Tag Archives: Google Analytics 360 Suite

Spotlight on Data Studio: Beautiful Reports and Collaboration Just Got Easier

We launched Google Data Studio (beta) in the U.S. earlier this year, and last week, we expanded availability to 21 additional countries.* We’re excited to offer Data Studio to companies across the globe so they can easily create and share reports and dashboards, and ultimately use insights and collaboration to make better business decisions.

Organizations today collect an increasingly large amount of data. In a world of web analytics, CRM systems, and third-party sources, data-driven decisions should be easier than ever before. However, all of this data has presented a significant challenge: making it easily accessible and useful.

Having multiple data sources that live in silos within your organization compromises your ability to spot critical business opportunities and issues when they matter most. This is a widespread challenge, with 84% of marketers saying they don’t believe their data sources are well-integrated, according to a 2016 Forrester study.

Data Studio solves this problem by allowing you to easily connect your data and create beautiful, informative reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Create up to five custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing. All for free.

Get started today so you can:

  • Put all your data to work. Easily access the data sources you need to understand your business and make better decisions.
  • Transform your data. Quickly transform raw data into easy-to-follow reports and dashboards — no code or queries required.
  • Build engaging reports and dashboards. Data Studio gives you the ability to create meaningful, shareable charts and graphs that bring your data to life.
  • Leverage teamwork that works. Work together quickly, from anywhere, by sharing reports via Google Drive.

Not sure where to start? Good news: We’re releasing our first batch of templates today to remove that hurdle. Businesses can use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes.



Get started for free.

Happy reporting!
The Data Studio team

*Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

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.

Enterprise Class Administration in the Google Analytics 360 Suite

If you're in marketing or analytics, you know consumer behavior has shifted dramatically — mobile has created new opportunities for businesses to reach customers at the right moment with the right message at every step in the buyer journey. That’s why earlier this year, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers and data analysts.

Since this launch, we’re now excited to announce a series of improvements available to Suite customers. The Google Analytics 360 Suite houses vital data for marketers to understand how their marketing programs, websites, and apps are performing; carefully controlling access to this data and monitoring what happens with it is a top priority, and we’ve made solid improvements.

User management for your Organization

Managing users’ access to your data and Suite assets is critical, and must be done in the context of your organization. The first step towards controlling your data access is to let us know which accounts your organization manages. Organization administrators can do this in the new Suite Home product: http://360suite.google.com/. Administrators will see an “Admin” tab, and underneath it lies the ability to link and verify all of your accounts with the Suite’s products to your organization:


Linked accounts must be verified before user management features will apply to them.

Centralized  User Auditing

Once you have linked and verified all of your accounts within Suite products, we compile a powerful user-auditing report for you. This report lists all users that have access to any of the accounts you linked across all Suite products. This is the only place where you can find a cross-product and cross-account list of users.


For each user in this report, we list rich data to help you make informed decisions about who has access to your corporate accounts. We show the user’s name and picture (when available), their Suite roles, and which products within your organization the user has access to. For all linked Google Analytics accounts, we show the last time the user accessed data from any of them.

Even more details can be loaded per user to show a summary of all the data that user has access to, such as how many properties or containers the user can access, whether the user is licensed for Data Studio, etc.


Filtering

You can use advanced filters to restrict data shown on screen; for example, you can show only users who haven’t accessed Analytics data over the last 6 months:


Remove Stale Users

Combining all of the actions above, you can complete an important task: identifying and removing stale users from your Analytics accounts (other Suite products to come in the future.) After you filter for only users who haven’t logged in recently, you can visit the details pane for those users and remove them from Analytics:


Change History

Suite Change History lets you keep track of when a change was made, who made the change, and what was changed. For example, you can easily see when someone linked a new account to your organization, added or removed users, changed the service level for an object, or changed the end date on an order. Having a record of these changes eliminates confusion over something like an increase in billing. Instead of wondering, you can search your change history to see that one of your administrators changed the service level for a property from Standard to 360, or made changes to the billing parameters. Access to change history is restricted to Owners.


Get Started: Complete your Suite Setup to Use these Features

Organization administrators can login to 360suite.google.com to complete their Suite setup and start using these features right now; contact your account manager if you’re not sure who your organization administrators are. Verify all accounts linked to your organization, then visit your Organization page in Suite Admin to enable the Suite experience today.

Put all these powerful administration features to use right now for your organization to tightly monitor & control access to your valuable data. We have many more improvements planned for the future; so stay tuned as we launch more, and truly bring an enterprise-grade experience to life in the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

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!

Announcing: Smarter, more sharable analytics innovations


We’re incredibly excited to share with you the new analytics product innovations announced just moments ago at the Google Performance Summit. These innovations for the Analytics 360 Suite are more integrated, more collaborative, and use built-in intelligence to handle more data than ever in our new multi-screen, cross-channel world.

Why are these innovations arriving now? Because across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, more than half of all web traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets1. And every year, over half of the trillions of searches on Google happen on mobile2.

This shift to mobile has made marketers' jobs more complex. We all have more opportunities than ever to reach consumers all day and measure their behavior in their I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do and I want-to-buy moments. But it's also harder to keep all the channels and touchpoints straight. You can’t market effectively in today’s world with products that were designed for a desktop-first world.

Two months ago we announced the Google Analytics 360 Suite, an enterprise-class modern measurement solution built from the ground up to help enterprise marketers and analytics professionals succeed in this new multi-screen world.

Today, we announced new innovations focused on three themes: 



Read on to learn the analytics highlights from today’s announcements.

Enterprise analytics re-imagined for modern marketing 

Google Analytics 360 Suite is beginning to roll out to current customers. This includes Google Analytics 360 (formerly known as Premium), Attribution 360 (formerly known as Adometry), Audience Center 360, and Tag Manager 360 when used as part of Analytics 360. The rollout will occur in phases over the next several months, and users will see an improved and unified product experience and a new look and feel across all Analytics 360 Suite products.

Google Optimize 360, our website testing and personalization product, is now available in paid BETA globally. The results from our closed beta have been amazing: one of our beta customers reduced the time to deploy a site experiment from three days to 10 minutes. Optimize 360’s deep integrations with Analytics 360 increase testing agility and reduce setup times. With just a few clicks, you can use the audiences and goals you’ve already created in Analytics 360 to run experiments with Optimize 360.

Google Data Studio 360, our data visualization product, will start rolling out in paid BETA in the US. This is our enterprise version with licensing starting at 200 users. Data Studio 360 allows you to connect to all your data with native integrations across many popular Google products, as well as non-Google data. Visualize your data by creating reports and dashboards. Share your data across your organization with built-in, real-time collaboration.

Google Data Studio is a completely new, free version of Data Studio 360 that we’re launching today! Starting now, anyone can use Data Studio to create up to 5 reports with unlimited sharing, editing and collaboration. We’re starting the BETA in the U.S. and rolling out to other regions throughout the year.

Succeeding together 

With massive volumes of data being created across screens, channels and touchpoints, built-in intelligence has become foundational in approach to analytics product development. This means we’re doing more of the heavy lifting for you, and we’re seeing a tremendous response from businesses. For example, Smart Goals in Analytics is now enabling more than 60K advertisers to optimize their AdWords performance. You’ll continue to see exciting developments in the future related to intelligence.

As consumers blur the lines between online and offline, it’s more important than ever to build your business in new ways. Google is excited to go on this journey with you, and we're building much more for the multi-screen, cross-channel world. Visit our website to learn more about all the new products in the Analytics 360 Suite.

To see the full range of ads and analytics innovations announced this morning, watch the Google Performance Summit keynote here.


1 Google Analytics 2016 
2 Google 2016

Adapting Measurement Strategies for Modern Marketing

Last week Forrester Research hosted a Forum for Marketing Leaders in New York City. I had the pleasure of speaking with top enterprise executives about data and analytics strategies to help them harness the exponential increase in data volume — caused by new devices, channels, and fragmented audiences — and turn data into useful insights.

Mobile has changed everything for everyone. For marketers, mobile has presented an opportunity to learn much more about consumer behavior. Marketers can then use those insights to deliver useful brand experiences in intent-rich moments when consumers are looking to buy.

But it’s not easy. Mobile has fractured the customer journey into little pieces (of data) and most legacy systems are ill-suited to organize, process, and make sense of all this data. Businesses could never hire enough people to mine all this data because it is growing and compounding so quickly — it’s just not practical. It’s estimated that 90% of the world’s data was created in the past two years. Think about that.

While conducting a recent research study we discovered the top challenges enterprise marketers are facing in a mobile-dominated world. We studied these challenges, spoke with executives at leading organizations, and brainstormed with our own engineers to develop strategies and products to help marketers win in today’s modern world.
  1. Understand the customer journey. Marketers need complete data to see what’s happening across the entire customer journey. Views of performance based on sessions, devices, and channels are no longer sufficient. The new view of performance means putting customers at the center of marketing strategy, which requires a data toolset that’s integrated across channels, touchpoints, and devices.
  2. Get useful insights, not just more data. The masses of digital information produced each day mean marketers need enormous computing power, data science, and smart algorithms all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. Tools that can perform ongoing automated analysis and spotlight opportunities for marketers are essential to ensure future success.
  3. Share insights with everyone. Putting data into everyone’s hands gets the whole company on the same page, strengthens cross-functional goals, and drives smarter decision-making. Data isn’t just for analysts anymore. For organizations to truly adapt for success, they need more people using insights and more people collaborating to spark great ideas. Tools offering data visualization and instant sharing help foster a truly data-driven culture.
  4. Deliver engaging experiences to the right people. When organizations provide customers with personal and relevant brand interactions — that deliver real value — it naturally leads to better marketing performance. The consumer wins and the marketer wins. Achieving this state depends on seamless data integrations across multiple technologies and platforms — and on executing instantly. Tools that swiftly integrate well with others will lead the way.

These four strategies work together to create a virtuous cycle that drives marketing results and a competitive advantage. We built the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help marketers execute on these strategies and overcome today’s challenges and win in the multi-screen world.

Learn how Progressive is using the Google Analytics 360 Suite to improve their customer experience and turn browsers into buyers.

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.

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