Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Google Analytics in AdMob helps mobile app developer Eltsoft go global

Cross-posted on the Inside AdMob Blog 

Since March 2014, Google Analytics has been fully available in AdMob, and now app developers are increasingly seeing results by combining data from both platforms. Here’s one story that illustrates the power of AdMob and Google Analytics together.

Passion for languages and learning
Jason Byrne, and business partner Robert Diem, are passionate about making a difference in education. They came together during their time as professors in Japan to found Eltsoft LLC, a company that builds mobile language learning apps for iOS and Android. Together, they started creating a series of fun tools  that allow users to study whenever they want, wherever they are.

Global expansion
Their most popular app is English Grammar, which has been downloaded by more than a million people looking to sharpen their English-language skills in nearly 120 countries.

All of the company’s apps are available for free or as paid versions. To increase revenue, they chose AdMob to earn money from the free versions of their apps with advertising. “AdMob monetization is central to our success because it delivers high-quality, appropriate ads to our audience in their native languages, wherever they live,” says Jason. 

The Google Analytics data within AdMob helped them understand more about their users. "Our app, English Grammar, has users from all around the world, so we turned to data from Google Analytics and AdMob to understand which languages we should consider for localization. For example, we knew we had to prioritize German and French, but we discovered other languages that we didn't expect, such as Russian and Japanese."

A data-driven approach to marketing 
Eltsoft uses data to focus their marketing campaigns and assess where to use their resources most effectively. “Google Analytics keeps making campaign analysis simpler and clearer,” Jason says. “Data from various sources - Google Analytics and Google Play, for instance - are now all in one place. That helps me understand what’s happening with our ad campaigns.” 

While data analysis helped Eltsoft validate some of their hypotheses, it also uncovered opportunities according to Jason: “The greatest takeaway for me is that the results are never really what I expect. I am often surprised. Analytics has given us great insights into who our users are, and has provided a very important lesson in the value of surveying our user base. Our simple assumptions are often inaccurate.”

Replicating successful strategies
Eltsoft has developed a way to calculate the value of users by using a combination of AdMob metrics (like ad request values) and Analytics metrics (like user counts and sessions per user). Having Google Analytics in AdMob has unlocked such analysis because the data is available in the same interface.

As a result, Eltsoft can now understand what works best for their users. “For example, we’ve made changes to our apps, and Analytics has really helped us to track the effectiveness of those changes. I would say six months ago, that our success was a mystery. The data said we were doing well, but the whys were not clear. Therefore, we couldn’t replicate or push forward. But today, we understand what’s happening and can project our future success. We have not only the data, but can control certain variables allowing us to understand that data.”

“Google Analytics data is literally a goldmine,” says Jason.

If you want to learn more about how Eltsoft is using Google Analytics and AdMob, download the full case study. 

Want to learn how to get the most from Analytics in AdMob? Sign up for our free online course, Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals.



Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Ringing in the New Year – Behavior Trends and Insights

Last month we published an analysis of how people behave before and during the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. We saw the most important days of the year for retailers, how to take advantage of the top transaction days, and when to take action.

Today we are looking at the patterns of behavior over the holidays and into the new year with the objective of understanding how digital marketers can prepare for 2015.

After looking at data from the previous three years, we found two interesting insights:
  1. User behavior is significantly different from country to country, but very consistent from year to year within a particular country.
  2. The beginning of January can be a great time to offer new deals outside of the US.
Read on to learn more about the analysis we performed and how to take advantage of the trends we found, it will help you get a head start on 2015!

User Behavior Trends
Patterns can tell us a lot about data, they are intuitive and show us a lot of information at a glance. With that in mind, we produced the charts below to show how people behave around Christmas and New Year’s Eve. We wanted to understand the differences between cultures, so we focused on the trends from three large economies: US, UK and France. All the charts show data from December 11 to January 14 for the last three years and the two vertical grey areas represent Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.


United States: the transactions trend clearly shows that users purchase mostly up to a week before Christmas Day and no improvement is seen in early January, although sessions do return to normal quickly after New Year’s Eve. Publishers should take advantage of this rebound in sessions, while retailers may want to wait on providing deals until sales bounce back fully.

United Kingdom: transactions decline sharply until Christmas and then start rising sharply from December 26, and about a week after New Year’s Eve it raises to levels about the same or higher than pre-holiday, so you might consider creating marketing campaigns and promotions to take advantage of January’s rise. Sessions follow a similar pattern.

France: transactions and sessions follow a similar pattern as in the UK, but with a significant decline during New Year’s Eve. As you can see, there is a major spike in the second Wednesday of January every year, that’s the day Winter sales begin in France! Unlike in the US, January is an important month for French retailers, should we say the French Cyber Wednesday?

Get a head start on 2015
So how can you take advantage of those trends to be more successful during the coming year? Here are some ideas for you to act upon right now:
  1. Look at your own data for previous years to understand the patterns for your existing and previous customers.
  2. Check your Benchmarking reports to learn more about how other websites of your size and in your vertical performed.
  3. Use Google Trends to check trends from previous years related to your vertical and country.
  4. Make sure you match your marketing efforts to your local post-holiday trend.
About the Data & Charts 
In order to perform this analysis, we looked at billions of sessions from authorized Google Analytics users who have shared their website data anonymously (read more).


With Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick: Matalan increases conversion rate 28%

This post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser blog as part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

As one of the UK's leading family clothing retailers, Matalan must be nimble -- faster decisions mean better customer engagement and more sales. So they worked with Morpheus Media to implement Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Google Analytics' powerful insights helped Matalan make better business decisions, faster.

Matalan was already using DoubleClick Campaign Manager to centralize their digital marketing and reports. Adding Google Analytics Premium side-by-side showed them campaign effectiveness even more clearly, allowing them to uncover the hidden value of their digital marketing efforts, like transactions where digital advertising had assisted a conversion on another channel.

“It’s really helpful to be able to see one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel,” says Lee Pinnington, Matalan's Multi-Channel Marketing Director.


With a complete view of their digital marketing ROI thanks to the integration of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics Premium, Matalan was able to put their marketing dollars where they would truly be most effective. And the results were dramatic: a 28% rise in conversion rate and significant growth in both site visits and revenue.

To learn more about Matalan's approach, check out the full case study.

Google Analytics Demos & Tools

As a member of the Google Analytics Developer Relations team, I often hear from our community that they want to do more with GA but don't always know how. They know the basics but want to see full examples and demos that show how things should be built.

Well, we've been listening, and today I'm proud to announce the launch Google Analytics Demos & Tools, a new website geared toward helping Google Analytics developers tackle the challenges they face most often.


The site aims to make experienced developers more productive (we use it internally all the time) and to show new users what's possible and inspire them to leverage the platform to improve their business through advanced measurement and analysis.

Some highlights of the site include a full-featured Enhanced Ecommerce demo with code samples for both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, a new Account Explorer tool to help you quickly find the IDs you need for various Google Analytics services and 3rd party integrations, several examples of easy-to-build custom dashboards, and some old favorites like the Query Explorer.

Google Analytics Demos & Tools not only shows off Google Analytics technologies, it also uses them under the hood. All pages that require authorization use the Embed API to log users in, and usage statistics, including outbound link clicks, authorization status, client-side exceptions, and numerous other user interaction events are measured using analytics.js.

Every page that makes use of a Google Analytics technology lists that information in the footer, making it easy for developers to see how all the pieces fit together. In addition, the entire site is open sourced and available on Github, so you can dive in and see exactly how everything works.

Feedback is welcome and appreciated!

By: Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer

Get a deeper view of your iOS app installs

If you use AdMob or other mobile ad networks to drive installs of iOS apps, here's some good news: iOS install tracking is coming as a Public Beta in a few weeks to all Google Analytics accounts. This detailed view of iOS install campaigns will be available right in your Google Analytics interface.

Optimize your iOS install marketing programs
Install metrics are a useful way to measure your marketing campaign performance. However, not all marketing efforts create the same volume and quality of users. With these new reports, you'll see how one source performs compared to another, so you can optimize your marketing spend. You can even dive deeper into the same marketing channel to see how one campaign or ad is performing compared to another. 

For instance: If users coming from source X tend to use your app once and abandon it, while users from source Y tend to use it for eight months and generate $68 each in value, you'll know. And with Google Analytics' powerful segmentation, you can combine post-download metrics with your acquisition channels across all Google Analytics reports, to make even better decisions for your marketing programs.


New iOS install tracking report (click image for full-size).

Beyond the install
Google Analytics Certified partner InfoTrust is already finding that the feature helps them measure and optimize install campaign performance.

"Many of our customers have mobile apps that generate more traffic and engagement than their desktop properties. Their goals are to bring users back to the app consistently and drive more engagement through more relevant articles and products, and increasing subscriptions or purchases. Seeing which marketing campaigns drive iOS users to app installs, and what users do after the install, is critical when determining where to use marketing spend."

Amin Shawki, Analytics Manager 
InfoTrust, LLC

Mobile ad networks integrated with the new reporting include Aakri, AdMob, AppLovin, Millennial Media, MdotM, Taptica and Tapjoy, with more to come soon. These iOS integrations join our existing Android campaign measurement tools.

Getting started
Learn more and get started easily with this step-by-step guide.

We hope this iOS integration helps you make even better choices for your business and for your customers. Happy mobile analyzing!

Posted by Rahul Oak, Product Manager, Google Analytics for Apps

Introducing Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals on Analytics Academy

So you’ve built an app? Awesome! But how are you tracking success? Does anyone know about your app? Do you have a good monetization plan? 

Today we’re excited to officially announce our newest Analytics Academy course, Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals, designed to help you answer these questions and more. 

Whether you’re an app developer or an experienced marketer in the mobile app space, knowing the fundamentals of mobile app measurement can help you improve your app marketing and monetization efforts. In this course, you’ll learn how to identify your most valuable users, how to find more of them, and how to tailor your monetization experience for different groups of users.


How it works
In this free online course, instructor Fontaine Foxworth will lead you through a series of conceptual training videos and interactive exercises to teach you about Mobile App Analytics. Throughout the course, she’ll use an example online gaming app called Go Fish!, which will demonstrate common Analytics use cases and help you apply what you learn to your own mobile app. 

After the course opens, you’ll have four weeks to earn a certificate of completion while working alongside a worldwide community of Analytics enthusiasts. In total, the course should take between two to four hours to complete.

Ready to sign up? Register now and join us when the course begins on Tuesday, November 18th.

We look forward to your participation in the course!


Post By: Christina Macholan & The Google Analytics Education Team

Measure What Matters Most: A Marketer’s Guide

It’s no secret that it takes many marketing touchpoints to connect with a customer, find a quality lead, or make a sale. But how do you know the right message to deliver at each point in that journey? How do you ensure that your investments are working, and that you’re not wasting money and resources, or worse, alienating your customers?

Better measurement is the answer. It’s the key to understanding and making the most of these interconnected touchpoints, but it's not always top of mind when building marketing campaigns.

Today, we’re releasing Measure What Matters Most: A Marketer’s Guide to help marketers make sense of today’s complex customer journey by laying a solid measurement foundation.



In this brief guide, we’ll look at four crucial tenets of measurement-focused marketing:
  1. Focus on the right metrics. Set yourself up for success by identifying clear metrics that you want to affect before launching a campaign.
  2. Value your best customers. Instead of measuring transactions alone, model the lifetime value you derive from your customers.
  3. Attribute value across the journey. To find out what’s working in your marketing and what’s not, identify the role of each touchpoint along the customer’s journey.
  4. Prove marketing impact. Use controlled experimentation to understand what happened only because of a given marketing spend change (and would not have happened without it).
Collectively, these points show how better measurement can improve campaign effectiveness, help you get the credit you deserve for your programs and, most importantly, ensure a better return on investment for all of your marketing. Download “Measure What Matters Most: A Marketer’s Guide” to find out how.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Brian Gavin Diamonds Sees 60% Increase in Customer Checkout with Enhanced Ecommerce

"Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics made it extremely easy to analyze the metrics that are important to an ecommerce site and garner the insights to make smart changes to our website, driving significant improvements in performance!"
-- Danny Gavin, VP and Director of Marketing at Brian Gavin Diamonds

Our Enhanced Ecommerce features in Google Analytics are officially out of beta today, complete with brand new tools like Product Attribution. Combined with our new Shopping Campaigns report, Google Analytics provides our retail clients with an integrated view of their customers. As part of today’s announcements, we’re also excited to highlight partnerships with Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper. Using Enhanced Ecommerce in conjunction with our partners’ products simplifies the implementation process and gives you a full set of tools to create and optimize your ecommerce site. Please see the end of this post for more information about our partners’ solutions.

Understand customer behavior
Enhanced Ecommerce provides insight into the customer’s path to purchase, like when customers added items to cart, started the checkout process, and completed a purchase. Importantly, Enhanced Ecommerce gives you the ability to identify segments of customers who are falling out of the shopping funnel. You can then focus on these high intent-to-purchase customers with remarketing or by optimizing your checkout flow. Brian Gavin Diamonds, a Texas-based jewelry design house that is renowned for its signature hearts and arrows diamonds and custom jewelry design, used Enhanced Ecommerce to discover that in a single month they had missed out on more than half a million dollars in sales due to cart abandonment at the customer login page.  The company worked quickly to optimize their checkout flow with guest checkout functionality and immediately realized a 60% increase in customers completing the checkout process to payment.  You can read more about Brian Gavin Diamonds’ success with Enhanced Ecommerce in our case study.


Optimize online merchandising to increase sales 
Once you’ve gotten users to your site, Enhanced Ecommerce allows you to optimize the onsite experience to drive sales. By using Product Lists, you can identify how customers are discovering and interacting with products before purchasing them. Armed with this information, you can analyze your onsite promotions in order to build a more effective merchandising strategy, or use the product attribution functionality to understand which product lists drive conversions.

In an increasingly mobile world, this information is critically important since screen real estate is limited and must be used wisely. For retailers with mobile apps, the Google Analytics SDK fully supports Enhanced Ecommerce, so you can do rich analysis of product performance and customer behavior across all sales channels.  Across both desktop and mobile, Enhanced Ecommerce delivers the information you need to increase sales on your site.

Drive revenue with Shopping Campaign reports
Today, we’re also introducing a new Shopping Campaigns report as part of the AdWords reporting section in Google Analytics.  This feature will be rolled out over the next few weeks and will allow you to analyze the performance of your shopping campaigns.  With this functionality, you’ll have the ability to understand the product categories/types that are driving site engagement and revenue and use this information to optimize your bids.  So, how can you get started?  If you have already linked your Adwords and your Google Analytics accounts, this report will automatically appear in the Adwords reporting section of your Analytics account.  Not linked yet?  Simply follow these instructions to link the two accounts.


Get Enhanced Ecommerce with our partner integrations
Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper have partnered with us to integrate Enhanced Ecommerce as part of their ecommerce solutions. If you’re using one of these platforms, you can take advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce by enabling one of these pre-built integrations.  Shopify’s solution is available today while solutions for Prestashop, Blue Acorn, and mShopper will be available in the coming week. To learn more about our featured partners, please visit our partner page. 

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is built to help you understand your customers and optimize your sales conversions. Combined with Shopping Campaign reports, Google Analytics is a complete solution for ecommerce businesses.  For more information about how to implement this feature in your Google Analytics account, please see the documentation available in our help center.

Posted by Marcia Jung, Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics team

More about our partners

Shopify
Shopify is a commerce platform that allows anyone to easily sell online, at their retail location, and everywhere in between. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, a point of sale system to power retail sales and a card reader to process credit card transactions through a mobile phone. Shopify currently powers over 120,000 retailers in 150 different countries, including: Tesla Motors, Gatorade, Google, Wikipedia, LA Lakers, CrossFit, and many more. 

PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a world industry leader in Open Source solutions for ecommerce, whose mission is to challenge ecommerce limits by developing a powerful solution that is accessible to anyone, anywhere. Through the Open Source software, PrestaShop allows everyone to create online stores quickly, easily and for free. The company currently counts more than 200,000 online stores worldwide, 700,000 community members and over 4 million software downloads.

Blue Acorn
Blue Acorn is a premium eCommerce agency dedicated to helping retailers and brands achieve revenue growth through a comprehensive, data-driven approach. In order to best support this approach, they became the first Magento Solution Partner in the world to also hold certified partnerships with Google and Optimizely. By integrating data and testing throughout their services, they are able to help their clients make the best decisions possible and further support their best-in-class design, development, and optimization capabilities.

mShopper
mShopper is a leading mobile commerce platform that allows retailers to create custom, mobile-optimized e-commerce sites designed specifically to increase sales on mobile devices. The integration with Enhanced Ecommerce will provide a dramatic impact on mobile commerce conversions for retailers by delivering superior insight on product sales and overall campaign performance. mShopper recently launched mStore® v4.1 with marketing tools and a performance dashboard to drive conversions and improve sales for customers using mobile devices as well.


DAA SF Presents ‘Getting Data Right: Optimizing Performance Using Quantitative & Qualitative Practices’

This year the annual Digital Analytics Association (DAA) San Francisco Symposium is taking place on Thursday November 13th  and will be hosted at University of San Francisco. The theme is "optimizing performance using quantitative and qualitative practices". The DAA SF chapter has lined up industry leaders who will be sharing their thoughts and experiences. We are expecting a great afternoon of discussion followed by a networking reception. Following are the event details:


Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting real-world solutions to the optimization challenges we all face everyday. They will be discussing the principles of qualitative data collection, optimization and the relation to quantitative data they've put into practice. This year we are piloting a new, more interactive format: 15 minutes of content from speakers followed by 10 min of Q&A from the audience, so come ready to participate in a day of analytics sharing and learning, and leave with ideas to put into practice. Our lineup includes:
  • Sarah Cho, Survey Monkey
  • Jason Conrad, Foresee
  • Joe Megibow, Chief Digital Officer, American Eagle
  • Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google
  • Jim Sterne, Founder, eMetrics
  • Rahul Todkar, Intuit
  • Jimmy Wong, LinkedIn
  • Ryan Zander, Sport Vision
By attending you will:
  • Learn how industry leaders use quantitative AND qualitative data to improve their businesses
  • Discover how your analytics can drive savvy optimization across multiple channels
  • Uncover how marketing attribution's data output leads to more informed marketing decisions
  • Learn the latest on optimization best practices from practitioners and vendors 
Theme: Optimizing performance using Quantitative AND Qualitative practices
When: November 13th, registration starts at 12:30, program 1:00pm to to 5:30pm, followed by a networking reception
Where: University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117
Cost: $25 for DAA members/$75 for non-members
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 Feras.

Online Retailers: The Secret to Seasonal Success in 2014


Plan ahead.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the holiday rush begin earlier and earlier. And we’ve also noticed that the shopping frenzy is extending beyond the traditional season, with transaction rates in 2013 boasting lifts even after Christmas. These trends make for a lot of opportunity for online retailers, but you need to play your cards right. The most important thing you can do to ensure seasonal success is to plan your digital strategy now.  We’ve analyzed transaction behavior from a portion of our Google Analytics accounts over the 2013 holiday season to develop a guide for seasonal success. 

Which days drive the most transactions?
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 a strategy that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.

As digital retailers are well aware, Cyber Monday is THE digital shopping day of the year.  It generates the most transactions of any single day and, in 2013, saw a transaction rate lift of 170% over average.  In second place is Black Friday, a day that has increased in digital importance over the last three years. By 2013, the transaction rate on Black Friday was 114% higher than average.  Beyond these two stars, the table below shows you the top days in 2013 by transaction volume and the lift in transactions rates on each day.


In general, beyond Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the Mondays and Tuesdays before Christmas in December tend to generate the highest volume of transactions.  Interestingly, the highest transaction days are not correlated to the days with the most sessions (traffic to your site), so avoid using the top session days as a proxy for the top transaction days.


How can I drive sales on the top transaction days?
The holiday season generates some of the highest transaction rate spikes and the lowest dips for the entire year. In order to drive digital sales successfully, it’s important that you adjust your bids for auction-based media, such as search ads, appropriately to account for higher transaction rates on key dates and throughout the season.  As you navigate the holiday season, use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier for auction-based media (learn more about bid adjustments). This adjustment schedule reflects the increased value of clicks that are more likely to convert, and helps ensure that you stay ahead of competitors and  get in front of the right consumers. The transaction rate lift for the top days are shown in the table above, while the chart below gives you an idea of the lift for the weeks surrounding the holiday season.


As you can see, the top days generate some of the biggest transaction rate lifts, but there’s also plenty of upside in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving as well as right before Christmas.  A smart retailer will generate a bid schedule for the entire season, starting 4-5 weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Marketing to consumers is notoriously tricky and often trend-driven, making the holiday season a difficult and uncertain time for retailers. However, with proper pre-season preparation, digital retailers can set themselves up for seasonal success in 2014.  If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach to your business, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking tool.  For more strategies for the holiday season, check out our holiday tips blog post and best practices checklist.


About the Data
In order to perform this analysis,we looked at billions of sessions across millions of Google Analytics accounts. We used session and transaction trends; and we looked at the percentage of sessions that included a transaction to calculate transaction rates. The data includes only accounts that have authorized Google to share website data in an anonymous way (read more). For questions, comments, or praise please contact us at [email protected] 


Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg from the Google Analytics team.