and Google BigQuery


The American Precious Metals Exchange (APMEX) is the leading purveyor of precious metals, serving millions of customers worldwide. The company partnered with E-Nor, a Google Analytics Premium Authorized Reseller, to better understand the customer journey and gain insights to improve marketing initiatives.




The first challenge they tackled was to integrate various data assets by exporting Google Analytics Premium data to Google BigQuery. This was accomplished using both the BigQuery export and the User ID features to connect website behavioral data to the company internal customer profiles. This enabled APMEX to use data more effectively to interact with different types of customers.

In addition, by bringing Google Analytics data into the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, they empowered their internal teams to make data-informed decisions on a daily basis. For example, when customers call, site usage information is now available to the customer representative talking them. 
“We have found BigQuery data to be immediately actionable. It focuses our marketing efforts, personalizes our onsite experiences, and improves the effectiveness of our sales department. When used in conjunction with our current data systems, there is seemingly no question about our customers that cannot be answered. It’s that powerful.”— Andrew Duffle, Director FP&A, Analytics & Optimization, APMEX, Inc.
As a result of the work mentioned above, APMEX has decreased the average cost per acquisition (CPA) by more than 20% while maintaining the same level of new customer orders. 

They have also used Google Analytics Premium data to build a statistical model to target valuable customers earlier in their life cycle. For customers identified in the model, the company has increased email open rates by 58%, email conversion rates by 62%, and revenue per email by 163% as compared to the overall business. 

To read more about how APMEX and E-Nor used Google Analytics Premium along with BigQuery in order to make more informed decisions, download the full case study.


Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate.

New media partnerships and ad solutions for mobile app promotion

As complexity increases in the app ecosystem, successful developers are looking for new ways to measure, manage, and optimize across multiple ad networks and operating systems.  This morning, at our annual I/O conference, we announced via Livestream a new set of media partnerships and ads offerings designed to meet the unique needs of mobile app marketers.  

Transparent, open and reliable measurement solutions

For app developers looking to drive installs and engagement, it’s critical to understand the effectiveness of various media partners and placements. That’s why we have been investing in solutions to help developers apply consistent measures across a fragmented ecosystem of ad networks, and understand the quality of users that each delivers.  

Google Analytics for Apps provides an industry-leading solution for in-app analytics that is increasingly benefiting advertisers as they seek more transparency into ad effectiveness across networks.  You can already use Google Analytics to track the performance of your mobile app install campaigns and understand the lifetime value of your users on both Android and iOS. As of today, we’ve built partnerships with 20+ ad networks including InMobi and Millennial Media since launching iOS conversion tracking late last year. Data integration with these partners provides a comprehensive view of app value across networks based on the metrics developers care about (i.e., LTV and retention), helping you make better decisions on where to spend your advertising dollars. In the next few months, you’ll be able to “postback” your conversions to referring networks in order to optimize your traffic -- all made possible with a single SDK. 

And it's not just about our measurement solutions.  We recognize that developers should have choices when it comes to attribution vendors, and are committed to open solutions for the industry.  That’s why we also announced the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into AdWords. Working with third parties, including Adjust, Appsflyer, Apsalar, Kochava, and Tune, we are able to increase measurement accuracy between different trackers in AdWords, ensuring your data is accurate and  reliable.

By partnering with these leading ad platforms and tracking systems, we believe we can make the entire mobile apps ecosystem stronger and more connected -- all with the goal of making developers more successful.

But we didn’t stop there. 

It’s easier than ever to promote your apps across Google 

For developers looking to promote their app, we offer a variety of placements across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, and YouTube.  And earlier this year, we announced Search Ads on Google Play. By showing ads alongside app search results, you can reach consumers right when they’re looking for a new app, at the moment they are ready to install. 
Click for full-sized image

Today we announced Universal App Campaigns, a new campaign type that allows advertisers to reach consumers across Google media more efficiently and effectively.  Universal App Campaigns offers a simple way to set up install ads for your Android apps in AdWords or directly from the Google Play Developer Console. 

Click for full-sized image

With a single campaign, you can scale your reach across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, YouTube and Google Play. Just provide us with a few inputs about your app — what your ad creative will say, the audience you wish to reach, and how much you want to spend — we’ll do the rest for you. Behind the scenes, our ad creation and bidding engines will help maximize performance for your campaigns so you can spend more time building and enhancing your apps.  Search Ads on Google Play and Universal App Campaigns will be rolled out to developers and advertisers in the coming months.

Complete solutions for your entire business

Today at I/O we also announced solutions to help you develop apps, engage users organically, and earn more money from your app.  Our innovations in analytics and ads are designed to complement these offerings, and allow you to grow your business with measurement solutions that are open and reliable, and promotion tools that make ad buying easier and more effective.  Thank you to all the developers out there who are building these experiences. We look forward to engaging with your apps and supporting your ongoing innovation by working closely with you and your partners in the ecosystem.

Posted by: Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management

Marketo Scores 10X Higher Conversion Rate With Google Analytics


"Google Analytics has helped us increase the effectiveness of our AdWords remarketing campaigns by improving the targeting of our audiences and allowing us to present more relevant ads." 
—Mike Telem, VP of Product Marketing at Marketo 

Marketo, a leading marketing automation company, is a strategic partner for thousands of companies. To take their own marketing to the next level, Marketo needed an analytics platform that was flexible enough to combine external data with user site behavior. They wanted to seamlessly leverage that data to improve the relevance of their marketing.

Marketo used a two-step approach for their marketing: first they used Marketo's Real-Time Personalization (RTP) product to identify characteristics—such as product interest and industry type—of Marketo's website visitors. Then they passed this data to Google Analytics in the form of events. This allowed Marketo to see Google Analytics visitor demographics and behavior information next to Marketo's RTP-identified characteristics for a more holistic picture of their user base in Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics as the single source for customer data, Marketo segmented audiences in Analytics based on conversion stage or business vertical. With native integrations between Google Analytics and AdWords, Marketo was able to pass these specialized remarketing lists to AdWords and serve more personalized remarketing ads to its users in just a few, easy clicks.

These tailored ads had a huge impact and Marketo saw a jump in both engagement and conversions. Across the board, remarketing with Google Analytics drove a 10X higher conversion rate compared to traditional display marketing campaigns. Marketo also saw 200% more conversions in its B2C segment and an increase of 150% in conversions for its enterprise visitors.

To read the full case study, click here. 

Posted by: Kelley Sternhagen, Google Analytics Marketing 

Google Analytics Hackathon in London – Retrospective

On March 25th, the Google Analytics Premium team hosted the first Google Analytics Hackathon in London. 18 developers from several agencies worked on the Google offices for a full day session of ‘hacking’. They connected devices like motion sensors, cameras, Raspberry Pi mini computers and even helicopters to send data to Universal Analytics using the Measurement Protocol - using “simple” technology to simulate real world applications.

The goal of the event was to help agencies innovate and think out of the box about how to use the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol with to collect valuable data from other sources than just websites and apps. Each group received a ‘hackathon kit’, consisting of Raspberry Pis, motion detectors, cameras, Google Glass, smart watches, barcode scanners, credit card readers, Smart Things home automation sets, beacons, some basic python scripts, documentation and one Android controlled helicopter.



The teams were free to build what they wanted and came up with great solutions. Here are the most innovative ideas:

  1. A helicopter enthusiast racetrack: Hobby pilots swipe their member cards to log to the system and fly a remote controlled helicopter along a racetrack - Google Analytics successfully measures lap times and stores them with the pilot customer ID.
  2. The burglar alarm: Detects a burglary using real time events in Google Analytics with a motion detector and a camera.
  3. Healthy cat: Decides how much you feed your cat at night based on how many times the cat entered and left the house as measured by Google Analytics..



Here are some of the feedback we received from developers.


“It was an inspirational session and we already started experimenting with measurement protocol more and come up with some innovative ideas tailored to our clients” - BadriNarayanan Srinivasan, iProspect UK.

“Something to highlight about the event was the chance to work with new and interesting technologies (bar code and card scanners, Android watches, Google Glass) and to integrate these with Google Analytics. Learning about new applications to help integrate GA/the use of the Measurement Protocol with Android and iOS apps was also awesome” - Jeff Lukey, Periscopix

“The day was brilliant and organised very well. It was great to be given such a wide range of technologies to try and use” - David Nwosu, DBi



Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Romina Rodriguez 

Supermetrics: Bringing more of your cost data into Google Analytics

The following is a guest post from Supermetrics, a Google Analytics Technology Partner.

Google Analytics has some great tools to help you keep track of how well your ad campaigns bring new users to your website, including Goals, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Enhanced Ecommerce. But acquisition or conversion data alone don’t give you the full picture of ad performance. To understand how well your campaigns are doing, you need to contextualize conversion rates with cost data. 

Set up automatic cost data uploads 
AdWords linking lets you see your AdWords data imported to your Google Analytics account, though getting data from other sources can take longer and be a more manual process. You can make the process easier and go faster with a tool like Supermetrics Uploader add-on. 

Built using the Google Analytics Data Import feature, Supermetrics Uploader lets you set up automatic daily uploads from your Facebook Ads and Bing Ads with just a few clicks. You can also use Supermetrics Uploader to to import historical advertising data going back several years, and use it to manually upload CSV formatted data from any source. If your ad destination URLs are tagged with utm parameters, the imported cost data will be mapped to Google Analytics session data, and you’ll immediately see your return on ad spend (ROAS) and revenue per click (RPC) metrics for each campaign.

Watch this one-minute video to get an overview of Supermetrics Uploader.


See all of your cost data in your reports
Supermetrics Uploader can help get you a clear picture of how all your campaign spend compares with the results without having to switch between different reporting systems.

Within twenty-four hours after scheduling your first upload with Supermetrics Uploader, your data will start appearing in your Google Analytics Cost Analysis report, and in any of your Custom Reports that include ad cost, impressions, or clicks. All of your imported data will also be available in any 3rd party tools that connect to the to Google Analytics Reporting API.


- The Google Analytics Developer Relations team

Introducing Search Response and Airings Data in TV Attribution

The following is a cross post from Adometry by Google, a Marketing Analytics and Attribution product. 

Mass media drives people to interact with brands in compelling ways. When a TV or radio ad creates an I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, or an I-want-to-buy moment in the mind of a consumer, many pursue it online. Immediately - and on whatever screen they have handy.

Last year, we announced Adometry TV Attribution, which measures the digital impact of offline channels such as television and radio. Now, we’re moving TV Attribution forward by integrating Google Search query data and Rentrak airings data to help marketers better understand the important moments their broadcast investments create.

New Search Behavior, New Search Analysis
Broadcast media doesn’t just drive consumers directly to websites — it drives searches. Now, TV attribution lets you analyze minute-by-minute aggregated Google Search query data against spot-related keywords to detect and attribute search “micro-conversions” to specific TV airings. 

With insights on the entire digital customer journey — including search behaviors — brands can better evaluate broadcast network and daypart, specific ad creative, and keyword performance. As a result, brands can:
  • Assess Immediate Influence: See which messages are sticking in the minds of consumers to both maximize TV interest and choose ideal keywords for SEO and paid search strategies.
  • Evaluate Awareness Goals: Optimize against a digital signal even when a site visit isn’t the primary goal, such as in brand awareness or sponsorship campaigns.
  • Analyze Competitive Category: Glean which generic keywords drive category interest for the industry — a type of insights not possible through site traffic analysis alone. 

Rentrak Partnership Speeds TV Attribution Insights
Knowing when your spots aired and collecting that data for timely TV attribution analysis can be a challenge. Marketers who buy broadcast media through agencies often don’t have direct access to this data. And once data is obtained — after coordinating with multiple agencies, partners, and TV measurement companies — the time lag makes for outdated analysis. 

TV Attribution now solves these challenges a new partnership with Rentrak, the leading and trusted source for TV airings information. 

What Rentrak Integration Delivers
Integrating directly with Rentrak TV Essentials, TV Attribution now overcomes some of the biggest hurdles in TV measurement, with increases in: 
  • Actionability: TV Attribution can more quickly and easily obtain TV data for analysis without time-consuming coordination from you or your agencies.  
  • Accuracy: Rentrak provides a comprehensive data set with aggregated viewership information from more than 30 million televisions across the country, and from more than 230 networks.
  • Frequency: A direct relationship means more frequent reporting since there is no longer a manual find-and-transfer of data required from TV buying partners.
“What makes this partnership so exciting is it removes the biggest barrier to truly measuring TV effectiveness, timely access to spot airings data including impressions,” said Tony Pecora, CMO for SelectQuote. “Rather than hunting and gathering data, we are now able to spend our time evaluating insights and optimizing our marketing investments across both TV and digital. As a CMO, this is a really big win for our business.”

Want to Get Moving?

The gap between offline and digital measurement continues to close. Learn more about how Adometry TV Attribution, now with Google Search query data and integrated Rentrak airings data, can help you gain more actionable cross-channel insights.

Posted by Dave Barney, Product Manager

Supercharge your Google Analytics with SkyGlue

The following is a guest post from SkyGlue, a Google Analytics Technology Partner. 

SkyGlue is a powerful add-on tool for Google Analytics that helps web analysts to get more out of Google Analytics. With SkyGlue, you can automate Event Tracking for your website, zoom in on visitor analytics, and export and integrate your Google Analytics data with your own database or CRM. 
Automatic Event Tracking: Custom data collection without IT help
Your website probably offers many ways for visitors to interact with your content, so you need to know what your visitors do on your site, and not just which pages they visit. Although you collect important data about interactions like clicks, downloads, and modal popups using Google Analytics Event Tracking, it requires a fair amount of additional setup. And if you don’t have the IT resources to set up Event Tracking, it means that you’re missing out on collecting this important data. 
SkyGlue helps you gain independence from IT resources by automating Event Tracking with on-the-fly customization using SkyGlue web portal. By adding one line of JavaScript to your website, the SkyGlue app can track interactions with any HTML element on your website and then send this data to your Google Analytics account.  
SkyGlue Event Tracking visual overlay
Visitor analytics + Data export
SkyGlue supports multiple approaches to visitor tracking and offers special reports that let you see the entire sequence of visits and interactions. Integrated fully with Google Analytics advanced segments, these reports let you zoom-in on selected groups of visitors, helping you understand your customers’ behavior, discover patterns, identify technical glitches, improve customer service, and find ways to increase conversion and retention rates. You can also use SkyGlue to export your Google Analytics data on a daily basis, and integrate it with your own CRM and other data sources.
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SkyGlue Individual Visitor Report (not based on real data)
SkyGlue puts some of Google Analytics most powerful features in the hands of every analyst. Use it to automate Event Tracking, get access to visitor analytics reports, and export and integrate Google Analytics data with other data sources. 
SkyGlue is free to try and takes only a few minutes to set up - check it out and see customer reviews in the Google Analytics Partner Gallery. 
For more information, visit the SkyGlue website and read real-world examples of how SkyGlue has already helped many business and organizations get more out of Google Analytics.  
- The Google Analytics Developer Relations team