Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Making tag management more accessible and powerful

Today we are happy to introduce improvements to Google Tag Manager that will make both marketing and IT teams happy: 
  • New APIs that tailor the power of Google Tag Manager to your unique needs
  • A new intuitive interface to help you launch and edit tags even faster
  • More 3rd-party templates to make tagging easier
Many large enterprises use Google Tag Manager to streamline and simplify website and mobile app tagging. It helps marketers control the end-to-end process of adding website tags, while IT departments save time they can spend on more strategic projects. InsureandGo has been using Google Tag Manager for all their tagging needs:

“Before, we missed opportunities because tag changes required a website release. Since we’ve enabled Google Tag Manager on the site, it’s enabled the marketing team to measure more on-site actions. For example, using Google Tag Manager to track on-page events such as specific clicks and form submissions helps us understand more granular customer actions, how to market and what to sell. We can make decisions much quicker and see within a few weeks whether the strategy has worked, whereas before it would have taken six to nine months.” Simon Everett, Head of Marketing

Let's look at the new features.


Introducing Google Tag Manager API

Sometimes you just want things your own way. We understand! The new full-featured Google Tag Manager API lets you customize the infrastructure to suit your needs, whether that means building your own tools or better integrations with your existing workflow. From creating and managing users to previewing and publishing containers and tags, the API provides all the power of the web interface.

For example, the new API makes it easy to manage user access in bulk. It's easy to set permissions for many users at once, or set up your own role-based permissions and let the API give the right level of access to the right people in your organization.

Agencies can use the API to easily manage large tagging setups for their clients: create a master container template, specify variations (such as the domain, or the ad campaign ID) in a Google Sheets doc, and use the API to automatically deploy to multiple containers and keep those containers in sync. 

Our partner Novartis has been able to scale more easily by using Google Tag Manager APIs:

We have a strong data-driven culture at Novartis and thus in the digital space we’re naturally interested in using data and insights to improve the usability and experience of our websites. With many brands and websites across the globe, collecting web analytics data can become time consuming. Two challenges we have faced are data consistency and tagging implementation across many sites. We developed a process where we use the Google Tag Manager API to eliminate a manual, error-prone, process and thus were able to shift our attention from several low-value tasks to determining how to create a great digital experience for our customers.
Angela Grammatas - Digital Analytics Manager for Novartis


More coverage for 3rd-party tags

Starting in the next few weeks, you'll see more 3rd-party templates in the tag creation flow. We've made it easier for marketers to add tags and minimize errors while doing so. When adding a new tag of your own, you'll select from a list of 3rd-party providers and be underway in just a few clicks. We now offer support for tags from AdRoll, Marin, Comscore, Bizo, Clicktale, Neustar, Distillery, Turn, Mediaplex, VisualDNA, quantcast, Criteo and many more to come soon. Don't see the tag you need? No problem: you can add it immediately as a custom HTML tag. You can also ask to have a new tag template included in future releases, as Tag Manager will continue to add new tag templates. You'll find the full list of tag templates in our help center.

Creating a new tag (click image for full-size).


A more intuitive interface

We think tag management should be easy even for non-technical users. Even if you're new to Google Tag Manager, you'll be using the improved interface within minutes. Tasks are intuitive and structured much the same way as in AdWords and Google Analytics. Our new updates include:
  • A default workflow that's simpler and clearer
  • Instant search and autocomplete that can help you find anything in your Google Tag Manager containers
  • New keyboard shortcuts to simplify life for power users
The goal: enable marketing managers to easily add and update tags.

The new container overview page (click image for full-size).

We are confident you'll find the new Google Tag Manager easier to use and a more powerful solution for your web and app tagging needs. If you are already using Google Tag Manager, you can try out the new user interface today by logging in your accounts and following the instructions. New to Google Tag Manager? Get started today!

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager Google Tag Manager

Dynamic remarketing now available to advertisers across all verticals

This post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Over the next few weeks we are rolling out dynamic remarketing to all verticals including hotels, flights, real estate, classifieds, jobs, auto, finance and education. Since we launched dynamic remarketing for retailers, many advertisers like Bebe Stores, Netshoes, and Build Direct have been driving better results and more profits from their remarketing campaigns.



Highlighting what matters most to your customers

Dynamic remarketing shows site visitors tailored ads that feature the products they viewed on your website, and related products they might be interested in. Let’s say you sell cars and offer hundreds of makes and models in multiple cities. With dynamic remarketing, you can build one ad that will dynamically show tailored messaging to your site visitors, like the cars they engaged with on your site, and similar cars in that city and price range. Beta clients across multiple verticals reported a 2x increase in conversion rates and 60% reduction in CPA, on average, when they added dynamic ads to their remarketing campaigns.*

Display ads built for mobile, optimized for conversion value 

  • When advertisers add mobile targeting to their remarketing campaigns, we’ve seen conversion volume increase by 15% on average at the same price. That's why all our dynamic remarketing templates are mobile-optimized to deliver ads seamlessly across screens. Learn more. 
  • Dynamic remarketing with automated bidding can boost performance by calculating optimal bids for each impression in real-time. This means if you sell an $800 camera and a $20 flashlight, AdWords will automatically prioritize winning more of the $800 conversions than the $20 conversions. This helps to maximize the total value of your conversions, not just the number of conversions.  Learn more. 

Customers driving success with dynamic remarketing  

In travel, Hotel Urbano built a single dynamic ad that showed each prospective traveler the package, hotel or cruise most relevant to them. Dynamic ads improved their return on ad spend by 38%, and drove 415% more revenue compared to standard remarketing. Mariana Filippo, senior marketing analyst at Hotel Urbano, says it made business more efficient “since we don’t have to change creatives every day across over 4,000 packages across 183 different countries. It keeps up with our frequency so we can deliver the right ad with the right user.”

In flights, Jet Airways customized ads based on where and when people were looking to fly, so someone browsing flights from New York to London could see a special offer on business class tickets on the exact day they’re looking to fly. They doubled conversions at a 65% lower CPA by adding dynamic ads to their remarketing strategy.




In local deals, India's largest online B2B marketplace IndiaMART used dynamic remarketing to recommend new suppliers to existing customers, increasing lead volume by 400% at a 60% lower CPA. Saugata Halder, product marketing manager at IndiaMART offers this advice: "For marketplaces like us, it’s imperative to showcase the wide range of products available to our buyers. Dynamic remarketing allowed us to reach a larger segment of our customers with personalized ads and to maximize the impact of our marketing efforts.”


Join us for a Hangout on Air

Learn how you can get started with Dynamic Remarketing. Join us for a live Hangout on Air with Google product managers and experts on Thursday, October 9th at 9:00am PT/ RSVP here.

For more information visit the AdWords Help Center. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can visit the Google Analytics Help Center to learn how to use your existing tags to get started with dynamic remarketing.

Posted by Jyoti Vaidee, Product Manager Dynamic Display Ads
*Campaign results may vary across advertisers 

The Top 3 Google Analytics Configuration Issues Impacting your Data (and How to Fix Them)

Good data is important.  How important?  Studies show that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of companies.  In fact, the average company loses 12% of its revenue due to bad data.  As you know, Google Analytics is a powerful product with a wealth of features to help you optimize your results online. However, to unleash the power of Google Analytics’ marketing tools, you must ensure the data collected is complete and of the highest quality. The insights that fuel action in Analytics depend on good data, especially for some of our advanced algorithmic marketing functionalities like data driven attribution.

Since its release two months ago, our popular new diagnostics tool is working hard to ensure you’re getting the best results. Today, we’d like to share insights into some of the most common account errors along with likely causes and suggested solutions. In particular, we’ll look at some solutions for when our diagnostics tool is telling you the following:  “Bad Default URL,” “Clicks and Sessions Discrepancy,” and “No Goal Conversions.”  Read on to understand the impact of these issues as well as their common causes.


Bad Default URL
“Data without quality is useless.”
João Correia, Analytics Strategist at Blast Analytics & Marketing

When you create a Google Analytics account for website tracking, one of the first questions we ask is for a default URL. This is generally the homepage of your website. Diagnostics ensures that you have tagged your default URL correctly for this property, and warns you if this is not the case. Having a properly tagged website is an essential step towards being able to understand consumer behavior.

This warning is generally caused by either missing or malformed tracking code installed on your default URL, or more simply a typo in the URL that was input. If the default URL is incorrect, simply login to your Google Analytics account, click the “Admin” button in the header, and click “Property Settings” to adjust your default URL. If the tracking code is flawed, you’ll want to talk to your webmaster and ask to have the tracking code correctly installed. 

Beyond the default URL, we also check for tracking code health across your site. We look for pages that have missing or malformed tags. And we continually run these checks, ensuring new pages you launch in the future also are properly tagged. 

Clicks / Session Discrepancies
"Diagnostics helped me identify and fix an AdWords data discrepancy in my account.  Without the tool, I may have never even realized that my data was inconsistent.  This is a great tool!"
Monika Rut-Koroglu, Digital Analytics and Optimization at FXCM

Google Analytics offers rich capabilities that help users share data with linked AdWords accounts and gain unique and powerful marketing insights. It’s common to expect the number of clicks you see in AdWords to match the number of sessions you see in Analytics; but this is not always the case. This discrepancy can slow down meaningful analysis, and is a situation that can and should be rectified.

The most common causes of this issue have to do with your configuration settings. For example, when you send ad clicks through a third party that redirects to your site; the third party will often times drop vital tagging parameters which are mandatory for Analytics and AdWords to associate clicks and sessions. Other examples are having AdWords auto-tagging disabled, and redirecting users to mobile sites while unintentionally dropping tagging parameters.

Fixes for these issues can vary; we have a detailed guide to walk users through this or you can follow prompts in Google Analytics when we identify specific actions for you to take. If you have a third party who uses redirects and drops parameters, talk to them to resolve the issue. If auto-tagging is disabled on your AdWords accounts, consider enabling it. 

No Goal Conversions
“[Google Analytics Diagnostics] is a great idea... Just discovered it the other day on my iPad. Helpful to let me redefine my goals better and find out what's not working.”
Sherri Matthew, Harpist and Small Business Owner

Google Analytics goals offer valuable ways to identify, track, and help you drive more valuable outcomes. Sometimes goals can break, and stop this critical stream of insights from reaching you. We run diagnostic checks to ensure your goals continually identify a steady flow of high value customers, and we warn you if this flow breaks.

The most common cause for goal breakage is when a goal is based on a URL that changes. If your webmaster updates the URLs on your site, and the URLs in the goal settings aren’t updated accordingly, this will cause your goal to stop tracking. The second most common cause for goals breaking is if the event tracking on your site changes and the events listed in the goal aren’t updated accordingly.

If you’ve had a goal break for these reasons, visit the “Admin” section via a link in the header of your Google Analytics account, and click “Goals” to correct your goal configurations.

More About Diagnostics
Google Analytics Diagnostics scans for problems every day (with some exceptions). It inspects your site tagging, account configuration, and reporting data for potential data-quality issues.  Only users with Edit permission can see and respond to diagnostics messages. Diagnostics honors the first response to a message; for example, when a user ignores a message, it is ignored for all users.

The tool currently scans for dozens of issues, and dozens more are planned. Just keep an eye on your account over time - it will notify you if and when new issues or opportunities are detected.


- Frank Kieviet and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Enhanced Google Analytics Audience Capabilities Come to Apps

Good news for mobile app developers: Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting and Remarketing are now available for apps in Google Analytics.  Just one of the improvements for audience segmentation and remarketing we're announcing today, these changes should make it even easier for all our advertisers to reach their high-value customer segments. 

In-App Audience Demographics Reporting and Remarketing

Good analytics are especially important to app developers. At Google I/O, Hovhannes Avoyan, the CEO and Founder of PicsArt , had this to say: 

“We need analytics to help us understand who our users are, how they interact with our application, how our application performs. With all that knowledge, we want to apply different monetization strategies to different kinds of users.” 

Now developers can see just how different user segments engage and monetize with In-App Audience Demographics Reporting. 

And it's more than just data. Analysts and developers can blend audience demographic and behavior data into detailed audience lists to be targeted with in app remarketing campaigns. In short, all the great remarketing capabilities for Google Analytics users on the web are now available for apps as well.

New In-App Audience Demographics Reporting

Segmentation and remarketing lists get an upgrade
Creating remarketing lists for apps and web is now even easier with recent upgrades to both segmentation and audience building. A streamlined creation flow for creating audiences allows users to go from segment to audience within clicks (plus a few bonus admin features like list renaming and automatic list sizing).

New Audience Builder Experience, now supporting App lists
If you prefer to stand on the shoulders of remarketing giants, Analytics power users have developed and shared audience definitions that import via template links or from the solutions gallery. This simplifies things dramatically for new users. A process that could be complicated and time-consuming can now be done with 6 clicks in under 1 minute. Give it a try: import our Engagement Pack of Core Remarketing Lists.

On the segmentation side, users have told us they wanted segments to be more discoverable, easier to manage, and more intuitive to build. We've been listening, and have made interface improvements, adding a simple “Add Segment” button within reports, a new segment-selection interface, hover-over segment definitions, and a 1-click action dialogue to Share, Edit, Copy, Remove, or Remarket to a segment. 

New Segmentation Experience: fewer errors for better analysis

Measure remarketing performance with the new Display Targeting report
Once you’ve found a segment, created an audience, and activated your remarketing campaign, close the loop by measuring the performance of those audiences across all remarketing campaigns . Enter the new Adwords Display Targeting report in the Acquisition section to see all your active remarketing lists, along with impressions, spend, behavior, and conversion rates under the “Interests and Remarketing” tab.

New Remarketing List Performance in Display Targeting Report
You can learn how to update your SDK to enable these features in our Help Center or get started now by creating some remarketing lists. We hope that these improvements make your audience segmentation and remarketing-- in apps and on the web-- more intuitive and more effective. We’d love to hear from you! Please leave questions or feedback in the comments, and stay tuned for more audience-related improvements. 


Posted by Dan Stone, Product Manager, and Kanu Singhal, Technical Lead from the Google Analytics Audience Team

Google Play Services 6.1

gps

Today, we’re excited to introduce the latest version of Google Play services to help you easily build on the newest features from Google and optimize your apps.

Google Play services 6.1 adds Enhanced Ecommerce analytics support from Google Tag Manager and offers new improvements to the Google Drive Android API. With the latest release, we’re also including a refresh of the Google Fit developer preview, so that you can test your fitness apps on any Android device.

Analytics

Launched in Google Play services 5.0, Enhanced Ecommerce is an analytics extension designed to provide richer insights into pre-purchase shopping behavior and into product performance. It’s a great way to gain visibility into the full customer journey, helping you understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing at a granular level. By including support for Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Tag Manager with the latest release of Google Play services, we are supercharging your ability to regularly update and manage tags on mobile apps more easily, so that you can consistently measure product impressions, shopping funnel events, and more.

Drive

To make it easier to use Drive, we added enhancements to the Google Drive Android API. With the new Completion Events feature, you can see when actions are committed to the server and improve the response time to conflicts. Material design elements have been incorporated into the File Picker UI, along with the addition of Recent and Starred views. A new setParents() method enables you to organize files and folders, while the previous Contents class has been replaced with a simpler DriveContents class.

Google Fit

Initially introduced in August, the Google Fit Developer Preview has been refreshed to enable you to test your new fitness apps on any Android device. We expect to make additional changes to the APIs, so please check back with us on new developments.

Stay tuned!

We will be rolling out Google Play services 6.1 over the next few days, after which we will publish the documentation and make the SDK available.

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services section on the Android Developers site.

New Benchmarking Reports Help Twiddy Boost Email Open Rates by 500%

If you’ve ever wondered how your website is performing compared to the competition, our new Benchmarking reports in Google Analytics will help you find out.

Analytics users can now compare their results to peers in their industry, choosing from 1600 industry categories, 1250 markets and 7 size buckets. Benchmarking leverages the footprint of Google Analytics and can help you set meaningful targets, spot trends occurring across industries and answer a whole array of questions: Which channels should you be investing more in? How does your mobile engagement compare to your peers? How unique is your audience?

The new Benchmarking reports display acquisition and engagement metrics — like sessions and bounce rate — by Channel, Location, or Device Category dimensions. To ensure total data transparency, the number of properties contributing to the benchmark is displayed once you choose the industry, market and size. A helpful heat map feature makes it easy to see areas of strength and opportunity, and where to devote more resources.

Benchmarking in Action: Twiddy Finds a New Email Marketing Opportunity

Twiddy.com, a vacation rentals company in the Outer Banks-- a popular summer getaway destination-- has been using Benchmarking reports to help focus its marketing resources. A look at their peer benchmarks by channel showed that Twiddy was doing many things well during its peak summer booking season. Still, “it was clear we were missing a huge opportunity in email marketing,” reports CMO Ross Twiddy. His team used Google Analytics data to revamp their email marketing and improve the flow and process.

Email opportunity: Visitors from email spend nearly twice as long on site as the average, but user sessions generated from email are 82% below average and new users from the channel fall 91% below similar sites.

Twiddy even used Google Analytics to choose the best-selling messages for their email campaigns. Their analysis helped them zero in on the factors that were most consistent in repeat bookings: the price range, location, rental type, and even vacation week that would be most likely to convert with for each customer. "We launched an email last week based on our findings, and it shattered our email marketing records: a 48% average open rate and a 40% clickthrough rate,” says Ross.

Twiddy is happy with the new visibility they’ve gained: “The Benchmarking reports were powerful enough for us to reallocate time, budget and resources towards running down the deficiency. We can’t wait to start testing the reports out more broadly during the next peak booking season.”

Get Started with Benchmarking

Benchmarking reports can be found in the “Audience” section of the reporting interface and are rolling out over the next few weeks to all Google Analytics users who have opted in to share their data anonymously. If you want to join in, simply check the “Share anonymously with Google and others” box in the Account Settings tab of your account admin page. This is only the beginning for benchmarking within Google Analytics. We’ll be expanding these capabilities in the coming months, both incorporating conversion metrics and adding support for mobile apps. For more information on Benchmarking reports, check out our Help Center.

Posted by: Nikhil Roy, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Valuing Website Metrics: Introducing Bid Optimization Support for Google Analytics Goals in DoubleClick Search

As part of our mission to offer the most actionable data and reporting, from all sources, DoubleClick Search lets you report on Google Analytics goals. You may not know that we also have the capability to use Google Analytics Goals as targets for DoubleClick Search bid-strategies. When you create a bid strategy in the Doubleclick Search Performance Bidding Suite, you can optimize to conversions and revenue based on Google Analytics goals and transactions. This feature extends the flexibility of DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. This release also extends bid optimization support to goals based on site analytics metrics such as pages per visit, visit duration, and new visitors.

Make better decisions based on user behavior insights 
Google Analytics goals make it possible to have user behavior prior to purchase drive your bidding decisions. Conversion windows vary by vertical. Some customers finalize their purchases/actions within minutes or hours, while other customers may take days, weeks or even months to research before converting. If you understand the propensity of a user to convert based on their session behavior, you can bid more for keywords that drive higher quality customers. This is where site analytics data comes in as it provides useful post click data such as "are we getting many new visitors?" or "users from ad group X spend an average of 5 minutes on the site after clicking".

Our Google Analytics integration gives you access to powerful new metrics to enhance bid optimization and create custom models that not only include the final conversion but also values keywords that lead to pre-conversion user behaviors including time on site, pages viewed, etc.

Getting started with Google Analytics goals 
Getting started with Google Analytics goals & DoubleClick Search bid-strategies is simple. They work in the same way as the DoubleClick Floodlight-targeted bid strategies you are already familiar with. Just create a new bid strategy using the wizard and select Conversions, Revenue, or Advanced targeting as the goal. Then Google Analytics can be selected as a conversion source (shown below).



If you want to mix Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Goals in the same bid-strategy, first define the relative value of the Tags and Goal inside the formula column. For example, suppose you wanted a ROAS strategy for your travel agency. Your main objective is to drive revenue from ticket and package sales, but you value a user spending 10 minutes reading about vacation packages at $1.50 since you expect they will return later to buy. The following formula column would capture this valuation:

FL_ticket_revenue + FL_package_revenue + to_money(1.50 * GA_10_minute_session) 

In the above formula: FL=Floodlight, GA=Google Analytics

Once you've created this formula columns, create a new bid strategy, in step 2 select the conversion source to be "formula column". If you haven’t linked your Google analytics account with DS, you can find a step by step guide here. If you are interested in using the site analytics level goals, please follow the guide here (note: you only need to complete Step 1: Transferring Property). To learn more about DS bid-strategies and Google Analytics integration, please check out our help center article.

U.S. Cellular reveals true impact of digital media on sales with Google Analytics Premium

With 10.6 million cell phone customers and retail stores in 400+ markets, U.S. Cellular needs to reach a lot of people with marketing messages. That's why U.S. Cellular uses many marketing channels -- online, in-store and telesales -- to drive mobile phone activations.


U.S. Cellular was challenged though. They didn’t know how many of their offline sales were driven by their digital marketing. This made it harder to adjust their media mix accordingly and also to forecast sales. To fix that situation, U.S. Cellular and its digital-analytics firm, Cardinal Path, turned to Google Analytics Premium and its integration with BigQuery. 

Part of Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery allows for highly flexible analysis of large datasets. The U.S. Cellular team used it to integrate and analyze terabytes of data from Google Analytics Premium and other systems. Then they mapped consumer behavior across online and offline marketing channels. Each transaction was attributed to the consumer touchpoints that the buyer had made across various sales channels. 

The result: U.S. Cellular got real insight into digital’s role in their sales. They were surprised to find that they could reclassify nearly half of all their offline activations to online marketing channels.

U.S. Cellular now uses this complete (and fully automatic) analytics framework to really see the consumer journey and forecast sales for each channel. Their team has the data they need to make better business decisions. 

“We’re now in the enviable position of having an accurate view at each stage of our customer journey," says Katie Birmingham, a digital & e-commerce analyst for the company. "The Google Analytics Premium solution not only gives us a business advantage, but helps us shape a great customer experience, and ultimately ties in to our values of industry-leading innovation and world-class customer service.”


Posted by: Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Premium Marketing

Rooms To Go Improves the Shopper Experience by Integrating Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery

Rooms To Go, a home furnishing retailer, simplifies the shopping experience by offering completely designed room packages. When the company wanted to better understand how its customers purchase its different furniture and decor variations and add-ons to streamline online customization options, it turned to its agency -  LunaMetrics - who integrated Google Analytics Premium and BigQuery. This approach helped to identify which items customers commonly buy together, leading to smarter and easier customization for its users.

The Google Analytics Premium integration allowed Rooms To Go to:
  • Better understand what their site visitors were purchasing
  • Organize the data and isolate the products that were frequently purchased together in order to discover customer buying patterns
  • Expand functionalities of the website to accommodate these customer patterns—for example, making it easier for users to add extra dining chairs when purchasing a dining room set

Overall, this strategy helped Rooms To Go create a better user experience for its customers, and the company expects an increase in sales because of it. Read the full case study on Think with Google, and learn about being a Google Analytics Premium customer here.

Avvo Gains New Insights with Data Import

Companies use many systems to run their business. These may include multiple web advertising networks, CRM and content publishing systems, point of sale systems, inventory databases, etc. Integrating the data from these systems with Google Analytics provides a better understanding for how your customers behave on the web. 

At the 2014 Analytics Summit we announced the new Data Import. Data Import helps unify data from your different business systems, allowing you to organize your data the same way your business is organized. This will allow for more accurate analysis and bringing together previously disparate datasets into one complete picture. Using Data Import, you can upload your brand’s existing data into Google Analytics and join it with GA data for reporting, segmentation and remarketing.

By using the Data Import functionality in Google Analytics Premium, consumer legal services brand Avvo created clear, accurate data, which continues to impact decisions across their organization. While Avvo already had a successful and fast-growing business, the lack of visibility into advertising success made it hard to align key revenue opportunities with actual site usage. Read the full case study here.


“We’ve been very pleased with the results that were realized using Data Import in Google Analytics to analyze client behavior on our website. This exercise has given us better insight into valuable data that will ultimately impact how we segment the market for legal services.” 
- Sendi Widjaja, Co-Founder & CTO, Avvo, Inc.

Data Import also now supports a new Query Time mode that allows you to join your data with historical GA data. With this mode you can:
  • Enhance existing, already processed GA data with imported dimensions and metrics.
  • Upload calculated values after a transaction occurs, like total customer spend, last transaction date, or a loyalty score.
  • Correct any errors in data you have uploaded to GA in the past.
Query Time mode is currently in whitelist release for Premium users. For more information, contact your Premium account manager. You can learn more about Premium here.

Illustration of a new Google Analytics report with data from multiple sources 

We are also introducing a new version of Cost Data import that provides more versatile support for importing historical data. Additionally, cost data  can now be uploaded directly  through the Google Analytics web interface (previously, data import  required using the GA API). Note: Users of the original cost data import  must migrate to the new version. Details can be found in the cost data migration guide.

How to get started using Data Import
For more information, read Data Import on the Google Analytics Help Center. Also check our new developer Data Import guides that will get you up and running in no time. Some features are currently not rolled out to all users. If you’d like to join the beta for full-access, sign-up here.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Jieyan Fan, Richard Maher, Rick Elliott and the Google Analytics Team