Tag Archives: Announcements

Learn to optimize your tag implementation with Google Tag Manager Fundamentals

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

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


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

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

Happy tagging!

Post By: Lizzie Pace & The Google Analytics Education Team

New media partnerships and ad solutions for mobile app promotion

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

Transparent, open and reliable measurement solutions

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

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

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

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

But we didn’t stop there. 

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

For developers looking to promote their app, we offer a variety of placements across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, and YouTube.  And earlier this year, we announced Search Ads on Google Play. By showing ads alongside app search results, you can reach consumers right when they’re looking for a new app, at the moment they are ready to install. 
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Today we announced Universal App Campaigns, a new campaign type that allows advertisers to reach consumers across Google media more efficiently and effectively.  Universal App Campaigns offers a simple way to set up install ads for your Android apps in AdWords or directly from the Google Play Developer Console. 

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

Complete solutions for your entire business

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

Posted by: Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management

Introducing Search Response and Airings Data in TV Attribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to Get Moving?

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

Posted by Dave Barney, Product Manager

Google Analytics Introduces Product Release Notes

Ever feel like you just can’t keep up with all the new features in Google Analytics? We hear you! To help you keep track of everything that’s going on, we’ve started publishing Release Notes in our product Help Center.

Release notes will be updated periodically and will have the most comprehensive list of new features or changes to the Google Analytics product. So, if you see something new in your account and have questions, we recommend starting here. We’ll point you to the relevant documentation to get you up to speed on everything you need to know.

We're happy to be adding another resources to keep our users informed. Check it out today!

Posted by Louis Gray, Analytics Advocate

Safe Browsing and Google Analytics: Keeping More Users Safe, Together

The following was originally posted on the Google Online Security Blog.

If you run a web site, you may already be familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and how it lets you know if Safe Browsing finds something problematic on your site. For example, we’ll notify you if your site is delivering malware, which is usually a sign that it’s been hacked. We’re extending our Safe Browsing protections to automatically display notifications to all Google Analytics users via familiar Google Analytics Notifications.


Google Safe Browsing has been protecting people across the Internet for over eight years and we're always looking for ways to extend that protection even further. Notifications like these help webmasters like you act quickly to respond to any issues. Fast response helps keep your site—and your visitors—safe.

Posted by: Stephan Somogyi, Product Manager, Security and Privacy

Start Remarketing with Google Analytics Instant Activation

For many advertisers, remarketing is an essential tactic. But remarketing can be a difficult journey, even for the savviest digital marketer. We repeatedly see marketers struggle with tagging hurdles and complex implementation challenges, with the result that only 1 in 5 remarketers successfully completes their setup.

To help make it easier for advertisers to reach their most qualified customers, we’ve enabled remarketing with a single toggle. Instead of manually updating all of your site tags, simply use Instant Activation and get started with remarketing in four easy steps.

Identifying quality visitors and maximizing conversions

GlobalTechLED.com is a producer of LED lighting. Thanks to Instant Activation, John Burns, Director of Marketing, was able to start remarketing quickly. Without waiting for IT to re-tag his site, John successfully launched Global Tech LED’s first remarketing campaign and saw fast results by reaching their highest potential customers.

After enabling remarketing, Global Tech LED leveraged Google’s powerful machine-learning technology in two ways for their online campaigns: Smart Lists for remarketing automatically created lists of visitors who were most likely to engage in a subsequent session on GlobalTechLED.com. Then, Conversion Optimizer instantly adjusted the campaigns’ bids get more conversions at a lower cost, eventually freeing up more time and resources for the company.

As a result, GlobalTechLED.com is currently reaching their performance and outreach goals. To date they’ve doubled their display campaigns’ CTRs and have almost five times more clicks on their remarketing campaign compared to their other campaigns. Website traffic increased by over 100% in the first 30 days of the campaign, and international traffic skyrocketed. They’ve also seen a 75% decrease in CPA for their campaigns.

These kind of results were exactly what the company was looking for. According to John, "We’ve been trying to hit these specific numbers in the account for a couple of months, and Google Analytics Remarketing helped us achieve these in only a couple of days." Read the full case study here.

Four easy steps to get started

Ready to get started with remarketing? You can, with just four steps.

1. In your Google Analytics Property’s settings, choose ‘Audiences’ under the ‘Remarketing’ section.


2. Choose the AdWords account where you’d like to share your Audience and click ‘Next Step’.


3. Click “Enable” to create your first audience of All Users.  You can also come back later and create more complex audiences, like ‘visitors who have spent more than six minutes on site’, ‘visitors who visited more than five pages’, or ‘abandoned cart’.

This step automatically activates Advertiser Features if you haven’t done so already, which also enables Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting. You can manage this setting at any time in the Admin tab, under the ‘Advertiser Features’ section in your Property Settings.


4. Click ‘Create Campaign’ and complete the remarketing campaign creation process in AdWords. Congratulations, you are now a Remarketer!


We’re really excited to make Advertiser Features in Google Analytics simpler and enable all Google Analytics users to be more successful across all their marketing channels. Stay tuned for future improvements!

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Avi Mehta and Rosanne Borja, Google Analytics Team

Introducing Trash Can: Data Recovery in Google Analytics

We all make mistakes, but the damage might seem irrevocable when accidentally deleting crucial reporting information from Google Analytics. Thanks to feedback from our users, we’re pleased to introduce a new feature to provide a safety net each time you delete a view, property or account from your Google Analytics account: the Trash Can.

To get started, navigate to the Administration tab, select an account, and click the Trash Can feature on the left-hand panel. Check off what you want to reclaim, click “Restore,” and voilà! Your view, property or account is now just as it was before you deleted it. Once 35 days pass from the day you originally trashed it, however, you’ll have to say a final goodbye as the data will be removed from the Trash Can and will no longer appear there. 


This feature will be rolling out to all Google Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, but don’t worry–anything you’ve deleted starting today will still show up in the Trash Can once you get the feature update in your account. 

Many people rely on Google Analytics to collect, analyze, and report on data in order to make good business decisions. We hope that the Trash Can is just one more way to ensure that you have all the information you need when you need it. To learn more details about the Trash Can feature, please read this Help Center article.

Posted by Chris Cahill, Michael Masukawa, and Dan Morenus

Keeping the GA Web Experience Modern

We're continuing to bring you new features and technologies in the design of Google Analytics to provide the best a user experience. With this in mind, starting January 31, 2015 we will no longer support official compatibility of Google Analytics with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). While you can continue to use IE9 after we discontinue support, some features may not work properly going forward. This update maintains our practice of supporting the newest browsers while discontinuing support for the third-oldest version, as we previously announced in September 2013.

We will continue to support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 10 or higher, Safari and other modern browsers. Of course, you will still be able to measure visits from users of all browsers, including IE 9. We will send further reminders prior to the deprecation, but do advise you begin preparing and implementing plans for this change at your earliest convenience.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Refreshing “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase” – New Insights into Marketing Channels

Last year we introduced “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase” -- a tool that helped marketers visualize the roles played by marketing channels like paid search, email and display ads in their customers' journeys.

The goal was to help marketers learn more about the customer journeys for their industries. If social makes your customers aware, and email makes them convert -- or vice versa -- you can make sure you're in both places with the right kind of message.

Today we're happy to introduce a new improved version of the Customer Journey to Online Purchase, with a few key enhancements.  We’ve refreshed the data based on millions of consumer interactions, updated the industry classifications, and we’ve split out paid search so you can see the influence of brand and generic search terms on the purchase decision.

In each industry you can now see journeys for small, medium and large companies, which can often be quite different.
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For instance, the above image shows the journey for customers of small businesses in the shopping industry. Note that organic search is very often an "assist" interaction for these customers.
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Now here's the same journey for large shopping businesses. Note that display clicks and social are strongly assisting interactions -- while display didn’t even appear for the small businesses above. For both small and large businesses, a direct website visit is most likely to be the last interaction. Across industries, the differences from small to large businesses illustrate how different marketing strategies and customer profiles may lead to different buying behavior.

And there's more! Now you can drill down into each marketing channel for a closer look at the role it plays based on its position in the purchase path. Channels that occur more frequently in the beginning of the path are more likely to help generate awareness for your product, while the end of the path is closer to the customer’s purchase decision.
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In these charts, for example, we see the different roles that different channels play in the Shopping industry. One interesting insight is that all channels -- even those traditionally thought of as “upper funnel” or “lower funnel” -- occur throughout the purchase path, but a given channel may be more common at particular stages depending on its role (and depending on the industry).

Each marketing campaign and channel may have a different impact on customers depending on when they interact with it. Using what you learn from this tool, you can help adapt your marketing messaging to be more relevant and useful for your customers.

Try the Customer Journey to Online Purchase today. And for more helpful marketing insights, check out Measure What Matters Most: our new guide chock-full of suggestions on how to measure the impact of your marketing -- across channels -- to complement what you learn from the Customer Journey tool and take action to improve your marketing.

Happy analyzing!


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

Library, Groups, Expandables… oh my! Google Web Designer spruces up for the holidays.


Today, we are excited to announce a new local library and new grouping functionality in Google Web Designer, which make it easier to add, edit, manage and group creative assets. We’ve also spruced up many of the components in the gallery, which build on the updates we launched in August, to help designers and developers make interactive and engaging HTML5 ad units for cross-screen campaigns. 

Manage your assets with ease:
  • Add, edit, and manage your assets in one place in the new local library: Add assets from the stage or within the library workflow, drag and drop from your desktop, or use the new import dialogue under File. Then, customize your folders and organize your assets to your liking. 
  • Group elements together: Once you group elements together, they are stored in your local library. You can drag and drop groups onto the stage and edit them all at once. 
Create more engaging, interactive ads:
  • Build ads that expand in all directions: The “view mode” will allow you to see the expanded state as an overlay, and move it to the desired expanded position. Learn more.
  • YouTube autoplay feature: You can now use the YouTube component to build a masthead that automatically plays the embedded video.
  • Other enhancements to the components gallery allow you to:
    • Add “navigation” (the dots or thumbnails at the bottom of a gallery that show that multiple images exist.)
    • Auto-scale images: stretch, resize or crop images to fit within the gallery 
    • Snap to ‘n’ frames: advance by a specified number of frames in the swipeable or carousel gallery (i.e. 3 images show on the first page of gallery, swiping moves to the next 3). Learn more.
  • SVG (scalable vector graphics) support: Google Web Designer now supports uploads of SVGs and provides a set of basic features, including 2D editing, cut, copy & paste, and selection tool support. 
Share your awesome Google Web Designer ad units with us! Submit them to the Rich Media Gallery and we’ll promote them to the ~35,000 people who view the site each month.

If you don't yet have Google Web Designer, you can download it for free here.

Posted by Tony Mowatt and Sean Kranzberg, Product Manager and Engineering Lead for Google Web Designer

P.S. It may take a couple hours for the updates to show up in your version of the product.