Tag Archives: case study

Using the Customer Voice to Speed Up Decision Making

Making important business decisions is often a slow process, regardless of industry or company size. In a world where innovation is increasingly important, speed is a necessity. But how does an organization streamline its decision-making process? For many companies, the answer is data. In fact, highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely than others to report significant improvement in decision-making, according to PwC research.1

When looking for meaningful insights to drive innovation and growth, market research is often a go-to data source. The problem many companies face is that market research can feel like a roadblock because it can take months to get the data.

At Lenovo, the leading PC manufacturer worldwide, constantly evolving and improving products is required to remain competitive. “We have to make decisions today for products two years from now,” says Sarah Kennedy, User Experience Researcher at Lenovo. To keep the decision-making process moving, Sarah’s team uses Google Surveys 360 for fast and accurate data. Bringing consumer insights to the table in the early stages of product development helps her team get buy-in from senior stakeholders at a faster pace. “Within seven days, we can get results that would normally take us a month,” says Sarah. 


"We put an emphasis on innovation. Collecting competitive data and industry benchmarks is critical to do this. Surveys 360 helps us get data on the current state of the market. The results are reliable and delivered at the speed we need so our teams can continue developing the best products without delay." 

– Corinna Proctor, ‎Director of User & Design Research, Lenovo 


Google Surveys 360 provides businesses with the data they need quickly, accurately, and affordably. Choose your target audience, write your survey, and get answers in as little as three days. Get started today.

Happy surveying!

1PwC's Global Data and Analytics Survey, Big Decisions™, Base: 1,135 senior executives, Global, May 2016

Posted by Kevin Fields, Product Marketing Manager, Google Surveys team

Jackpot: APMEX Doubles New User Revenue with Google Optimize 360

A few months ago we shared a spotlight post on Google Optimize 360 (beta), a new testing and personalization solution in the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Today we’d like to share how one of our customers, APMEX, uses Optimize 360 to deliver an online shopping experience that matches the personal touch its customers get over the phone.

Built with full native integration for all the data that matters to your business, Optimize 360 let the APMEX team use their Analytics 360 goals and audiences to deliver better online experiences for their customers.


APMEX Case Study 

"Investments you hold" is the motto of APMEX, one of the nation's largest precious metals retailers. From the gold Maple Leafs of the Royal Canadian Mint to the platinum bars of Credit Suisse, APMEX offers thousands of bullion and numismatic products for easy sale online.

While APMEX is a large company, its marketing resources are limited. But APMEX works hard to give its online customers a concierge-level customer experience — the same personal experience customers get over the phone. "We refuse to believe that our customers’ experiences should be limited by our resources," says Andrew Duffle, Director of Analytics at APMEX.

APMEX relies on Optimize 360 to help it bring a personal concierge-level touch to its website users. "We test everything," says Duffle. "Creative versus non-creative, the impacts of SEO content on engagement, conversion rate optimization on low-performing pages, new user experiences, and even the price sensitivity of different products."

"One of our goals was to capture conversions on pages that were otherwise being used as educational resources," says Andy Mueller, Manager of Business Intelligence at APMEX. "We thought if people were checking the price of metals, they might respond to offers that really reflected their interests." In one test, new users coming to APMEX to check silver prices were given limited-time offers on United States Silver Eagles. If they're interested enough to check prices, the theory went, they might appreciate a chance to buy.

Before

After

                                                

The results were excellent, says Mueller: "We found the sessions that included an offer resulted in a median rate of 112% more revenue per session, with a 100% probability to beat baseline." The experiment did more than boost revenue: It also increased APMEX’s new customer counts. "We saw a 9% increase in new customer acquisition. Our customers have a long lifespan, so giving up a little margin on the first sale to the right customer is worth it to us."

Some of APMEX’s other tests have also produced astounding results. In one, the team used Analytics 360 to build an audience of people who had put Silver Buffalo coins in their shopping cart and then abandoned the cart. Those who returned to APMEX in the next few days saw the Silver Buffalo first thing on their homepage. As a result, the conversion rate for the coin doubled with this audience. 

"With all the data that Optimize 360 puts at our fingertips, we use it daily to build and evolve our customer relationships," says Duffle.

For more, read the full case study with APMEX.

Posted by Tiffany Siu, Product Marketing Manager, Google Optimize 360

AccuWeather delivers enhanced value to advertisers with DoubleClick for Publishers and Google Analytics 360

The Challenge
Publishers use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to manage and serve ads across their sites and apps, and use Google Analytics 360 to understand user behavior on their sites. DFP reports on the ads and ad units on the site, while Analytics 360 reports on the pages on the site.

Each platform on its own doesn’t provide insight into the intersection of data with the other. And with two platforms speaking two different languages, it hasn't always been easy for publishers to understand how user behavior influences revenue and how ads influence user behavior.

That’s why last year we launched an integration between DFP and Analytics 360.

The Solution 
Through the integration, publishers using Analytics 360 can see DFP metrics like impressions, clicks, and revenue within the Analytics 360 interface. This enables publishers to combine revenue data with user behavior insights—for example, the number of ad impressions or revenue each page of their site generates. AccuWeather is one such publisher.

AccuWeather Case Study 
AccuWeather brings real-time weather news and information to more than a billion people worldwide through its website and popular suite of apps. The company knew that if it could better understand the needs of those visitors and match them with more relevant messages from advertisers, it could provide more value to advertisers and boost its own ad revenues. By linking its DFP and Analytics 360 accounts, AccuWeather could see how the behavior of its website visitors affected revenue.

With DFP metrics now in Analytics 360, AccuWeather could see that average revenue per 1,000 sessions rose by 45% on a country-level basis when two new companies began advertising on accuweather.com. This revenue increase was driven by users who were actively in-market to travel and were looking at weather in “exotic” locations such as Turks & Caicos and Barbados. With insights like these, the team has been able to create highly tailored advertising packages with high-value, unique audience segments that sales teams can sell directly or through programmatic marketplaces like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.


“The integration of DoubleClick for Publishers and Analytics 360 gives AccuWeather real-time visibility to the next level of campaign performance insights and is helping us make better advertising decisions. We’re now creating new behavior-based ad products that are being very well received by our advertisers,” says Steve Mummey, Director of Ad Strategy & Audience Development, AccuWeather.

For more, read the full case study with AccuWeather.

Even More Capabilities Available for Publishers 
In addition to seeing DFP metrics in Analytics 360, publishers will be able to use a consolidated reporting section, see DFP ad unit data together with Analytics 360 data, and do deeper analysis on their DFP data in Google BigQuery.

Reporting 
DFP metrics are consolidated into a reporting section in Analytics 360, making it easy for publishers to understand how their online content impacts revenue.

The figures in the above image are for illustration only and do not represent actual data in AccuWeather’s DFP or Analytics 360 accounts.


Ad Units
Publishers sell their online ad inventory based on the thousands or millions of ad units they have available on their properties. Individual ad slots can be grouped together into ad units so that publishers can create a hierarchy of ad units that represents the structure of their website. Then, publishers can match each advertiser’s message with the right ad slot.

Through this integration, publishers can now see their Analytics 360 data through the lens of their ad units. DFP ad unit hierarchy is mapped to Analytics 360 along with related metrics such as impressions, clicks, and dollars.

And now that analyst and ad operations teams can speak the same language, publishers are able to analyze DFP data through the lens of demographic and interest data in Analytics 360—and they can identify things like which affinity category or user lifestyle is driving the most revenue per 1,000 sessions by ad unit.

The figures in the above image are for illustration only and do not represent actual data in AccuWeather’s DFP or Analytics 360 accounts.


Google BigQuery 
Now that DFP metrics are available in Analytics 360, they can be exported to BigQuery. This means more metrics, more exports, and more data sources. Publishers can run their own revenue models and explore in more detail the intersection of revenue and user behavior.

Stay tuned for more updates from Analytics 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities!

Posted by Abhishek Aggarwal, Dan Cary, and Tiffany Siu on behalf of the Google Analytics team

Which TV Ads Made the Podium During the 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremonies?

When the 2016 Olympics kicked off last Friday, many TV advertisers were crossing their fingers that their strategy would pay off. Reaching an estimated 26.5 million total viewers in the U.S., they were hoping their ads delivered relevant and compelling creative to the right audiences. To answer the pay-off question, advertisers will predominately look at three specific areas of performance:

  1. Which ads were noticed by the audience?
  2. Which ads drove interest, shifted perception, and increased intent?
  3. And, which ads drove actual consumer response?

To get some insights into these questions, Google evaluated the top 10 brands (based on total ad minutes) that aired ads during the live broadcast of the opening ceremonies. The analysis is based on a combination of consumer surveys and second-screen (mobile, desktop, and tablet) response data. Presented in a live Google Data Studio dashboard, the result is a unique view into the full-funnel performance of the ads evaluated.

Awareness

Commercials during large, live sporting events like the Olympics are often uniquely created to leverage both the scale of the audience and the context of the event. Whether it is telling the personal story of an athlete or playing to our passions like patriotism, they are intended to strike an emotional connection, entertain us, or make us stand up and take notice.

Coca Cola was the big winner with almost 35% of respondents having remembered seeing the ad when prompted—a result that outpaces typical recall rates in the 20%-25% range. Not a surprising result from a top CPG brand. Samsung, Chevy, United, and Visa rounded out the top five with respectable recall rates.
TV Ad Awareness Metrics
35% of respondents remembered seeing the Coca Cola ad.
Additionally, of those respondents recalling the ad, only 40% could recall the specific product or service featured in the ad. The net is that only about 8% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement. For many of the ads this was the first airing and it is reasonable to expect these numbers to improve substantially with increased exposure over the next couple of weeks.

Interest

Advertisers also want the ad to shift perceptions and create interest in the product or service featured. By surveying both viewers who saw the ad (exposed) and those who did not (unexposed), we are able to get insights into the impact of each ad’s messaging and creative. Overall, the results were impressive. On average, respondents who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the associated brands than those who did not. Likewise, respondents who saw the ads were 16% more likely to find out more and/or purchase the product being advertised.
TV Ad Interest Metrics
Consumers who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the brand and were 16% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ad.
Interestingly, the baseline favorability and purchase intentions for both non-sponsors and Olympic sponsors are relatively equal. And for the most part, the ad’s impact on both factors was the same across non-sponsors and sponsors.

Desire

These commercials don’t just make us laugh or make us feel better about the brand—they also make us search and visit websites. Second-screen searching—whether it’s to re-engage with the ad or to learn more about the product—is a powerful indication of desire. By measuring incremental search queries on Google and YouTube during the broadcast that are specific and modeled to be attributable to ads shown, we are now able to include responses in our analysis. During the opening ceremonies, TV ad driven searches were almost exclusively on mobile—94% compared to an average of 56% for those brands when the ads were not airing. For brands, that means a presence on the TV screen isn’t complete without a strategy for small screens, as well.
"94% of searches on Google and YouTube as a result of seeing the ads occurred on mobile devices."
McDonald’s took the top spot on the podium with 42% more searches than the average. BMW and Samsung fought it out for second and third with 14% and 12% respectively. The answer to the question “Do emotional and inspiring ads work?” is, in this instance, “Yes.” But so do product-featured ads. Both inspiring and product ad creatives drove 10% more searches on average. Also, ads by sponsors drove 14% more searches than their non-sponsor counterparts.
TV Ad Response Metrics
Compared to the average of the top 10 ads studied, McDonald’s drove 42% more searches.
Finally, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 ad was the overall winner with strong full-funnel performance placing in the top three across all three funnel stages. Whether people are tuning into the Olympics or their favorite TV show, they use their smartphones to search for information triggered by what they’re seeing. That means if you advertise on TV, you can now get a new view of performance across each stage of the funnel—using a combination of consumer surveys and digital response, all in a matter of days. Armed with these new insights, advertisers are now able to better understand and improve the performance of these investments in concert with their digital media.

Sourcing

Using Google Consumer Surveys to provide consumer ad awareness and interest research, an online survey was conducted in the United States during the period 8/6 - 8/9/16 using a validated, representative sample with a minimum of 750 respondents. Response data is based on incremental TV ad-driven search queries (Google and YouTube) during the course of the broadcast that are specific to the ad shown and are modeled by Google Attribution 360 to be attributable to the airings of the commercials. Response data is normalized for total commercial air time during the broadcast for each advertiser and indexed to the average.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Casey Carey, Director of Marketing, Google Analytics

Case Study in Online-to-Store Measurement: Petit Bateau & Google Analytics

Knowing that many people research products online before going into a physical store to make a purchase, French clothing retailer Petit Bateau wanted to develop a better understanding of the online-to-offline (in-store) behaviour of its customer base. The brand leveraged Google Analytics and its robust features: User ID and Measurement Protocol, to reach the objectives.

Petit Bateau customers in France can shop in 153 physical stores as well as on Petit-bateau.fr. Users log into the website which makes it possible to later match the traffic of logged-in users with subsequent in-store transactions made with a loyalty card.



Petit Bateau uploaded personally non-identifiable in-store data into Google Analytics and discovered that digital played a significant role in driving in-store purchases:

  • 44% of in-store buyers had visited the site within the seven days before making their purchases, 
  • 9% of in-store buyers had visited the site on the same day as their purchase in the physical shop. 
Further analysis revealed that the online-to-store effect was particularly important on mobile. Mobile visitors converted within stores at an 11% higher rate than desktop visitors, and their in-store spend was 8% greater.

By using Google Analytics to measure online-to-offline purchase behaviour, Petit Bateau was able to better understand the impact of online marketing on in-store sales and use the data to recalculate AdWords return on ad spend – which proved to be six times higher with in-store sales incorporated. Taking in-store transactions into consideration in this way is enabling Petit Bateau to optimise the brand’s digital marketing programmes, make more informed decisions around media budget allocation and design better experiences for consumers as they move seamlessly between digital and physical shopping environments.

You can find the full case study with all the details here.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Spotlight on Attribution 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Your marketing strategy isn’t single channel so why should your measurement practices be? 

Looking at marketing performance one channel at a time no longer makes sense. In today’s complex, micro-moment, cross-screen landscape, the lines between marketing efforts are blurred. Traditional marketing and digital marketing overlap, with investments online delivering results offline, and vice versa. Cross-channel marketers have an opportunity to shift away from channel-by-channel thinking to better understand how to optimize their entire marketing strategy.

Google Attribution 360 allows you to measure and optimize marketing spend for all channels, online and off, at once. Use it to uncover insights, make a true impact on the customer journey, and improve ROI.


The Digital Attribution, Marketing Mix Modeling, and TV Attribution capabilities within Attribution 360 allow you to analyze all your available data streams and create a highly accurate model of your full marketing efforts.

  • Digital Attribution helps you combine and interpret siloed data sources, apply data-driven attribution modeling, and optimize your digital marketing mix. Rather than using a limited first-touch, last-touch, or arbitrary rules-based model, Digital Attribution awards the appropriate credit to each and every touchpoint on the customer journey. 
  • Marketing Mix Modeling adds a top-down, aggregated view of performance across all channels, including media such as radio, television, print, out-of-home, and digital. You’ll also get insights into how external factors such as economic conditions, seasonality, and competitive actions impact your marketing efforts. 
  • TV Attribution helps business relying on TV to build awareness and demand to integrate digital and broadcast data and understand their cross-channel performance. Down-to-the-minute TV ad airings data is analyzed alongside digital site and search data to reveal the attributable impact of specific broadcast ad placements. 
Here’s how one of our customers, Open Colleges, uses Attribution 360 to make the connection between TV and digital advertising.

Google Attribution 360 helps Open Colleges see how TV ads turn into online leads 

Open Colleges, Australia’s leader in online learning, felt television advertising could be a powerful tool to reach its audience, but in a data-driven and lead-driven culture they found it difficult to measure and justify the actual impact of TV ads. They wanted to see how TV ads translated into real leads, understand the cross-channel customer journey, and find new opportunities in their marketing mix. That’s when they turned to Google Attribution 360.

For three months in 2015, the team tested Attribution 360 with a series of TV campaigns focused on their key user base of women aged 25-54 who are looking to enhance or change their careers. They ran ads on a variety of TV programming — cooking shows, series, soap operas, and news and morning shows.


Getting results 

With Attribution 360, the Open Colleges team could see clearly what was engaging TV viewers and driving them to search. While news and morning shows delivered larger impression volume, light entertainment shows like Ellen and Grey’s Anatomy had higher impact on leads. Open Colleges also learned that while Saturday was their most engaged day, Monday and Tuesday spots were more cost-efficient by an average of 12%.

“We gained insights into day-parting, 15-second versus 30-second spots, and campaign flighting — just a level of insights we’ve never had before,” says Matt Hill, Head of Brand & Communication for Open Colleges.

They also learned that dual-screen TV viewers were far more engaged on mobile than on desktop, and far more engaged on smartphones than on tablets.

“People sitting on the couch who see a TV ad, they’re not going to run and get their laptop,” notes Hill. “They pull out their phone and search for us right there.” In prime time (6-10pm), for example, 81% of attributed visits were from mobile.

Making adjustments 

As results came in, the Open Colleges team made adjustments to campaigns, ad buys and creatives to capitalize on what they learned. The realized they had to make sure their online ads were at or near top position for web searches using keywords like online courses any time their TV ads were driving response. “Your search bidding strategy has to be aligned with your TV activity,” says Hill. “If your TV ad drives a mobile user to search for online education and you aren’t there, you won’t make the most of your investment.”

In the first three months, Open Colleges saw a significant uplift with its key target audience of women aged 25–54. As a result, the team is now testing many new approaches, like targeting smaller audiences in Western Australia, trying programming alternatives at off-peak hours, and exploring the hours where 15-second ads get the best ROI.

“Traditional metrics just don’t cut it anymore,” says Hill. “You need to understand what your marketing dollars are doing for you in detail, and TV attribution has given us the visibility and confidence that TV does deliver against hard business metrics. If you’re serious about understanding the pathways to conversion and the full impact of your offline spend for maximum ROI, Attribution 360 is a must.”

Read the full case study with Open Colleges for more details.

Stay tuned for more updates on Attribution 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities.

Posted by Dave Barney, Product Manager, Google Attribution 360

Spotlight on Optimize 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Because better web experiences start with integrated marketing tools

A recent survey of marketers found that only 26% believe their marketing tools are well-integrated and work seamlessly together.1

And with all the channels and screens that customers are using – plus all the data that results – poor integration makes it hard to understand and respond to all the journeys that customers take to interact with your brand.

When your marketing tools are integrated, you can use all the rich behavioral insights you’ve learned about your customers to make their experience on your site better. You can quickly identify areas of your site that can be improved upon and more easily tailor your site for specific audiences so your business can provide the optimal site experience to each customer.

That’s why we created Google Optimize 360 (beta). This new testing and personalization solution is built with full native integration for all the data that matters to your business.

Get a clearer view and faster action

The Google Analytics 360 Suite was built to make sense of all this data. Optimize 360 helps you take that integrated data and build better web experiences, not just for the "average user" but for individual users with all their different needs and goals. It offers you:

  • One data source. Work with confidence as your web analytics data and experiment data can now work together in one tool. 
  • Experiment and business objectives are the same. Many businesses already use Analytics 360 to measure key activity on their site as they make critical business decisions. Now their experiments can easily test against those same activities. 
  • Simple, powerful personalization. It's easy to use the Analytics 360 segments you’ve already discovered to deliver more personal web experiences. 

 Enterprise-level testing and personalization made simple

Refresh your site messaging or re-imagine the entire customer journey — just about anything is possible with the easy-to-use visual editor in Optimize 360.

Once you’ve created a new variation of your site to test, you can select your Analytics 360 goals as experiment objectives and target your Analytics 360 audiences. After you’ve launched your experiment, you can review experiment reporting that matches your web analytics reporting. It's both easy and powerful ― because testing and personalization are seamlessly integrated with Analytics 360 from start to finish.

The Motley Fool increases order page conversion rate by 26% with Optimize 360

Many Optimize 360 customers have seen first-hand the benefits of an integrated and simple-to-use testing solution. The Motley Fool is one such customer.

The Motley Fool is dedicated to helping the world invest — better. The company was begun by brothers Tom and David Gardner in 1993 as a simple investing newsletter for family and friends. The Motley Fool is a global financial company now, but newsletters remain a key product.

During regular reviews of their Analytics 360 data, The Motley Fool team began to see a weak link in the sales chain — email campaigns were driving visitors to the newsletter order page, but a high percentage of those sessions weren't leading to an order.

The Motley Fool team began experimenting with ways they could make the newsletter order process as simple and easy as possible for their users. They used Optimize 360 to put their ideas to the test and measured their results against an already created Analytics 360 goal that was measuring newsletter orders.

“The ability to use our existing Analytics 360 data in a testing platform was huge for our team,” says Laura Cavanaugh, Data Analytics Manager for The Motley Fool. “Our server-side event tracking for key metrics like leads and orders is 99% accurate — far better than with other sources."

Even before results came in, Optimize 360 made a big impact on The Motley Fool team by saving valuable time and resources. “One of our marketing managers can set up a test from start to finish in less than 10 minutes,” says Cavanaugh.

When the experiment results did come in, they were clear and powerful. The redesigned order page resulted in an improvement in conversion rate over the original order page.

And The Motley Fool isn’t stopping there. Now they plan on testing new elements for many different audience segments, like better landing pages for new prospects and custom experiences for loyal customers.

And having the combination of Analytics 360 and Optimize 360 gives them a more complete view of the greater business impact each of their changes have.

Read the full case study with The Motley Fool for more details.

More to come 

This is only the beginning. In the coming months we’ll share even more product features and integrations that we’re now building into Optimize 360, so you can take seamless action on your Google data wherever it exists.

Want to learn more? Visit our website to read more about Optimize 360.

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

Posted by Jon Mesh, Product Manager, Optimize 360 and Tiffany Siu, Product Marketing Manager, Optimize 360

Spotlight: Smarter Marketing with Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite

On the Google Analytics team, we believe a primary goal of analytics is to make your marketing smarter.  It should help you understand your customer’s journey, gain and share insights, and create an engaging experience for your audience.

But just as your organization can’t achieve these goals in a silo, neither can your website analytics data.  Your customer’s journey includes both their experience with your marketing campaigns as well as their experience on your sites and apps.  So you need complete data, connected from marketing through to site experience, to actually gain insight and deliver a great customer experience.  

Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, is proud to provide this type of end-to-end understanding with our existing AdWords integrations. Beginning today, we are now offering this same capability with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.  In addition to our existing integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, you can now view user engagement information for users acquired through DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Search campaigns directly within Analytics 360.  It’s super easy to connect your Analytics 360 account to DoubleClick Digital Marketing and there’s no implementation work needed (e.g. no site or campaign re-tagging).

With these new capabilities, marketers using Analytics 360 are better able to see the customer journey from when a customer was exposed to their marketing campaigns all the way through to that customer’s eventual purchase on their site (or lack thereof).  User engagement with your site can be analyzed for both users who viewed an ad (view-through) and for users who clicked on an ad (click-through). View-through information is especially important for display, video, and mobile because users often view these ads and then visit the website later rather than clicking directly on the ad.  

Companies like Panasonic are already using our integrations with marketing media to improve their return on investment (ROI) from digital marketing campaigns.  With the Analytics 360 ads integrations, Panasonic was able to aggregate all digital campaign data into one platform to gain insight about their customers.  They then shared these insights back to their media tools to better find engaged audiences and provide those audiences with the right experience at the right moment, driving an ROI increase of 30%. 

In light of these latest integrations with Google ad technologies, we wanted to take a moment to discuss the two capabilities we enable across all our ads integrations that help you achieve smarter marketing:  1) understanding the customer and their journey and 2) creating relevant experiences for users.


Understanding the customer and their journey

They saw and / or clicked on your ad and arrived on your site.  But who are they?  What happened next?  Did they bounce immediately?  Did they research specific products?  Did they sign up for your newsletter?  What were the users who interacted with your digital marketing doing on your site?  Ads integrations with Analytics 360 can help you answer these questions and more, for example:
  • You are launching a new product and start running display and search advertising campaigns to attract customers.  You find that one campaign has a low conversion rate and you’re considering deprecating it.  But you review your site analytics data for this campaign and find that some specific ad exchanges and certain keywords are driving many new users to your site.  And some of these exchanges and keywords are driving new users who are highly engaged — they view a lot of product detail pages and spend a lot of time on your site. So, instead of shutting down the campaign, you refine the targeting for the ads in this campaign to focus more on the ad exchanges and the keywords that drive engaged new users to your site.  Then, you create a remarketing campaign to bring these engaged new users back to your site for purchase.
  • One of your campaigns drives a lot of click and view-throughs, but has a low conversion rate.  Analysis in Analytics 360 reveals that most users bounce immediately, but a certain segment who click on or view that ad (e.g. women aged 18-35) have a really high conversion rate.  You refine the messaging and creative in your ads, adjust where these ads are served, and bid higher in order to find and attract more of this high-performing audience.
Creating relevant experiences for users
User behavior on your site can tell you a lot about them and what they’re interested in.  Shouldn’t you use that information to inform your marketing strategy? Some examples:
  • You run a shopping site and have users who spend a lot of time looking at an item or even put that item in their cart, but don’t end up purchasing.  At the end of the season, the clothes on your site go on sale.  You create remarketing campaigns to these users who showed interest but never purchased letting them know that the item they were interested in is now on sale.
  • You are a cable company and you’d like to offer your new online streaming HDTV service to existing customers who subscribe to your high speed Internet plan.  You create remarketing ads for customers who have the high speed plan, driving higher lifetime value for these customers.
These are just a few examples of how analytics data can blend with campaign data to create real value for both companies and for their customers. It's a win-win — customers get marketing that is truly relevant to them, and companies put their marketing dollars to work with the customers who are most likely to be interested.  

Visit the Google Analytics 360 Suite Help Center to learn more about our new integrations with DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Search.  You can also learn about our existing integrations DoubleClick Campaign Manager and with AdWords.  Stay tuned for more updates from Analytics 360 as we continue to invest in new and exciting capabilities. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Abhi Aggarwal and Jocelyn Whittenburg, Google Analytics team

L’Oreal doubles anticipated revenue with Analytics 360 and DoubleClick Bid Manager

For a special holiday campaign, L'Oreal Canada wanted to build a special audience: the best potential customers for their artisinal Japanese brand Shu Uemura.

Using the Google Analytics 360 Suite, the L'Oreal team built an audience of people who had interests often shared with makeup users -- yoga, for instance, and certain types of travel. They used Google Analytics to bring these people to the Shu Uemura website, then ran DoubleClick banners to convert them into customers.

The results were game-changing: 2X the expected sales and a return on ad spend of 2200%. Now the L'Oreal Canada team is sharing what they've learned with all of L'Oreal's global brands.

If those kinds of numbers sound good, watch the video for more details.


Posted by Suzanne Mumford Head of Marketing, Google Analytics 360 Suite

Start measuring your TV ads with the precision of digital

“The challenge with television is that there’s no link to click on,” says Alex Bain, Marketing Analyst for Nest. The company makes products for the thoughtful home, but was having a hard time understanding the effect of its TV ads on digital visits and sales.

That's why the Nest marketing team turned to the Google Analytics 360 Suite while running a set of six TV ads last holiday season. The suite's TV attribution features are designed to measure the impact of ads on search activity and website visits. As a result, Nest could see the channels and times of day where its ads had the most impact. The metrics arrive almost immediately, so the Nest team found itself spending less time trying to get answers and more time taking action on what they learned.

The good results that Nest is getting are available to anyone. Watch the video for more details.
 
 Post by, Suzanne Mumford Head of Marketing, Google Analytics 360 Suite