On the first day of Summitmas, Google gave to us: 14 new features and fixes in Google Analytics.
No public partridge or pear tree yet, at least none that we’re allowed to share for now ;-)
Faster, faster!
Anyone following the development of Google Analytics will know that the pace of innovation has been fearsome over the last few years. It probably wouldn't surprise you to note that there have been 70+ new features in GA last year alone. What might surprise is the news that we are going to accelerate this in the next year. ‘But how is this possible’ you ask. Well, here are 14 new innovations within the first HOUR of the summit today
Truthfully, only around half of these were really news to Google Analytics Premium Resellers and clients. But it’s great that we can start to talk about and use these publicly!
First a bit of background
The conference this year is geared towards three central themes: Access, Empower, Act
Suffice to say for now that everything the Google Analytics team are working on follows the principle that the tool should provide you access to useful data and empower you to use it in way that allows you to act to improve your marketing, websites and entire organisations. Without meaning to brag, we think this sounds a bit like our Define, Measure, Analyse process for web measurement excellence. You can have that one for free Google.
New stuff
So, back to new amazing announcementsville (I think California is starting to affect my lexicon).
It made perfect sense to divide the announcements into the three title sections (Access, Empower, Act) so I have continued the theme below.
Access
The below features and fixes are all designed to make accessing useful information about the usage of our websites quicker and easier than ever.
1. Auto event tracking - track events without touching html
This made Jeff go weak at the knees with anticipation; with their first swipe they blew away one of the single biggest issues with GTM: you still had to code events. Well, not anymore.
Our interface looks a bit like this now:
2. Premium SLA for GTM
Previously, GA Premium users were not protected by collection and uptime SLAs when using GTM. Coming soon the Premium SLA will cover GTM! Not knee-weakening this one but it has done away with one of the barriers to adoption of GTM by enterprise clients.
3. Upgrade previous properties to UA – new tool within the interface
Rather than having to kill your traditional Google Analytics profiles and then set up new ones you will soon be able to upgrade your profiles to use Universal Analytics without any loss of data or delays in switchover. This will be great news as we start to get a trickle of the cool Universal Analytics features coming through.
4. User access API to manage big user access requirements.
Anyone who has ever had to add more than about 5 users to an Analytics account will know that it gets very painful very quickly. Google heard this and have created an API for you to add multiple users access to a GA account at the same time.
If you like grainy pictures of script, then boy is the below picture one for you!
Empower
Here we look at improvements that are designed to give you the ability to use the data and insights to drive improvements.
5. ABC based acquisition reporting
This is something we have been playing with for 6 months or so and while it’s not perfect yet, it is starting to come together as a very useful way of shaping the way you look at your website users. Essentially dividing your analysis into how you Acquire your users, how they Behave on the site and whether they Convert or not:
Apart from the taxonomy and visual improvement you can now also customise your view of the acquisition reports by grouping channels in a custom fashion:
6. Segmentation UI
Again we’ve been playing with this for some time now and while some aspects of the actual UI itself need polishing the functionality sitting behind it is quite simply amazing. For example:
Cohort analysis – looking at the behaviour of a bunch of people who came to the site in a particular time period over the ensuing weeks and months. For example, what’s the repeat value of users who visited your site for the first time during your Christmas promotion drives?
Multi-session segmentation – segment users based on their behaviour over more than one visit. For example, viewed a product page but didn’t purchase and then went on to purchase in a subsequent visit.
Intra-session sequencing – specifying that users did A and then B (and C,D etc if desired) in the same session. This was typically only possible with pre-defined sequences, such as goal funnels. Now you can crunch these on the fly.
7. Demographic integration – age, gender, interest groups
In short, you will be able to see the age and gender of a proportion of your users. This is the same data that you would see in one of Google’s display network offerings, such as the GDN or Doubleclick networks. Same goes for the interest groupings that you see in those very networks. This is all data that Google collect through users’ behaviour when logged in to their Google property. So if you frequently view websites about high powered cars, google will put you in a ‘performance automotive’ interest category. Interestingly, I found out, that might also help them to decide that you are male if you didn’t specify this in your google account settings.
THIS IS BIG. So this falls into the category of ‘thing we mostly didn’t think would ever get into GA’. Although part of the ‘Empower’ section here it’s important to note that this (IMHO) is very easily slotted in as an ‘Act’ improvement also, given that it can be tied in with the AdWords GDN to generate tailored targeting options very soon.
8. Demographic info in unified segments
Number 6 and number 7, smashed together at the speed of Google. Amazing.
Hey, wait a second, does that mean we could see if people changed their sex from one visit to the next?
No, we don’t think it does. Treat that as anomalous if you do see it :-)
9. Export hit level and user level data into BigQuery
I can’t get close to explaining how big and exciting this is for data geeks with a Premium account. If you can write SQL and want to see unsampled hit level data (i.e export every single hit, not just visit with a hh:mm:ss time stamp), then this is the tool for you! Keep an eye out for a more involved post on this to come as it is just quite simply too ‘big’ to cover in this post. Send any queries you might have to me in the meantime……
Act
Acting is doing, fixing, improving. As we all know it should be the aim of all measurement projects to actually do something with the data you collect. Fix the world, or even just your marketing campaigns.
10. DCM data in GA – impressions data in MCF
Get your Doubleclick Campaign Manager (DFA) data into Google Analytics so that you can mix it in with all of your other useful data. Be warned, this does require a Premium account. The really cool bit is being able to see your whole DCM/DFA taxonomy in GA multi channel funnels (MCF), both click and IMPRESSION level data! The aim being that you can tune your display efforts by understanding more richly how display generates conversion activity (hint, not with the last click).
11. GA Remarketing
Remarketing in AdWords, with all the perks it brings, does require extra tagging and setup. Enter GA remarketing; once you have the latest version of the GA script on your site you can build audiences on the fly using Google Analytics behaviour data.
12. Google Play data in GA
I have to admit to not getting excited enough to even try to think of gimmicky way of explaining this. I couldn’t even bring myself to hit caps lock or control + i.
If you market apps on Google Play, you can now track how users find your apps using GA. Job done.
13. Analytics academy - MOOCS
Google have launched their own MOOC – Massive Open Online Course (I will hold my hand up to having to look this one up. I really must learn to be more Silicon Valley).
This online course will help us all to become more au fait with Google Analytics. Its fronted by the excellent Justin Cutroni, one man who truly did write the book on analytics. You can sign up for the course here:
https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/preview
14. In-product videos to help with features
Tooltips are so 2012, move over Clippy – we now have in-product video tutorials to help you fathom out how the data you are looking at is calculated. Simply click the tiny mortarboard image in the top right of your GA interface.
Whaddya reckon?
There was a definite sense among some of the seasoned vets that Google had done an awesome job of putting together a really sensible collection of product upgrades and fixes. Some of the less glitzy additions – GTM events for example – don’t sound sexy but will make a big difference to those needing to implement this stuff day in day out. At the same time, improvements to the segmentation options, the addition of demographic data etc is pretty cool in the general scheme of things.
From the bottom of our code weary hearts we say ‘thank you Google’, here’s to another year of breakneck innovation.