Tag Archives: Announcements

Introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite



An enterprise-class solution for a multi-screen world

Our lives are filled with micro-moments: intent-rich moments when we turn to the nearest device to find a store, buy a product or look for answers to all kinds of wants and needs. In these moments, today's consumers decide what to do, where to go, and what to buy. 

If you're in marketing or analytics, you know this consumer behavior brings new opportunities to reach your customer in the right moment with the right message. At the same time, it's harder than ever to get a complete view of the consumer journey and then make sense of it all.

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers. It all starts with understanding consumer behavior in the moment — getting the right insights, and then making your brand useful to consumers.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-­ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight,” said Pawan Divakarla, Analytics Leader at Progressive. 

Modern measurement tools that are simple to use
Sophisticated marketers who use analytics platforms are three times more likely to outperform their peers in achieving revenue goals. It’s no wonder enterprise-class marketers have been telling us they need more from their marketing analytics tools. Many toolsets can't cope: They're too hard to use, lack sufficient collaboration capabilities, are poorly integrated, and require hard-to-find expertise. 

Several years ago, Google engineers set out to simplify marketing analytics in the same way we simplified web search with Google.com. With infrastructure that allows us to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — we set out to give enterprise marketers the same utility.

As we built the system, enterprise marketers shared what they needed with us:
  • See the complete customer journey. Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels. 
  • Useful insights, not just more data. Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.
  • Enable better sharing within your organization. Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.
  • Deliver engaging experiences to the right people. Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.
The Google Analytics 360 Suite is built to address these needs. Its powerful set products are unified, providing a consistent user experience and cross product data integrations, plus services. Simply put: it’s a complete measurement platform.

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“Using the integrations in the Google Analytics 360 Suite, we are able to manage everything in one seamless platform,” said Khoi Truong, Director of Analytics and Media at L'Oréal Canada.

Loaded with six products, four of which are brand-new, the Google Analytics 360 Suite offers easy-to-use tools that enable sharing of data and insights throughout an organization. 
  • Google Audience Center 360 (beta). This powerful data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it's open to third party data providers, DSPs and more. 
  • Google Optimize 360 (beta). This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.
  • Google Data Studio 360 (beta). A new data analysis and visualization product that integrates data across all suite products and other data sources ― turning it into beautiful, interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.
  • Google Tag Manager 360. Built from our industry-leading tag management product, it empowers enterprise marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code) and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows.
  • Google Analytics 360, formerly known as GA Premium, will roll out exciting new capabilities throughout the next couple of months as investments continue to grow. It will serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touch-points and integrating with our ad products to drive marketing effectiveness.
  • Google Attribution 360, formerly known as Adometry, has been rebuilt from the ground up to help advertisers value marketing investments and allocate budgets with confidence. Marketers can analyze performance across all channels, devices, and systems to achieve their most effective marketing mix. 
Achieve more with your Google media

The Google Analytics 360 Suite offers integrations with many third party data providers and platforms. It also plugs right into Google AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketing, our core ad technology. That means marketers can turn analytics into action by combining their own data from multiple sources ― website data, audience data, and customer data (e.g. CRM) and more ― and using it to make ads more relevant for people.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite has a native integration with DoubleClick — that’s a game-changer. Now I can personalize my media based on website user behaviors, such as what they purchase,” said Khoi Truong, Director of Media and Data Optimization at L’Oreal Canada.

When will the Google Analytics 360 Suite launch?

The new products -- Audience Center 360, Optimize 360, Data Studio 360,  and Tag Manager 360 -- are available today in limited BETA. If you're a Google Analytics Premium or Adometry customer, you will see the products renamed in the coming months, and we'll let you know when you're eligible to join the new betas. 

This is just the beginning of our ongoing  innovation in enterprise marketing analytics -- we can’t wait to share more. In the meantime, visit our website for more details or hear from directly from our customers below.



Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the capabilities and benefits of all the new products on the newly refreshed and renamed Google Analytics Solutions blog, and on our Google+ and Twitter pages. We’d love your feedback. 

Posted by, Paul Muret, Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products, Google 

1Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Results

*Launching March 15, 2016

From Insights to Impact: Driving Value with Analytics

At eTail West this week we were thrilled to give a joint presentation with Chris Duncan, VP of Strategic Marketing for Kohl's, a $19B+ retailer making big strides in omni-channel analytics.  Casey Carey, Head of Marketing for Google Analytics, kicked off the presentation with highlights from our new report with Harvard Business Review.  Following Casey's introduction, Chris gave the audience a glimpse into the Kohl’s Greatness Agenda, launched in 2014 with the goal of becoming “the most engaging retailer in America.”

Kohl’s has seen the growing effect of micro-moments on their business in recent years and has used measurement and analytics to gain key insights:
  • They had more visits on digital devices last year than in all stores combined.
  • Most of their sales are driven by people who have engaged with more than one marketing channel.
  • Customers who engage online are spending more in-store.
Kohl’s has taken action, finding better ways to engage consumers across channels.  They combined direct mail with digital display to make their direct mail dollars go further, they blended email marketing with social media to increase app downloads by 180%, and they got hyper-local with digital display and paid search.  In other words, they used their insights to drive action.

The Google Analytics team is all about turning insights into action, which is why we commissioned a study with Harvard Business Review—we wanted to understand how great companies are using insights to drive customer value.  The findings are compelling:  some companies who capture the full customer journey with integrated data are generating up to 8.5x higher shareholder value.


We invite you to read the full report to learn how great companies like Kohl's are analyzing and acting to create value for their customers and for themselves.

Posted by:  Jocelyn Whittenburg, Product Marketing Manager

Announcing GA Support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Analytics

When Google was a few years old, we wrote up a list of Ten things we know to be true. The list includes items like “Focus on the user and all else will follow” as well as “Fast is better than slow.” It would be tough to say that much of the mobile web has adhered to these principles. Users often get frustrated by poor experiences in which sites load slowly or will lock up trying to load resources that clog their data connections.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an open source initiative that aims to address these problems by enabling content to load instantaneously and provide a better web experience for all. AMP introduces a new format that is a flavor of HTML. It’s built to prioritize speed and a fantastic user experience. One way that AMP provides reliably good page loading performance is by restricting the ability to add custom JavaScript to pages and instead relying on built in, reusable components.

Today, the AMP team announced the launch of an analytics component that will enable measurement on AMP pages. The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users measure their content wherever it appears. So, for publishers looking to use AMP to provide an improved user experience, we’ve released Google Analytics measurement capabilities for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP support in Google Analytics makes it easy to identify your best content and optimize your user experience.

How Google Analytics Support Works

Analytics on AMP is handled by an open source, reusable component that the Google Analytics team helped build. The <amp-analytics> component can be configured with Google Analytics specific configuration parameters to record pageviews, events, and even custom dimensions. That configuration works hand in hand with a global event listener that automatically detects triggers like button presses. As a result, there’s no need to scatter custom JavaScript throughout your page to detect actions that should trigger events and hits. Instead, you can define which actions should trigger hits within the configuration section and let the magic of AMP do the rest.

How to Get Started

Before you get started with AMP Analytics, you’ll need to get started with AMP itself. The AMP website contains a great introduction to getting started. Once you have an AMP page up, it’s time to start thinking about how you’d like to measure its performance. 

We recommend that you use a separate Google Analytics property to measure your AMP pages. AMP is a new technology that’s going to mature over time. As such, some of the functionality that you’re used to in web analytics won’t immediately be available in AMP analytics right away. AMP pages can appear in multiple contexts, including through different syndication caches. Because of that, a single user that visits an AMP version of a page and a HTML version of a page can end up being treated as two distinct users. Using a separate Google Analytics property to measure AMP pages makes it easier to handle these issues.

Once you have your AMP page and new Google Analytics property set up, you’ll want to reference the requirements for using Analytics on AMP pages as well as the developers guide for instrumenting measurement.

What’s Next

Multiple technology partners, including Google Search, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have announced that they’ll start surfacing AMP pages in the coming months. The Google Analytics team is excited to support AMP from day one and look forward to growing our offering as AMP’s capabilities expand.


Posted by Dan Cary, Product Manager and Avi Mehta, Software Engineer

Use Smart Goals, powered by Google Analytics, to optimize in AdWords

To advertise smart, you have to measure smart.  And a key metric for almost any business is conversions, also known as “that moment when users do the thing that you want them to do.”  

Many AdWords advertisers are already measuring their website conversions, using either AdWords Conversion Tracking or imported Google Analytics Ecommerce transactions.  Measuring actual conversions is ideal, because it allows you to optimize your bids, your ads and your website with a clear goal in mind.

However, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses aren't measuring their website conversions today.  Some businesses may not have a way for users to convert on their website and others may not have the time or the technical ability to implement conversion tracking.

The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users use their data to drive better marketing and advertising performance.  So, for businesses that don’t measure conversions in AdWords today, we’ve created an easy-to-use solution: Smart Goals. Smart Goals help you identify the highest-quality visits to your website and optimize for those visits in AdWords. 

"Smart Goals helped us drive more engaged visits to our website. It gave us something meaningful to optimize for in AdWords, without having to change any tags on our site. We could tell that optimizing to Smart Goals was working, because we had higher sales than usual across our channels during the testing period."

- Richard Bissell, President/Owner, Richard Bissell Fine Woodworking, Inc

How Smart Goals Work

To generate Smart Goals, we apply machine learning across thousands of websites that use Google Analytics and have opted in to share anonymized conversion data.  From this information, we can distill dozens of key factors that correlate with likelihood to convert: things like session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser.  We can then apply these key factors to any website.  The easiest way to think about Smart Goals is that they reflect your website visits that our model indicates are most likely to lead to conversions. 

Step 1: Activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics

To activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics, simply go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account, click Goals (under the View heading) and select Smart Goals.  The highest-quality visits to your website will now be turned into Smart Goals automatically.  No additional tagging or customization is required; Smart Goals just work.  

To help you see how Smart Goals perform before you activate them, we’ve built a Smart Goals report in the “Conversions” section of Google Analytics.  The behavior metrics in this report indicate the engagement level of Smart Goals visits compared to other visits, helping you evaluate Smart Goals before you activate the feature.

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Step 2: Import Smart Goals into AdWords

Like any other goal in Google Analytics, Smart Goals can be imported into AdWords to be used as an AdWords conversion.  Once you’ve defined a conversion in AdWords, you’re able to optimize for it.

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Step 3: Optimizing for Smart Goals in AdWords

One of the benefits of measuring conversions in your Adwords account is the ability to set a target cost per acquisition (CPA) as opposed to just setting a cost per click (CPC).  If you aren’t measuring actual conversions today, importing Smart Goals as conversions in Adwords allows you to set a target CPA.  In this way, you’re able to optimize your Adwords spend based on the likelihood of conversion as determined by our model.

Smart Goals will be rolling out over the next few weeks. To be eligible for Smart Goals, your Google Analytics property must be linked to your AdWords account(s).  Learn how to link your Google Analytics property to your AdWords account(s) in the Analytics Help Center or the AdWords Help Center.  Note that your Google Analytics view must receive at least 1,000 clicks from AdWords over a 30-day period to ensure the validity of your data.

Posted by Abishek Sethi (Software Engineer) and Joan Arensman (Product Manager)

Share Google Analytics data and remarketing lists more efficiently using manager accounts (MCC)

The following was originally posted on the AdWords Blog.

From monitoring account performance at scale to making cross-account campaign changes, manager accountshelp many of the most sophisticated AdWords advertisers get more done in less time. To deliver more insightful reporting and scale your remarketing efforts, we’re introducing two new enhancements to manager accounts: Google Analytics account linking, and remarketing tag and list sharing.

Access your data with a single link

You can now link your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium account directly to your AdWords manager account using the new setup wizard in AdWords under Account Settings. This streamlined workflow for linking accounts eliminates the need to link each of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts individually.

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Now when you import your goals, website metrics, remarketing lists, or other data from Google Analytics, you'll only need to do it once. And whenever you add a new AdWords account to your manager account, it will automatically be linked with the same Analytics properties.

These enhancements save time so you can focus on optimizing your campaigns. You can learn more about linking your Google Analytics account into your manager account in the AdWords Help Center.

Scale your remarketing strategy

Many advertisers are seeing tremendous success re-engaging customers and finding new ones using Display remarketing, remarketing lists for search ads, and similar audiences. To help scale these efforts across the AdWords accounts you manage, you now have options for creating and sharing remarketing lists directly in your manager account from the new “Audiences” view, including any lists imported from Google Analytics or Customer Match.

You can also create remarketing lists using a manager-level remarketing tag and use them across your managed accounts. This eliminates the need to retag your website and manage multiple lists in each AdWords account. If any of your managed accounts have their own lists, they can be made available for use in your other managed accounts.

These enhancements make it easier and faster than ever before to get your remarketing strategy up and running. You can learn more about sharing remarketing tags and lists in the AdWords Help Center.


Posted by Vishal Goenka, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Happy 10th Birthday, Google Analytics!

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Google Analytics. So much has changed over the last decade! If you think back ten years ago, the most popular smartphone was the Blackberry and a 128 megabyte flash drive cost about $30. Today you can get 250X the storage for half the price.

During that time, the world we now refer to as “digital analytics” has changed significantly. 

Our mission when Google acquired Urchin Software was to empower a broad range of website developers and marketers to better understand and improve their business through powerful, yet easy to use analytics tools. In pursuit of that goal we've continued to bring new digital analytics capabilities to the market with Google Analytics Premium, Google Tag Manager,  and Adometry. I’m really proud of the effort and innovation we have put forth in pursuit of that goal.

Looking back on the journey, here are my top ten Google Analytics highlights in no particular order:
  1. Event Tracking - A powerful feature added early on that allows users to track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to a pageview. With event tracking, specific actions like PDF downloads and video views are easily tracked, categorized, and analyzed. This feature has become critical as websites have moved away from a page-structured model. Read how PUMA uses custom filters, event tracking, and advanced segments to kick up order rates by 7%.
  2. Real-Time Reporting - Providing insights into what is happening at any given moment, real-time reporting is a powerful set of reports that are invaluable when checking campaign tagging, launching new campaigns, or understanding the immediate impact of social media. Read how Obama for America used Google Analytics to democratize rapid, data-driven decision making.
  3. Multi-Channel Funnels, Attribution Modeling, and Data-Driven Attribution - Multi-channel funnels was the first step in helping marketers move from last-click attribution and gain insights into the full path to conversion. Next up was Attribution Modeling, which helps businesses distribute credit to all marketing touch-points in the conversion process. We currently provide algorithmic models and a new set of reports designed to take the guesswork out of attribution and make it more accurate. Watch how attribution modeling increases profit for Baby Supermall.
  4. Tag Management - As the complexity of digital marketing and data collection continues to increase, it became clear that our users needed better tools for managing tags. Google Tag Manager consolidates website tags with a single snippet of code and lets users manage everything from an easy to use interface. Read how Domino’s Increased Monthly Revenue by 6% with Google Analytics Premium and Google Tag Manager.
  5. Analytics Academy - A great product is only as good as its users ability to take advantage of all it offers. As the world of marketing and analytics increased in complexity, it became more important for Google Analytics users to be able to stay up to speed on all the changes. In response to this need, the Analytics Academy offers users a hub to participate in free, online, community-based video courses about digital analytics and, specifically, Google Analytics.
  6. Universal Analytics - Universal Analytics (UA) was a big step for Google Analytics on two dimensions. First, UA helps address the challenges of today’s multi-screen, multi-device world by combining visitor activities across devices into a single view. Secondly, it is the foundation of people-centric analytics and enables features like User ID, Lifetime-Value, and Cohorts reporting. Read how 1stdibs luxury marketplace hit new heights with Google Analytics Premium.
  7. Measurement Protocol - This feature was one of the foundations for Universal Analytics. It helped Google Analytics change from a  “web analytics” tool to “digital analytics” platform. The measurement protocol allows users to send, store, and visualize interaction data via an HTTP request. This enables developers to measure how users interact with their business from almost any environment including offline transactions and IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Read how AccuWeather unlocks cross-channel impact using Google Analytics Premium.
  8. Mobile App Analytics - With the explosion of mobile apps and devices, being able to measure and improve both app marketing performance and the app experience is critical. Mobile App Analytics reports are tailored for mobile app developers and marketers to measure the entire mobile customer journey—from discovery to download to engagement. And, when used with the UserID feature, businesses can better understand cross device user behavior. Read how Certain Affinity used Google’s Mobile App Analytics to improve game design.
  9. Enhanced Ecommerce - A complete revamp of how Google Analytics measures the ecommerce experience. It   provides clear insight into new, important metrics about shopper behavior and conversions including: product detail views, ‘add to cart’ actions, internal campaign clicks, the success of internal merchandising tools, the checkout process, and purchase. Read how Brian Gavin Diamonds saw a 60% Increase in customer checkouts with enhanced ecommerce.
  10. Remarketing - Remarketing with Google Analytics helps you easily create audiences based on behaviors of people who visit your website and mobile app. Those audiences are then made available for remarketing campaigns in AdWords, GDN and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Read how TransUnion sees drastic cost efficiencies and conversion improvement with Google Analytics Premium.
I want to thank all the Googler’s, our certified partners, and most importantly, our users who have made this past decade such a fantastic experience. Rest assured, we’re not done yet. We continue to enhance Google Analytics, build new products, and  provide new and innovative ways to help all businesses make better decisions. Stay tuned and cheers to the possibilities of the next decade.


Posted by Paul Muret, VP Engineering

Enhancements to Container Engine and Container Registry

DevOps teams are adopting containers to make their development and deployment simpler. Google Cloud Platform has a complete suite of container offerings including Google Container Engine and Google Container Registry. Today we’re introducing some enhancements to them both, along with updates to our ecosystem to give you more options in managing container images and running services.


Container Registry


 Docker Registry V2 API support. You can now push and pull Docker images to Container Registry using the V2 API. This allows you to have content addressable references, parallel layer downloads and digest-based pulls. Docker versions 1.6 and above support the v2 API, it’s recommended to upgrade to the latest version. If you’re using a mix of Docker client versions, see the newest Docker documentation to check compatibility.


Performance enhancements. Based on internal performance testing, this update pulls images 40% faster than the previous version.

Advanced Authentication. If you use a continuous delivery system (and we hope you do), it’s even easier to make it work with Container Registry, see the auth documentation page for details and setup. Learn how it works with popular CI/CD systems including Circle, Codeship, Drone.io, Jenkins, Shippable and Wercker.

TwistLock Integration. TwistLock provides rule violation detection and policy enforcement for containers in a registry or at runtime. They recently completed a Beta with 15 customers with positive results. Using TwistLock with GCR and GKE is really simple. See their blog for more details.



Container Engine


Today, on the heels of the Kubernetes 1.1 release, we’re bring the latest from Kubernetes to Container Engine users. The performance improvements in this release ensure you can run Google Container Engine in high-scale environments. Additional highlights of this release include:




  • Horizontal pod autoscaling helps resolve the uneven experiences users see when workloads go through spiky periods of utilization, meaning your pods can scale up and down based on CPU usage.

  • HTTP load balancer that enables routing traffic to different Kubernetes services based on HTTP traffic, such as using different services for sub-URLs.

  • A re-architected networking system that allows native iptables and reduces tail latency by up to 80%, virtually eliminating CPU overhead and improving reliability. Available in Beta, you can manually choose to enable this in GKE by running the following shell command:
             for node in $(kubectl get nodes -o name | cut -f2 -d/); do
                   kubectl annotate node $node 
                      net.beta.kubernetes.io/proxy-mode=iptables;
                   gcloud compute ssh --zone=us-central1-b $node 
                      --command="sudo /etc/init.d/kube-proxy restart";
             done

These and other updates in the 1.1 release will be rolled out to all Container Engine users over the next week. Send us your feedback and connect with the community on the google-containers mailing list or on the Kubernetes google-containers Slack channel.

If you’re new to the Google Cloud Platform, getting started is easy. Sign up for your free trial here.

- Posted by Kit Merker, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Real-Time Data Validation with Google Tag Assistant Recordings

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: great analytics can only happen with great data.  

That's why we've made it a priority to help our users confirm that their data is top-quality. Last year we released our automated data diagnostics feature, and now we’re proud to announce the launch of another powerful new feature: Google Tag Assistant Recordings.  

This tool helps you instantly validate your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium implementation. If it finds data quality issues, it helps you troubleshoot them and then recheck them on the spot.  It’s available as part of the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension.
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"Tag Assistant Recordings is fast becoming one of my favorite tools for debugging Google Analytics Premium installations!  I use it multiple times a day with my Premium clients to help explain odd trends in their data or debug configuration issues. Already I'm building it into my core workflow." 

- Dan Rowe, Director of Analytics at Analytics Pros

What can I use it for?

Tag Assistant Recordings works with all kinds of data events: purchases, logins, and so on. What if you sell flowers online and want to confirm that Enhanced Ecommerce is capturing the checkout flow correctly? With Tag Assistant Recordings, you can record yourself going through the checkout process as you buy a dozen red roses, and then review what Google Analytics captured.

If you find that your account isn’t set up properly — if the sale wasn't recorded or was mis-labeled — you can make adjustments and test it all over again instantly.  With Tag Assistant Recordings, you know you’re capturing all the data that’s important to you.

Tag Assistant Recordings can be particularly useful when (1) you’re in the process of implementing Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium, (2) you’ve recently made updates to your site, or (3) you’re making changes to your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium configuration. It works even if your new site or your updates aren't visible to the public yet, so you can feel confident before you go live.

Tag Assistant Recordings can also help if you want to reconfigure your Google Analytics account to better reflect your business.  For example, you may want to configure multi-channel funnels to detect your AdWords channel.  Tag Assistant Recordings lets you set up this new functionality in Google Analytics and test immediately whether everything is working as you expect.  

"Tag Assistant Recordings has already been a HUGE help! Analytics Pros and About.com were working on an issue with sessions double-counting and Tag Assistant Recordings let us narrow down precisely which hits were having new sessions counted. It saved us hours of time and helped us jump right to where the problem was. So, in summary, this is awesome!"  

- Greg McDonald, Business Intelligence Analyst at About.com

How does it work?

Tag Assistant Recordings works through the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension, so you’ll need to download the extension if you aren’t already using it.  From there, setup is easy.  Simply open Google Tag Assistant, record the user flow you’d like to check, and then view the full report in Tag Assistant.  You’ll want to view both tabs in the report (Tag Assistant and Google Analytics) to verify that you see the intended tags.  Keep in mind that the Google Analytics data is only available if you have access to the appropriate property or view.

Tag Recordings Gif.gif

Here's a nifty bonus: If you find a problem, and you think you have fixed it by changing settings from within Google Analytics, return to the Google Analytics tab in Tag Assistant Recordings and click the “Update” button. You'll see instantly how your configuration changes would have affected this recording.

We hope that Google Tag Assistant will be a valuable new tool in your analytics toolkit.  

Why not start using it today?


Posted by:  Ajay Nainani, Frank Kieviet, and Jocelyn Whittenburg, Google Analytics team

Google Analytics User Conference: G’day Australia

The Australian Google Analytics User Conference is worth clearing your diaries for, with some of the most well-known and respected international industry influencers making their way to Sydney and Melbourne to present at the conference this September.


Hosted by Google Certified Partners, Loves Data, you’ll be learning about the latest features, what’s trending and popular, best practices and uncovering ways to get the most out of Google Analytics. Topics covered include: making sure digital analytics is indispensable to your organisation; applying analytics frameworks to your whole organisation; improving your data quality and collection; data insights you can action; and presenting data to get results.

Presenting the keynote is Jim Sterne, Chairman of the Digital Analytics Association, founder of eMetrics and also known as the godfather of analytics. Joining him are two speakers from Google in the US: Krista Seiden, Google Product Manager and Analytics Advocate and Mike Kwong, Senior Staff Software Engineer.

Other leading international industry influencers presenting at the conference include Simo Ahava (Google Developer Expert; Reaktor), Chris Chapo (Enjoy), Benjamin Mangold (Loves Data), Lea Pica (Consultant, Leapica.com), Chris Samila (Optimizely), Carey Wilkins (Evolytics) and Tim Wilson (Web Analytics Demystified).  

Expect to network with other like-minded data enthusiasts, marketers, developers and strategists, plus get to know the speakers better during the Conference’s Ask Me Anything session. We’ve even covered our bases for those seeking next-level expertise with a marketing or technical masterclass available the day before the conference. Find out more information about the speakers and check out the full program.

Last year’s conference sold out way in advance and this year’s conference is heading in the same direction. Book your tickets now to avoid disappointment. 

Event details Sydney
Masterclass & Conference | 8 & 9 September 2015

Event details Melbourne
Masterclass & Conference | 10 & 11 September 2015

Posted by Will Pryor, Google Analytics team

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, Powered by Google Analytics

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

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

TransUnion cuts CPA in half with RLSA

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

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

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

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

How to get started

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


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

Building Audiences

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

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

Admin Remarketing.png

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

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

Activating audiences in AdWords

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


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

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