Introducing Hourly Tracking and more for your TV Campaigns

Imagine you're advertising on national television. You've selected several programs and networks that you think will deliver your message to the right audience. Now, wouldn't you want to know which of those target placements was most effective at driving traffic to your website? Well now it's even easier for Google Analytics and Google TV Ads advertisers to learn just that.

Check out the new hourly breakdown of your TV Campaigns metrics

alongside your website metrics. In addition, we've included two new TV campaign metrics, Viewed Entire Ad and % Initial Audience Retained, so you can see how viewer engagement relates to your website activity.

Here's more information on each of these enhancements:

New TV Ads metrics

The two new TV Ads metrics help you to understand full ad viewership with Viewed Entire Ads providing you an absolute number and % Initial Audience Retained providing this data expressed as a percentage.

• Viewed Entire Ad: The number of impressions tuned to your ad from beginning through to the end.

• % Initial Audience Retained: The proportion of the audience that was present at the beginning of the ad who then watched the entire airing to the end.

These two metrics are currently available in Report Center within AdWords, and we've now added them to the TV Campaigns report in Analytics. As always, Analytics provides powerful visualization tools. You can see TV campaign metrics alongside your website metrics to help you more easily identify which of your TV ad airings most effectively drove traffic to your website.

Hourly data reporting

One of TV advertisers' most requested features has been to view ad performance at an hourly level. Advertisers have been able to review TV campaign data at a daily, weekly and monthly level within Analytics. Today we've enhanced the TV Campaigns report to show metrics in hourly breakdowns. Simply click on the "Graph by Hourly" clock icon in the top right hand corner above the chart. This view makes it easier to attribute website metrics to specific TV ad airings.

Please note that the hourly display in Analytics is based on the specific time zone associated with your Analytics profile and AdWords account, while the TV Reports within AdWords will show the time of an ad airing based on the TV station's time zone. For example, if you live in San Francisco and have your AdWords account in the PST time zone but are airing an ad on the TV station's time zone of the East coast, the hourly data in your TV Campaigns report will be displayed based on PST.

With these enhancements to Analytics' cross-media reporting you can more easily analyze the online impact of your TV campaigns, and use this information to optimize your campaigns as you learn. If you're not currently advertising on TV and are interested in learning more, visit our Google TV Ads website.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team