Tag Archives: Announcements

Segmenting Brand and Generic Paid Search Traffic in Google Analytics

Many advertisers with paid search campaigns advertise on queries mentioning their brand (e.g., “Motorola smartphone” for Motorola) and also on generic searches (e.g., “smartphone reviews”). Because the performance metrics for ads shown against brand and generic queries can be vastly different, many advertisers prefer to analyze these two groups separately.  For example, all else being equal, searches containing the advertiser’s brand name often have higher clickthrough-rates than those that don’t.

Automatic classification


To make analysis of brand and generic performance as easy as possible, we’re introducing a new feature which automatically identifies brand-aware paid search clicks tracked in Google Analytics. We use a combination of signals (including the clickthrough-rate, text string, domain name and others) to identify query terms which show awareness of your brand.  You can review our suggested brand terms and then accept or decline each of them. It’s also easy to add additional brand terms that we’ve missed. 

With the resulting list of brand terms, we classify your paid search traffic in GA so that you can split your “paid search” channel into two separate channels: “brand paid search” and “generic paid search”. This can be done both for Multi-Channel Funnels (for attribution purposes) and for the main Google Analytics channel grouping. See this straightforward step-by-step guide to get started.

Industry feedback

Back in 2012, George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufmann Group, a leading online marketing agency, called analyzing brand and generic paid search together “the cardinal sin of paid search”. We showed him a preview of our new solution and here’s his reaction:

"I've been arguing for many years that advertisers should look at their brand and generic paid search separately. There are massive differences in overall performance - but also in more specific areas, like attribution and new customer acquisition. 

Google Analytics now makes it a lot easier for advertisers to segment brand and generic paid search into separate channels. I'm sure this feature will help many more advertisers measure these important differences - and more importantly, take action on these new insights."

Getting started

Finally: note that this feature works for all paid search advertising, not just Google AdWords. It will roll out to all users in the coming weeks.

To get started, use the step-by-step guide to set up separate brand paid search and generic paid search channels. We’ve already suggested brand terms for every GA view with sufficient paid search traffic.

Posted by: Frank Uyeda, Software Engineer, Google Analytics

Introducing the new Google Analytics Partner Gallery

Google Analytics has a vibrant ecosystem of analytics practitioners, advocates, and developers that drive great conversations, learnings, and sharing among passionate users. A central part of this ecosystem is partners, which can help users quickly increase the business value of Google Analytics through implementation expertise, analysis, and integrations.

To make it easier to find services and apps that are important to your business, we’ve re-launched the App Gallery as the Partner Gallery, the new destination to find partners and review their offerings. It includes:

Services by Google Analytics Certified Partners
Certified Partners are vetted by Google and meet rigorous qualification standards. This includes agencies and consultancies who offer web analytics implementations, analysis services and website testing and optimization services.

Apps by Google Analytics Technology Partners
Ready-to-use applications that extend Google Analytics in new and exciting ways. This includes solutions that help analysts, marketers, IT teams, and executives get the most out of Google Analytics and complement functionality.



The Partner Gallery includes new features and improvements:
  • A brand new look and layout.
  • A combined view of both services and apps so you don’t need to visit multiple sites to find a solution.
  • New search capabilities and category selection making it easier to filter and find what you’re looking for.
  • Google Analytics Certified Partners are sorted based on your location to find partners that have an office near you.
  • Media assets like screenshots / videos / case studies that highlight customer success stories and illustrate app features.
  • Comments and ratings to review user experiences and provide feedback.
Visit the Partner Gallery to browse partner services and apps. If you’re interested in the Google Analytics Certified Partner or Technology Partner programs, learn how to become a partner.

Pete Frisella, Developer Advocate, Google Analytics Developer Relations team

Q&A with Neal Mohan: A Sneak Peek at the DoubleClick Live Stream

DoubleClick’s annual digital advertising summit is just around the corner, streaming live on YouTube on Wednesday, June 4th. (Sign up here to watch.) We caught up with Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products, to hear what’s on his mind as we get ready for the event.

Q: What topics should we expect to hear about this year? 
A: I don’t think it will come as a surprise that our team has been very focused on how to make digital work for brands and premium publishers. You can expect to hear a lot more about that. Also, since this event marks Google’s annual conversation on the future of digital advertising, we’ll discuss how digital is redefining consumer behavior, content development, and the ways that advertisers and publishers reach their customers.

Q: Will the live stream include any special guests? 
A: I’ll be joined by Nikesh Arora, our Chief Business Officer at Google, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and Co-Founder of DreamWorks Animation. I’m looking forward to hearing Jeffrey talk about how technology has changed content creation.

Q: What consumer trends are impacting the way brands and publishers think about digital? 
A: When we started this DoubleClick event 14 years ago, going online was a deliberate act that required going to a computer and “logging-in”. The days of going online are coming to an end. Today’s digital experience is one that is always-on and always with us. As a result, digital has become far more personal, and one of the most personal forms of communication - video - is playing a more central role in our online lives. All these factors have major implications for brands and publishers, which we’ll discuss at the event.

Q: So...any scoops you can give us?
A: As I mentioned, video has been very much on my mind lately. Getting video right is something that is essential to our brand, agency, and publisher partners...expect to hear more about what we have planned to help make that happen.

We hope you can join us on Wednesday, June 4th at 9:30 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT. Register to watch the live stream or to receive the recording. -The DoubleClick Team

Google Analytics Summit 2014: What’s Next And On The Horizon For Analytics


As they have for years, Google Analytics Certified Partners, Premium customers and developers will once again join us in the Bay Area for our annual summit this week. We are constantly working to improve our products based on feedback from our most dedicated users and this event lets us hear directly from our community. We wanted to share an overview of some of the tools and features we’ll discuss at the 2014 summit so that even if you aren’t able to attend, you can about hear what’s next. 

Enhanced Ecommerce

Google Analytics Ecommerce data traditionally focused on details about the purchase - transaction details, product details, and others. But, marketers today want to understand the entire customer journey. They want more details about customer behavior when looking at products, interacting with merchandising units and on-site marketing. Today we’re announcing the beta for Enhanced Ecommerce - a complete revamp of how Google Analytics measures the Ecommerce experience. 

Businesses can now gain clear insight into new important metrics about shopper behavior and conversion including: product detail views, ‘add to cart’ actions, internal campaign clicks, the success of internal merchandising tools, the checkout process, and purchase. Merchants will be able to understand how far along users get in the buying process and where they are dropping off. For a complete overview of new features, have a look at our Help Center.


For marketers and Ecommerce managers looking to hone their analytic skills, we are also announcing a new Analytics Academy course titled Ecommerce Analytics: From Data to Decisions. Students will be guided through interactive examples of analyses for a fictional retail company to practice techniques they can apply to their own business. You can sign-up to be notified when this course opens on the Analytics Academy site.

Flexible and Scalable Reporting  

Today’s marketers and analysts are looking to multiple data sets to gain deeper insights. We’re working on a number of new features to make it simple for businesses to work with different types of data in Google Analytics.  
  • We unveiled Unified Channel Groupings to ensure all traffic that comes to the your site are classified in-line with your unique channel definitions. This is especially valuable for attribution, so marketers can interpret and report on the consumer journey based on their unique view of acquisition channels. 
  • We’ve expanded the functionality of Google Analytics Dimension Widening, now called ‘Data Import’, to enable customers to import more of their own data into Google Analytics. This could include specific product details, information about returned products, insights about your customers’ preferences, and more. Imported data can be used with almost all of the standard Google Analytics features. For a complete list of the types of data you can import please see our article in the help center (linked above).
  • For Google Analytics Premium users, we’re introducing Custom Tables. This powerful feature enables users to retrieve unsampled data using customized tables that best fit their business’ needs. Once configured, fresh data will be available daily for unsampled analysis and segmentation. 
Enterprise-Class Features

Today, smart marketers are increasingly tying measurement to media execution. We’re excited to announce a seamless integration between Google Analytics Premium, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Google Analytics Premium is uniquely positioned to help today’s advertiser understand how customers, and potential customers, interact with advertising media trafficked on the DoubleClick platform. In addition to understanding impression level data, advertisers can now send remarketing lists from Google Analytics to DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.  
-Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

Additionally, for enterprise customers, service providers, or developers that manage many accounts we are offering 4 new APIs to help you save you time and increase productivity: the new Provisioning API to create new GA accounts (invite only), the AdWords and Filters API to manage configurations, and the Embed API to surface key reports and dashboards. We’ve also re-launched the App Gallery as the Partner Gallery, the new destination to find services by Google Analytics Certified Partners and apps by Google Analytics Technology Partners. The new gallery will rollout to all users over the coming week.

Stay tuned in the next several days for deep-dives about our various new tools and features. You can also sign-up for the whitelist of several of the features listed above here. Thank you to our partners, developers, and customers for all the great feedback over the year. We hope to continue developing and launches capabilities that matters to you most.  

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Introducing Content Grouping in the Behavior Flow

Many of you have shared with us that it’s difficult to identify traffic patterns from Behavior Flows that include a large number of pages. That’s why we're pleased to announce that we’re adding support for Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow. 

Content Groupings let you group pages and content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. The Behavior Flow view provides a graphical representation of how visitors flow through your site by traffic source (or any other dimension) so you can see their journeys, as well as where they dropped off. Now, you can select Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow to see how visitors flow through Content Groupings that you have defined.  This can help you answer questions like “Where do users who read my sports pages go next? Do they view more sports articles or do they switch to another section? Or, do they simply drop off?”


The more time you spend setting up your Content Groupings, the more information you will be able to discover from viewing them in the Behavior Flow. Watch the video to learn more about setting up Content Groupings.


Visit our Help Center to learn how to get started with Content Groupings, or read this article about using the Behavior Flow once you have set up your Content Groupings.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Matthew Anderson, Google Analytics Team

Sharing is Caring – Unleash your productivity with asset sharing in Google Analytics


Innovation happens on every level

Within your organization there are multiple people working on different sides of the same problem. Making it easy for people to quickly and effectively share innovative solutions is a key enabler for more productivity, and better decisions. 

We are proud to announce a series of asset sharing tools within Google Analytics. To spread all your innovative solutions and assets even easier. Our permalink solution is a simple to use and privacy friendly way to share Google Analytics configurations across your organization, and beyond.

Narrow the focus for precise insights

Our popular segments feature helps you to narrow the focus of your analysis. Are you trying to answer a hypotheses for new, or recurring customers? Is this report more meaningful if you focus on a particular region? By sharing a segment, you share a certain point of view on a problem. Invite others to your view by sharing a segment you built, or a custom report.

Define success, and spread the love

Goals in Google Analytics help advertisers to map real business value into a conversion signal. Track users site engagement, media interactions, or sales events through Goal tracking. Now it is easier than ever to share your success definition across other views, or with other people in your organization.

Capture everything with Custom Channels Groupings

It all starts with traffic to your website. You spend a tremendous amount of effort and resources on getting people to visit. Custom Channel Grouping within Multi-Channel Funnels enables you to identify everything, especially traffic that is custom to your business model. Sharing this important view is now easier than ever. Create a Custom Channel Grouping, and share this among your organization.

Assign partial value to your marketing efforts

Custom Attribution Models allow Google Analytics users to assign partial value to the channel interactions which drive business value. You invest time and effort to build a customized attribution model, which reflects the nuances of your business. Now it is easier than ever to ensure all stakeholders are working off the same consistent definition of attribution.

“Amazing feature! I tried it … and like it.”
Sebastian Pospischil Director Digital Analytics, United Digital Group

How it works

Permalink is a simple to use, and privacy friendly way to share configuration assets. When you ‘share’ an asset, we are creating a copy of that asset or configuration, and create a unique URL which points to that copy. The asset copy will remain private and can only be accessed by someone with the URL. If you want to share your asset, just share the URL. The recipient clicks on the URL, and will be brought to a simple dialog to import the assets into his or her Google Analytics views. This feature also supports Dashboard, and Custom Reports.

Check out our Solutions Gallery within your Google Analytics account via the “Import from Gallery” button or directly at the standalone site for inspiration, and consider sharing your own permalinks via the “Share in Solutions Gallery” link. 

Happy Analyzing.

Posted by Stefan Schnabl, on behalf of the Google Analytics team

Understanding multi-device user behavior in a single view

In this constantly connected world, users can interact with your business across many digital touchpoints: websites, mobile apps, web apps, and other digital devices. So to help you understand what users do in the increasingly diverse digital landscape, we’re enabling the ability to see web and app data in the same reporting view.



Here’s a bit more detail on this change:

Analyze app and web data in the same reporting view
Now you can see all data you send to one Google Analytics property in a single reporting view, regardless of the collection method you use of where the data comes from. If you send data from the web and from a mobile app to one property, both data sets appear in your reports. 

If you want to isolate data from one source, like if you only want to see web data in your reports, you can set up a filter to customize what you see. You can also use other tools to isolate each data set, including customizations in standard reports, dashboards, custom reports, and secondary dimensions. 

If you don’t send web and app data to the same property, this change doesn’t affect your data or your account.

Measure web apps
We’ve also added some new app-specific fields to the analytics.js JavaScript web collection library, including screen name, app name, app version, and exception tracking. These changes allow the JavaScript tracking code to take advantage of the app tracking framework, so you can more accurately collect data on your web apps.

Benefit from consistent dimension & metrics names
Until today, some metrics and dimensions used different names in app views and in web views, even though they presented the exact same data. Now, all metric, dimensions, and segment names are the same, regardless if they’re used for web or app data. This gives you a clear and consistent way to analyze and refer to all of your Google Analytics data.

Visitors are now users and visits are sessions:
There are two big changes to the names in Google Analytics: First, the Visitors web metric and Active Users app metric are now unified under the same name, Users. And second, Visits are now referred to as Sessions everywhere in all of Google Analytics. 

We’ll be making these changes starting today, and rolling them out incrementally over the next week. Visit our developer site for more information on these changes:
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Product Manager

Improving Your Data Quality: Google Analytics Diagnostics

Google Analytics is a powerful product with a wealth of features. Analytics data can fuel powerful actions like improving websites, streamlining mobile apps, and optimizing marketing investment. To realize this power, you must configure Analytics well and ensure high quality data. For these reasons, we’re starting a beta test with some of our users on Analytics Diagnostics that are aimed at finding data-quality issues, making you aware of them, and helping you fix them.

Analytics Diagnostics frequently scans for problems. It inspects your site tagging, account configuration, and reporting data for potential data-quality issues, looking for things like:
  • Missing or malformed Analytics tags 
  • Filters that conflict
  • Looking for the presence of (other) entries in reports
Here’s what it looks like:


As we get lots more feedback and improve the diagnostics system, we will release this to all of our users. It will take some time to get there; in the meantime, you are welcome to express interest in trying out the diagnostics system on your own GA accounts.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Smarter remarketing with Google Analytics



Sometimes, less is more.
While many marketers love the hundreds of dimensions they can use to create remarketing lists in Google Analytics, others have told us that the sheer number of possibilities can be overwhelming.

So to simplify the product while still ensuring great results for our users, we’re proud to announce a new type of remarketing list: one that’s managed automatically.

Introducing: Smart Lists with Google Analytics.
Now when creating a new remarketing list, you’ll have the option to have Analytics manage your list for you.

Smart List option in the Remarketing Interface

How does it work?
Smart Lists are built using machine learning across the millions of Google Analytics websites which have opted in to share anonymized conversion data, using dozens of signals like visit duration, page depth, location, device, referrer, and browser to predict which of your users are most likely to convert during a later visit.

Based on their on-site actions, Analytics is able to calibrate your remarketing campaigns to align with each user’s value.

If you use use eCommerce transaction tracking and have enough traffic and conversions, your Smart List will be automatically upgraded. Marked as [My Smart List], your list will be customized based on the unique characteristics that cause your visitors to convert. Only you will have access to this list, and no new data will be shared whether you use this feature or not (learn more).

For practitioners, the promise of big data is also the burden - there are so many analyses to run, so much opportunity.  With Smart Lists, as with Data Driven Attribution, Google Analytics is  operationalizing statistical analysis - making us not just smarter marketers - but faster and more nimble. 

While we might have been able to achieve similar results with ongoing statistical analysis and a complex cookie structure, Smart Lists are simply plug and play. This speeds us along, so we can focus not on list management, but on growing the business. 
-- Melissa Shusterman, Engagement Director, www.maassmedia.com

For best results, make sure your Google Analytics goals and transactions are being imported into AdWords, then combine your Smart List with Conversion Optimizer using Target CPA or ROAS in AdWords.

If you’re new to remarketing, the Smart List is a great way to get started with strong performance results.  As you get comfortable with remarketing you can tailor your creatives and apply a variety of remarketing best practices.

If you’re a remarketer already employing a sophisticated list strategy, stay tuned while we gear up to extend this signal directly for your current lists as an optimization signal used in AdWords bidding.

We’ll be continuing to iterate on these models in order to help users better understand and act on their data. We’re also working on surfacing these signals elsewhere in your reports and in the product so you can dive into what factors help predict whether a user will likely convert.

We welcome your feedback and ideas. Please leave them right in the comments!

Happy Analyzing,
Ismail Sebe and Dan Stone
on behalf of the Google Analytics Team

Analytics & AdWords Bulk Account Linking

To maximize marketing investment and return, advertisers need insights into the effectiveness of their ads. However, gaining such insights is often overly cumbersome. This is why we’re pleased to announce that in the coming weeks, the Google Analytics and AdWords account linking process is becoming even more streamlined, making it easier for advertisers to quickly gain rich insights. The new linking process allows you to link multiple AdWords accounts all at once. This enables more tightly controlled linking access for each Google Analytics property. 

Enable Bulk AdWords Account Linking
Many Google Analytics users have multiple AdWords accounts. Until now, each AdWords account had to be individually linked. The new account linking wizard allows you to select any of the AdWords accounts in which you have Administrative access. The following screenshot shows what the wizard looks like for a user who has access to an AdWords MCC containing many AdWords accounts. Note that you can select multiple accounts:

Discover Unlinked Accounts
Many users want to quickly find unlinked AdWords accounts and link to them, and the new wizard makes this easy. A quick glance at the AdWords account list in the screenshot above shows which accounts are and aren’t linked. To link additional accounts, just mark the “X” in front of each account, and then continue.


Gain More Granular Control
With this launch, linking to AdWords now takes place at the Analytics property level instead of the account level. This is a benefit for those with many properties in a single Analytics account; if you have different teams of people managing each property, you no longer need to give them access to the full Analytics account in order to link to AdWords. Now, you can simply give that team access to only the appropriate property, and they can manage AdWords links. All it takes is property-level Edit permission to create and update AdWords links. This is another Analytics feature enabling large-scale Analytics customers to better control access to their Analytics accounts.

Visit The New AdWords Linking Section
Once the new linking process has launched to your account, you’ll be able to see all these features. Log in to your Analytics account, click the Admin button in the header, and you’ll see a new AdWords Linking section in the Property column:


These great new features are rolling out now and should fully launch to everyone in the coming weeks. Here’s what one of our users had to say:

"The linking process is now a lot more straightforward as I do not need to toggle between 2 different interfaces. Everything can be done in GA. In addition, all of the accounts that I manage are automatically listed in the interface so I do not need to look for them. This is a vast improvement from the previous experience." Sam Chew, Digital Manager, Air Asia

Log into your Analytics account soon to update your AdWords account links and gain rich marketing insights.

Posted by Dan Fielder and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team