Tag Archives: Analytics

Get insights and take action on changing customer behavior

With free measurement tools from Google, you can get insights into how customer behavior has changed due to COVID-19 and then take action to update your marketing strategy. Read more to learn about how to get started, and for specific tips to help your business navigate the coming months.

Understand the impact of your Google media

If you’re running marketing campaigns to drive visits to your website or app, it’s important for these visits to turn into sales. Attribution in Google Ads helps you understand the paths people take to complete a conversion, and then award credit for that conversion to different ads, clicks, and factors along the way.

We recently launched a new look for attribution reports in Google Ads that helps you quickly see how customers interact with your marketing throughout the purchase cycle. This makes it easier for you to then take action in the areas that are driving results.

Revamped overview page that displays simplified and intuitive set of attribution reports.

Attribution models give you a deeper understanding of how your ads perform to help you decide where to allocate your marketing investment. One model, data-driven attribution, uses machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each click on the customer journey, helping it better account for changes in customer behavior during turbulent times. For example, if you're working on behalf of a grocery store experiencing an increase in online orders from mobile devices, data-driven attribution may indicate that your mobile ads are having a greater impact on driving conversions than you realized, giving you the insight you need to optimize your campaign performance. If you’d like to learn which attribution model is right for your business, check out our official guide to attribution modeling.

Measure the online customer journey

The way that your customers interact with you may have changed dramatically in the past few months. Google Analytics can help you measure how those changes have impacted your business through your website or app.

We’ve put together a guide that lists a few reporting shortcuts in Analytics that can help you easily get useful insights. For example, if your business has shifted to online only, you need to make sure you’re converting as many site or app visits into sales as possible. You can use a shortcut to see your weekly conversion rate for the last 60 days and identify areas you might be able to improve upon – without digging through multiple reports in your account.

Visualize trends about your business

With so much changing so rapidly, you’ll want to understand how your business has been impacted. You can use Google Data Studio to help you create a report and visualize the changes that have happened over the past few months. Data Studio is easy to use, anyone on your team can quickly start using it.

If you’ve connected Data Studio to your marketing campaigns, you can use these curated marketing templates to monitor the performance of those campaigns. Let’s say you need to create a report that shows daily online sales from each of your Google Ads campaigns over the last 60 days. You can use one of those templates to quickly build the report and then identify which campaigns are performing best so you can re-allocate your marketing budget to those campaigns.

Keep your website updated

During this time, you might have different business hours or shipping policies. Instead of having to invest in an additional resource to update your website, you can do it for free with Google Optimize. When you log into your account, you can use a new feature to easily add a message for your customers to the top of your homepage. Either use our templated banner or customize the message by editing the color, size or text.

Frame 6.png — Use our template to post a banner at the top of your website with an important message.

And if you need to make other changes throughout your site, you can still continue to use Optimize to create site personalizations. Optimize users would normally be limited to running 10 site personalizations at once, but we’ve removed that restriction for the next 90 days, until July 31.

All of these products and features are available for free today. We hope they are helpful as you navigate your business through changing times.

Source: The Official Google Blog

A new Optimize feature to keep your website updated through COVID-19

As communities around the world respond to COVID-19, we know this time presents unique challenges to your business. We’d like to share a few ways Google Optimize can help you keep your website updated with the latest information.

Last week we introduceda new way for you to quickly post an informational banner at the top of your website. This means you can easily let your customers know if your business hours or services have changed – or even just reinforce that you are still open to serve them – and where they can find more information.

And of course you can still use Optimize to help you update any page of your site, so we’ve included some tips and best practices below to get you started.

Quickly add a message on your website

Once you log into your Optimize account you can add a message to the top of your site by clicking “Add a banner.” You can use our templated banner or customize it by editing the color, size, and text. We recommend you use a color that stands out from the other content on the page. You can also select on which pages of your site the banner should be shown, for example only the homepage or on every page of your site.

You can also tailor your message by location. Let’s say you’re a clothing retailer based in San Francisco and are offering expedited shipping to customers located within the city. Optimize can help you display a customized banner that highlights faster shipping just to users located in San Francisco.

Temporarily update your site

You may have updated store hours or services available at this time. Use Optimize to create a personalization to temporarily display a different version of your site to people when they visit. You can end the personalization whenever you like and your site will go back to displaying its original version.

This is helpful if you want to let your customers know about new ways they can purchase from your business. For example, if you’re a restaurant that is now accepting to-go orders over the phone, you can add your phone number to your home page or make it more visible on your site. Or, if you’re a clothing retailer that is now only accepting online orders, you can update your FAQs page to include your new shipping and return policy.

Consider website best practices

We’ve also put together some additional recommendations to consider while updating your website during this time:

Reduce distraction on your site. Avoid automatic product carousels or animation on your site. If you have information about how customers can order from you on the same page, the carousel or animation could draw attention away from that message.
Adjust your FAQs page. Your frequently asked questions might be different than what they were last year. Make sure this page highlights what is currently top of mind for your customers. If you need to reduce your customer support load, place your contact information below all other sections to allow users to read your FAQs first.
Change your message for mobile devices. Adding longer messages to your customers may display fine on desktop but they probably will be too long on mobile devices. Limit your messages on your mobile site to less than 50 characters. And allow users to close the message if they wish.

Normally Optimize users would only be able to run 10 personalizations on their site at the same time. We have temporarily removed this restriction for the next 90 days so that you can make as many updates to your site as you need until July 31, 2020. If you don’t already have an Optimize account, you can create one for free here.

Source: Google Analytics Blog

New Enterprise IT Controls for Data Studio

As people use Data Studio throughout their organizations, IT administrators have asked to manage how Data Studio can be used. Today, we’re launching three free enterprise features providing IT administrators new visibility and control over Data Studio in their organization.

Organization management through Cloud Identity integration

Data Studio now integrates with Google Cloud Identity to provide organization-wide administrative capabilities. With this integration, Cloud Identity admins can manage who can use Data Studio and how they can use it. Existing G Suite and Cloud Identity customers get Data Studio integration out of the box, and can start using the new Data Studio administration features today. Customers using other identity providers, such as Active Directory, can synchronize their users with Google Cloud Identity, so that creating, suspending, and deleting users happens in one place.

Enterprise audit logging

Data Studio now offers audit logging, providing IT admins organization-wide visibility into Data Studio usage, similar to that available for apps like Drive and Calendar. For example, admins can understand which users are creating Data Studio reports, and who they are sharing those reports with. Admins can also identify which reports have the most engagement, to scale successful reports across the organization. With custom alerts, you can monitor potentially risky activity like external sharing of data sources, and can export audit logs to BigQuery and use Data Studio to drill into the details. Learn more.

Organization sharing policies

New Data Studio sharing policies allow you to reduce the risk of data exfiltration. You can set limits to prevent users from sharing reports outside of your organization, or make sure they don’t expose company data by disabling public link sharing.

Sharing policies offer you the flexibility to define sharing permissions that meet your business needs. You can give certain users the ability to share reports externally, while allowing other users to share only within the organization. Learn more.

There’s no charge for audit logging or sharing controls — they’re included with every edition of G Suite and Cloud Identity, including Cloud Identity Free. We’re committed to making Data Studio a solution that works for businesses of all sizes, and we’ll continue to build on this foundation. That way, everyone in your organization can uncover insights that matter, and you can rest assured knowing that your valuable business data is safe.

Source: Google Analytics Blog

Do more with Data Studio Community Visualizations

Data Studio Community Visualizations, currently in beta, allow you to create and integrate custom JavaScript components into your dashboards. You can use Community Visualizations to expand your chart selection, customize your report styling, or create custom components that perform advanced analysis or even in-browser machine learning.

New galleries for Data Studio Community Visualizations

Showcase gallery for Community Visualization reports

The Data Studio team recently launched the Community Visualization Report Gallery.

There, you can explore how others in the community have leveraged Community Visualizations to make the most of their data and dashboards.

Reports featuring Community Visualizations

Public Partner Visualization Gallery

Additionally, we’ve added a new gallery of Partner Community Visualizations that we’ve made available. Browse them in the new Data Studio Visualizations gallery.

Click-to-add Partner Visualizations

To add these Partner Visualizations to a report, click “Explore more” in the Community Visualizations drop down. There, you can browse and install a variety of partner-built charts, including funnel visualizations and Gantt charts.

The new in-product Partner Visualization gallery

Community Visualizations can add to a Data Studio dashboard in different ways - from providing custom charts and styling to integrating calculations with reporting.

Statistical analysis with Community Visualizations

Anvil Analytics + Insights works to bring data-driven decision making to all of their work, including optimized paid media campaigns. They used Community Visualizations to build their own Chi-Square statistical analyzer.

Several Anvil customers noticed that channels in Google Ads and Analytics converted at different rates, and wanted to know if the variance in conversion rates was statistically significant.

Prior to using Community Visualizations, the Anvil Insights team manually exported the data out of Google Analytics into a separate tool, then ran the statistical analysis. Depending on where Anvil ran the analysis, the results were either stored separately from their reports, or not stored at all. Every time they wanted to test a different hypothesis or run a different variation of the test, they had to repeat the same time-intensive process.

In order to speed up hypothesis testing and integrate the tests and results into Data Studio reports, Anvil used Data Studio Community Visualizations and built a Chi-Square calculator within a week.

Anvil’s calculator takes in data, just like any Data Studio chart. Once the calculation is complete, the analyzer presents the statistical significance, and either calls the viewer’s attention to a relationship in the data, or comments that there was nothing of note in the data. Now, all it takes to test new hypotheses is switching out the data for the component, just like you would for any other Data Studio chart. See it live.

Anvil Analytics + Insights Community Visualization Chi-Square Calculator

“This has been a much faster way to find statistical significance in our campaigns and in other hypotheses we want to test. Anvil’s Director of Analytics and Decision Science, Brett Lohmeyer says, “The best part is that it gives us an easy way for our team to better communicate the value of using statistical significance to our clients.”

Try it yourself

Check out the new in-product Partner Visualizations Gallery to browse and add new partner-built Community Visualizations to your reports. To build your own Community Visualizations, check out the developer documentation.

Source: Google Analytics Blog

“Up and to the right” with Data Studio

Millions of people from global enterprises, small businesses, governments and educational institutions are choosing Data Studio to make data-driven decisions. Over the last year, people used Data Studio to monitor ad performance, track brand performance, visualize student progress, and build machine learning models.

Google Ads monitoring report by Search Foresight

In 2019, we launched more than 80 new features and over 50 new connectors to data. A heartfelt thanks to our users and developers who made 2019 a year to remember. Here are a few highlights.

Visual Analysis

Throughout the year, we invested in visual analysis allowing faster data exploration and insights discovery. We made it possible to turn a chart into a filter using chart interaction controls. We also launched cross-chart interactions and drill downs. These investments, alongside updates like optional metrics, give users the tools they need to explore and interact with their data.

Fast performance through In-Memory BI Engine

Having the right tools to interact with and analyze data is critical but if report performance is slow, analyzing and visualizing large data sets can be frustrating. In collaboration with the Google Cloud BigQuery team, we launched BI Engine to bring sub second performance to Data Studio. BI Engine is an in-memory analysis service that integrates with your BigQuery data to return blazingly fast results in Data Studio. No more waiting for the page to load!

Scheduled PDF export

Listening to what our users need has always been a priority for the Data Studio team. Two of the top requests we heard from our users was the need to create PDFs and schedule emails of reports. Users can now do both. We’re happy to let you know that as of last week you can now set a custom schedule for scheduled emails. Learn more.

Conditional formatting

We recently launched conditional formatting, which allows users to apply formatting based on a set of rules, making it easier to tell a story with your data. We’re continuing to invest in conditional formatting and recently added AND and OR conditions to support compound conditions. Learn more.

In 2020 the Data Studio team is committed to delivering a great product that helps our users make better decisions with data. To stay in the loop on what’s happening in Data Studio, subscribe to email updates under Settings > Marketing Preferences or check our Help Center each week to learn “What’s new.”

Source: Google Analytics Blog

What’s new in App + Web properties

This July we announceda new property type in Google Analytics that helps you measure across both your app and website in one place. The new App + Web property helps you better understand your customers’ journeys across platforms so you can deliver more unified experiences.

Recently, we’ve introduced enhancements that allow you to measure multiple websites, do even more custom analysis, and get faster insights from your data.

Measure multiple web streams in a single property

App + Web properties now support multiple web streams, including Firebase web apps, in a single property—up to 50 data streams across your apps, websites, and web apps. This allows you to see metrics aggregated across all your related apps and websites, or apply filters to compare them individually. For example, if you were an online retailer with multiple regional stores, you could see your total global sales for the month or compare the sales of each of your regional sites and apps.

More options for custom analysis

In July we introduced the Analysis module in App + Web properties with five techniques to do cross-platform analysis with more flexibility. Now, we’ve added two more techniques to the mix: cohort analysis and user lifetime, as well as an update to the existing pathing technique and a larger window for historical data. These capabilities will become available over the next few weeks.

Cohort analysis helps you compare engagement between groups of similar users with more metric and dimension breakdowns. For example, you can compare revenue between cohorts of users that were acquired at different times to understand the results of a change in your marketing strategy.

User lifetime gives you insight into the lifetime activity of a group of users, based on custom dimensions you choose. For example, see how many lifetime in-app purchases were made by users acquired from a holiday promotion you ran.

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The cohort analysis technique helps you identify like-users and conduct analysis between cohorts
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See the lifetime activity of groups of users based on different variables
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The cohort analysis technique helps you identify like-users and conduct analysis between cohorts
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See the lifetime activity of groups of users based on different variables

Backward pathing allows you to work backwards from a conversion or other key event and analyze the differences, trends, or patterns users took to get there. For example, you can start from a purchase event to see how many users that made a purchase entered the funnel from an email campaign to your website, compared to a search ad that deep-links to your app.

Data retention has now expanded to up to 14 months across all techniques within the Analysis module so you can conduct longer term analyses, like year-over-year. Go to data settings in your property admin to increase data retention.

App and web insights at your fingertips

Automated and custom insights, previously available only for web, are now in App + Web properties.

Automated insights use machine learning to identify key trends and anomalies in your data. For example, if there was an unusual spike in sales yesterday, you will get an alert of the change which you can then investigate. Automated insights get smarter and more relevant to your business over time.

Custom insights give you the control to tell Analytics what metrics you’d like to be alerted about. For example, if you are a retailer and you’ve just released a new product, you may want to track sales specifically for that SKU. You can set up a custom insight to alert you if the product’s sales increased by more than 10% week-over-week. These alerts can now be set up to run hourly, and you can receive email notifications within 5 minutes of a triggered alert.

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The Insights dashboard displays all your automated and custom insights in one place
None
Create custom insights based on the most important metrics for your business
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The Insights dashboard displays all your automated and custom insights in one place
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Create custom insights based on the most important metrics for your business

Instant answers with search

When looking for specific insights in your Web properties you can simply ask a question in the search bar and get a quick answer. Today, we are extending this to App + Web properties, so you can ask questions and get holistic answers across your app and web data.

Ask questions using keywords, such as “users from organic channel last week,” and a relevant answer will appear in the search dropdown. Be specific about the metric, dimension, and time frame to get the best results.

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Type a question into the search bar in natural language and get quick answers in the dropdown
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Type a query into the search bar and get instant answers
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Click on the result to see it in the Insights panel
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See the insight in more detail

Automated and custom insights, as well as instant answers from the search dropdown, are available in App + Web properties today in English and will soon be available in all languages supported by Google Analytics.

Next steps for App + Web properties

Businesses already see the benefits of bringing more of the customer journey into view. TUI group, a leading integrated tourism group based in Europe, is using App + Web properties to close the gap between their app and web data.

Previously we had been manually stitching together app and web sessions in order to generate customer behaviour insight and value our marketing investments; this release unifies that data to show the full path to conversion. Dan Truman
Global Head of Digital Analytics, TUI Group

If you’re not already using the beta and your business is looking for a more complete view of how your customers engage across app and web, you can get started today by setting up a new property and linking your app and website.

Source: Google Analytics Blog

What’s new in App + Web properties

Recently, we’ve introduced enhancements that allow you to measure multiple websites, do even more custom analysis, and get faster insights from your data.

Measure multiple web streams in a single property

More options for custom analysis

App + Web 1 v5.png
The cohort analysis technique helps you identify like-users and conduct analysis between cohorts
App + Web 2 v5.png
See the lifetime activity of groups of users based on different variables
App + Web 1 v5.png
The cohort analysis technique helps you identify like-users and conduct analysis between cohorts
App + Web 2 v5.png
See the lifetime activity of groups of users based on different variables

App and web insights at your fingertips

Automated and custom insights, previously available only for web, are now in App + Web properties.

App + Web 4 v5.png
The Insights dashboard displays all your automated and custom insights in one place
App + Web 3 v5.png
Create custom insights based on the most important metrics for your business
App + Web 4 v5.png
The Insights dashboard displays all your automated and custom insights in one place
App + Web 3 v5.png
Create custom insights based on the most important metrics for your business

Instant answers with search

App + Web 5 v5.png
Type a question into the search bar in natural language and get quick answers in the dropdown
App + Web 6 v5.png
Type a query into the search bar and get instant answers
App + Web 7 v5.png
Click on the result to see it in the Insights panel
App + Web 8 v5.png
See the insight in more detail

Next steps for App + Web properties

Source: The Official Google Blog

Deliver consistent site experiences with Google Optimize

Consumers expect connected shopping experiences from research to purchase. But their journeys aren’t linear; they move around, visiting—and revisiting—multiple sites and apps, multiple times a day.

This makes it challenging for businesses to deliver a coordinated site experience, especially if they are running an experiment or personalization on their site. How do they make sure that the version of their site someone saw in the morning is the same version they see in the afternoon?

Google Optimize can now understand when a customer has returned to a site they visited before and deliver a consistent site experience. Let’s see how this works.

Imagine you’re a hotel business running a marketing campaign that promotes a 20 percent discount for the upcoming holiday season. When people visit your site in response to the campaign, you want to make sure you offer this discount to them throughout their entire booking experience, even if they come back multiple times before they make a reservation.

One part of your marketing campaign is paid media you buy through Google Ads. In this case, you would use Optimize to create a custom web page featuring the discount and then add the Google Ads rule to ensure this page is shown to people who first arrive to your site from your Google Ads campaign. There are likely many people who click on an ad, explore your site, then come back later to complete the reservation. Now, no matter how many other pages on your site people visit, or how many times they return over 24 hours, Optimize will automatically display that custom page to them each time.

Another way you promote this sale is through email. For this part of your campaign, once you create a custom web page with the discount offer, add a utm_campaign parameter named “holiday-sale” to the URL in the email. Then in Optimize, add a UTM parameter rule for “holiday-sale.” Optimize can now use that parameter to display the correct experience every time people who received the promo email visit your site. In addition to email, you can also use the UTM parameter rule in advertising campaigns managed with Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360, or any other campaigns you are running that support UTM parameters.

Create a UTM parameter rule to focus your experiment or personalization on a particular marketing campaign.

Royal Bank of Canada is an Optimize 360 customer that has already begun using UTM parameter rules.

Together with their Google Marketing Platform Partner, Bounteous, they often use Optimize 360 to run personalizations across their entire website. Because most of these personalizations are focused on delivering the right content to the right user from their marketing campaigns, they were excited to start using the UTM parameter rule.

"The customer journey at the Royal Bank of Canada is rarely linear. We need experiments that can react as customers frequently engage and navigate our website. The UTM parameter rule gives us that flexibility, and it is changing the way we approach our campaigns.”

- Arnab Tagore, Senior Manager of Digital Analytics, Royal Bank of Canada

Both the Google Ads rule and UTM parameter rule are already available to use in Optimize and Optimize 360. We encourage you to go into your account and check them out and we look forward to sharing more new features that help you better meet your customers’ expectations and get the most out of your website.

Source: Google Analytics Blog

New Analytics updates in Actions on Google Console

Posted by Mandy Chan, Developer Advocate

Have you built an Action for the Google Assistant and wondered how many people are using it? Or how many of your users are returning users? In this blog post, we will dive into 5 improvements that the Actions on Google Console team has made to give you more insight into how your Action is being used.

1. Multiple improvements for readability

We've updated three areas of the Actions Console for readability: Active Users Chart, Date Range Selection, and Filter Options. With these new updates, you can now better customize the data to analyze the usage of your Actions.

Active Users Chart

The labels at the top of the Active Users chart now read Daily, Weekly and Monthly, instead of the previous 1 Day, 7 Days and 28 Days labels. We also improved the readability of the individual date labels at the bottom of the chart to be more clear. You’ll also notice a quick insight at the bottom of the chart that shows the unique number of users during this time period.

Before: Active Users chart

After:

Date Range Selection

Previously, the date range selectors applied globally to all the charts. These selectors are now local to each chart, allowing you more control over how you view your data.

The date selector provides the following ranges:

Daily (last 7 days, last 30 days, last 90 days)
Weekly (last 4 weeks, last 8 weeks, last 12 weeks, last 24 weeks)
Monthly (last 3 months, last 6 months, last 12 months)

Filter Options

Previously when you added a filter, it was applied to all the charts on the page. Now, the filters apply only to the chart you're viewing. We’ve also enhanced the filtering options available for the ‘Surface’ filter, such as mobile devices, smart speakers, and smart display.

Before:

After:

The filter feature also lets you show data breakdowns over different dimensions. By default, the chart shows a single consolidated line, a result of all the filters applied. You can now select the ‘Show breakdown by’ option to see how the components of that data contribute to the totals based on the dimension you selected.

2. Introducing Retention metrics (New!)

A brand new addition to analytics is the introduction of a retention metrics chart to help you understand how well your action is retaining users. This chart shows you how many users you had in a week and how many returned each week for up to 5 weeks. The higher the percentage week after week, the better your retention.

When you hover over each cell in the chart, you can see the exact number of users who have returned for that week from the previous week.

3. Improvements to Conversation Metrics

Finally, we’ve consolidated the conversation metrics and brought them together into a single chart with separate tabs (‘Conversations’, ‘Messages’, ‘Avg Length’ and ‘Abort rate’) for easier comparison and visibility of trends over time. We’ve also updated the chart labels and tooltips for better interpretation.

Before:

After:

Next steps

To learn more about what each metric means, you can check out our documentation.

Try out these new improvements to see how your Actions are performing with your users. You can also check out our documentation to learn more. Let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions in terms of metrics that you need to improve your Action. Thanks for reading! To share your thoughts or questions, join us on Reddit at r/GoogleAssistantDev.

Follow @ActionsOnGoogle on Twitter for more of our team's updates, and tweet using #AoGDevs to share what you’re working on. Can’t wait to see what you build!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Manage tags easily and safely with the new Community Template Gallery

Businesses often work with trusted partners to conduct a variety of important functions on their websites. These partners can help businesses accurately measure their online conversions or determine which product reviews to display. For all this to work businesses need to implement tags, or code written by their partners, directly on their sites. It’s critical for businesses to trust that these tags are working as intended to protect their customers and brand.

With that in mind, we’ve created the new Community Template Gallery for Google Tag Manager. Community Template Gallery is an open platform where partners can share their tag templates. Businesses can then customize these templates to easily implement tags on their websites.

Not only does Community Template Gallery help businesses quickly implement and manage tags, but it also provides more transparency into how these tags will behave—making the whole tagging process easier and safer.

Less code is more

In the past, if your business needed to implement a partner tag that wasn’t already integrated with Tag Manager, getting that tag up and running would take a lot of manual work. You might have to consult with your partner to determine how to correctly customize and place the tag on your website so it was tailored for your business needs. Not only did this take a lot of time, it also required heavy involvement from developers, leaving lots of room for error.

Community Template Gallery reduces the potential for incorrect implementation. Once your partner shares their tag template in the gallery, you can find it and simply enter the required information in an intuitive UI. You do not need to customize any HTML or Javascript.

Businesses can add tag templates to their workspace and then tailor the tag by completing the form.

Community Template Gallery also helps partners keep tag templates up-to-date. Whenever partners make updates to their tag templates, the latest version will quickly become available. And if you’ve already implemented that tag template, we’ll notify you that there is a new version that you can review before making the update.

Increased transparency

When you publish a partner’s tag on your website, you need to understand what it does and trust that it won’t do anything unexpected. That’s why we’ve built a permissions system into Community Template Gallery.

Before you implement or update a tag from the gallery, you will now be able to review and approve the actions it will take when it becomes live on your website. This gives you more control and transparency over the tags on your sites.

Businesses can review and approve how a tag will behave when implemented on a website.

Community Template Gallery is now live in both Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360. You’ll find many tag templates already included and ready to use. If you’re a tag developer, we encourage you to build and submit your template today.