Return on investment analysis for all your digital channels

Google Analytics has been a great place to analyze the performance of your Google advertising programs, but a piece of the puzzle has been missing: analyzing return on investment across all your digital channels. That’s why we’re happy to announce our new Cost Data Import tool, now available in public beta. This tool allows Google Analytics users to import their cost data from any digital source -- such as paid search providers, display providers, affiliates, email, social and even organic traffic.

Your imported cost data can be viewed in two places: in a new report called Cost Analysis in Traffic Sources, and in the newly publicly available Attribution Modeling Tool. These reports show you how all your digital marketing channels are performing compared to each other, so you can make better decisions about your marketing programs.

To take advantage of cost analysis, you can upload data in two ways: via a self-service API, or using solutions created by independent application providers. These solution providers include:

• NEXT Analytics 
• AutomateAnalytics.com GA Data Uploader 
• ShufflePoint In2GA
• Analytics Canvas 

Our early customers are already loving it! Here are some success stories:

“Most of our paid search and social advertising decisions were made strictly based on a conversion pixel and CPA. We really didn't have the resources or the energy to continue to pull data and work it backward for detailed analysis. Now that we can import raw data into Google Analytics using NEXT Analytics v5, we can quickly and easily look for insights - just as we do with Adwords."
-- Darcy Foster, President, Natural Wellbeing (with Cardinal Path) 

“Before, we used to manually match paid search cost to revenue data in Excel. With AutomateAnalytics.com GA Data Uploader, we have been able to automate this process, and can now much more accurately measure paid search campaign ROI within Google Analytics."
-- David Jaeger, Director of SEM, National Positions 

“Using the ‘In2GA’ cost data import tool from ShufllePoint, our partners at E-Nor can improve the performance of our paid search channel more efficiently.This translates into quicker insights comparing campaign metrics, ad effectiveness, and keyword performance at one glance instead of logging into multiple systems. Any application or feature that streamlines data collection for analysis, ultimately impacting the bottom line positively, is welcomed. Thanks for the continued innovations and look forward to more.”
-- Michael Rosito, Founder & President OEMPCWorld.com

Cost Data Import will be rolling out over the next month. If your account has been enabled, you should be able to see the Cost Analysis report show up in the Traffic Sources menu on the left-hand side of the Google Analytics interface (in the Standard Reporting tab). We hope this tool will provide a clearer view of your media performance across all your channels and help you make more informed budgeting decisions.


Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager

Attribution Modeling for Digital Success: Webinar this Friday + Public Whitelist

Last year, we launched Multi-Channel Funnels, giving marketers insight into how customers interact with multiple touch points prior to conversion. Since then, we’ve begun to see a great shift in the industry, as marketers move away from simple, last click attribution, toward a more holistic picture of how digital marketing channels work together to drive conversions.

Earlier this year, in Google Analytics Premium, we added the Attribution Modeling Tool, which lets marketers build models that distribute the credit for conversions across channels and touchpoints, and quickly compare multiple models side by side. We’ve received great feedback about how the tool provides fast and easy insight into channel value.



Yesterday at the Google Analytics Summit, we announced wider availability for the Attribution Modeling Tool through a public whitelist. We also shared our plans for a new 90-day lookback window, better sampling controls, and the ability to import cost data for use in attribution models.  To help you get started, this Friday we’ll host a webinar, Attribution Modeling for Digital Success, giving an overview of the tool. We’ll cover the opportunities and challenges of attribution modeling, how to interpret and build models, and ways to take action on the results.

Webinar: Attribution Modeling for Digital Success
Day: Friday, November 2
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Webinar sign-up: goo.gl/YTulu
Whitelist sign-up: goo.gl/uHckk

A recording of the webinar will be available on the blog and YouTube soon afterward. You can also check out our attribution playbook and product fact sheet for more background -- and you can view earlier webinars in our Attribution webinar series.

Hope to see you at the webinar, and happy modeling!

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager

Google Analytics Summit: What’s New And On The Horizon For 2013

Every year, Google Analytics Certified Partners and Premium customers descend upon Mountain View for our annual summit. Google Analytics team members share a glimpse into the future of Analytics, and GACPs network and share ideas. Previously what happens at the summit stays at the summit. But starting this year we decided to share the latest and greatest with our wider community. Following is round up of the cool things we're working on which we shared at the Summit.

Paul Muret, Google Analytics Engineering Director, delivering opening keynote

Universal Analytics

This morning, we announced the launch of Universal Analytics, which helps customers tailor Google Analytics to their needs, integrate their own datasets and ultimately get a more complete vision of the entire marketing funnel. Read more in our announcement blog post. 

Attribution Modeling Tool Public Whitelist

Since April 2012, Premium customers have been using the Attribution Modeling Tool to build models that give credit to all of their digital channels, providing insight into the impact of various marketing programs as they work together to drive sales and conversions. Today, we’re beginning a gradual public rollout of the Attribution Modeling Tool. Please register for our webinar this Friday to learn more, or request early access to the whitelist.

Cost Data Import

Google Analytics now allows users to import their cost data from any digital source -- such as paid search providers, display providers, affiliates, email, social and even organic traffic. This allows you to measure performance of all your digital programs side-by-side. Cost data import will be rolling out over the next month.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value is a feature being worked on for 2013, and shows the dollar amount of money that an individual customer will spend with a given business in the future. Its a very powerful feature, putting the types of analysis marketers need to drive smart decisions into their hands. 

Our CLV reports will help you:

• Value segments or all of your customer base
• Decide how much to spend acquiring new customers in a given segment
• Decide how much to spend retaining certain customers (e.g. remarketing)
• Rank customers
• Measure success of marketing actions

Recency & Frequency

Finding your most valuable customers leads to smarter marketing decisions, improving your spend allocation and customer relationship management. Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value (RFM) are three powerful behavioral metrics that savvy marketers have been using for decades to identify exactly these customers. With these forthcoming reports, we are bringing the power of RFM to Google Analytics. Watch out for these reports in 2013. 

Custom Dimensions / Metrics 

Dimension widening (a feature activated by Universal Analytics) enables you to easily add information like CRM data to your Google Analytics account. You can, for example, widen an advertising campaign by adding cost data to get a clear picture of the ROI on your marketing effectiveness.

Note that custom dimensions and custom metrics are just like the default dimensions and metrics in your Analytics account, except you create and define them yourself. You can use them to collect and segment data such as demographic data, which isn’t automatically collected.

Premium International Expansion

It’s been a year since we launched Google Analytics Premium to better meet the needs of our enterprise accounts. With the strong demand we’ve seen for Premium in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, we are now planning to launch in at least 8 more countries: Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Norway for 2013. 

Mobile 100%

With ever-expanding mobile application marketplaces and a shift in focus to mobile, measuring apps is more important now than ever. With this, we’re excited to be moving Google Analytics Mobile App Analytics out of closed and into open beta. We’ve listened to feedback from more than 5,000 mobile app developers during the closed beta, improved the product and are now making it available to all developers and marketers.  

We’re excited to push Analytics forward into the future with new features and reports which help marketers and businesses become more data-driven. 

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Re-imagining Google Analytics to support the versatile usage patterns of today's users

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of hashed data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

Measurement today is evolving from technology that counts site traffic into a broader system that measures your effectiveness in advertising, sales, product usage, support, and retention. Ultimately, this sort of integrated measurement can help you deliver the best service, products, and experiences for your customers.

We’ve been developing solutions, like Google Analytics Premium and Mobile App Analytics to advance this vision. For large enterprises, such as Premium customers and those who want to work with APIs, we're now starting to offer “Universal Analytics.” This will help these customers tailor Google Analytics to their needs, integrate their own datasets and ultimately get a more complete vision of the entire marketing funnel.

The new tools offered by Universal Analytics via the new Measurement Protocol (an API that enables you to send your data to Google Analytics) can help you measure the how people actually become and remain loyal customers:

• Consumers use multiple devices.

Mastering data on your website is no longer sufficient - larger clients are increasingly asking for a cross platform view of their data in Analytics. The tools from the Measurement Protocol allow you to seamlessly send your own data about your customers  and business (from any digital device that you are measuring) to your Analytics account. This can help you see how users interact with your brand from multiple touchpoints - phones, tablets, laptops or more - in one place. 

• The world is mobile.

We announced Mobile App Analytics at I/O in 2012 as a beta. It’s been delivering great results for clients. Universal Analytics now enables you to measure your marketing more holistically by integrating this data with your Google Analytics account. 

• Cross-channel measurement is essential.

Cross-channel information is more important and more diverse than ever before. Universal Analytics, via the Measurement Protocol, lets you sync your own data from across various marketing channels, so you can discover relationships between the channels that drive conversions.

• Your business is unique. 

Not every campaign (or app, or website!) is the same, and sometimes, depending on your business and goals, you want to learn more about a particular aspect of the way visitors interact with your business. With Universal Analytics, you can integrate your own data and can customize the metrics that matter to you - beyond website visits.  Google Analytics can deliver the custom metrics you want, in the same report you’re used to, based on the customized data you provide.

As a Google Analytics user, Universal Analytics won’t mean any changes in your account. But if you’re a large enterprise that is interested in exploring the integration options, you can request access to the Universal Analytics beta. You can also learn more in our help center.

Posted by Manav Mishra, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics

Mobile App Analytics Updates And Public Beta Launch

With ever-expanding mobile application marketplaces (more than 600,000 apps on Google Play at the time of writing) and a shift in focus to mobile (more than 80 percent of marketers are planning to increase emphasis in mobile initiatives in 2013, according to recent research we conducted with ClickZ) measuring mobile is more important now than ever. With this, we are excited to be moving Google Analytics Mobile App Analytics (initially launched at I/O) out of closed and into open beta. We’ve listened to feedback from more than 5,000 mobile app developers during the closed beta, improved the product, and are now making it available to all developers and marketers. 

In addition to moving into public beta, there are some other exciting updates:

A New Sign-up Flow for all GA users

With the induction of mobile app analytics into the family of digital analytics at GA, we’ve introduced a new and improved sign-up flow that you will see whenever you setup a new entity on GA. In just 3 clicks, you’ll be able to set up your app analytics account, download the SDK, and be well on the way to tracking key metrics and finding valuable insights using our features.

New sign-up flow for Google Analytics

More powerful SDK for both Android and iOS, yet really easy to implement

The mobile app analytics solution is made possible with our new Android and iOS SDKs which have been rebuilt from scratch. They are lightweight, powerful, and super easy to implement. The majority of the mobile app reports are available out of the box after less than 5 minutes of work implementing our new SDK (check out our developer guides for more details).

New App Version Report

Find out about the long-tail of your old app versions. This report gives answers to questions such as:

• How quickly are users migrating to the latest version of my app?
• What’s the cannibalization effect among my multiple versions?
• How many users would be affected if I deprecated an early version of my app?

App Versions report in Mobile App Analytics

A first-class customizable structure called “Custom Dimensions” 

For those of you who are savvy users of “Custom Variables,” consider this feature the next-generation Custom Variables: 

• You can create your own dimensions by which to segment your hits in every standard or custom GA report.
• Leverage your own business and customer data as custom dimension values to enable new possibilities for analysis and reporting.
• Naming and scoping of Custom Dimensions can be configured through the administration UI - no retagging needed!

(Note: we are rolling out Custom Dimensions to everyone over the next few weeks)

Other improvements include: more accurate & up-to-date mobile device library, armv7s ( iOS6) support, support for social interaction tracking, a more accurate Google Play conversion report and more.

With this big step forward for Mobile App Analytics, we still have many more exciting features on the way and planned for the future that will add to the power and functionality of the platform. Look forward to improved integration with other Google properties like Google Play as well as brand-new reports that will provide a better understanding of your user acquisition, engagement, and outcome models.

We hope that our product will give app developers and advertisers a better picture of users’ interactions as well as the end-to-end value of your mobile app. And in the long run, make mobile apps more beautiful and engaging experience for all users.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by JiaJing Wang, Google Analytics Team

Real Time Analytics Supports Profiles

(Update: Please note that this rollout will be happening over the next couple of weeks so be patient with us as we ramp this feature up.)

 Last year we announced the beta launch of Real Time Analytics. We knew it would be an addictive feature but we were blown away seeing the growth and usage. In fact, we now have over 7 years worth of engagement with the feature every day!

One of the biggest requests we received was to show real time traffic per profile, which would also allow non-admin users to view real time reports. So today, we are really excited to announce that we are beginning to roll out Real Time support for your profiles! What this means is that the data you see in real time is profile specific and obeys the filtering you set up for that profile. And this means any user with access to a profile can view the associated real time reports. You can choose and move between profiles using the standard profile-picker feature available in the upper left hand corner.

When viewing your real time reports keep in mind these changes. If the numbers are lower than you are used to, check your filters to see what traffic is being excluded. And if you use real time for debugging, be sure to use an unfiltered report for that purpose.

Real Time has always been great for rapid testing and debugging of your tracking code and now with profile support you can do the same when creating profile filters. When you change the filters in your profile, you should see the effects in the real time reports within a couple of hours. We are working to make this even quicker going forward. 

Profile support is not restricted to web-pages but also supports App profiles. This means, you can now see mobile SDK traffic in real time!  This can be a powerful end to end debugging tool for your Google-Analytics SDK implementation. For example, one way we tested our Google Analytics mobile app is to install a new version on our phones and check that the mobile hits for that version are showing up in real time as we interact with the app. On the phone mobile hits are batched to conserve battery life so you may see delays. Typically batching will occur on the order of minutes.

While real time is great for debugging, where it shines is when something goes viral about your site. Sometimes, this spike is totally expected. For example, Reddit used this to monitor the Obama Q&A, and Khan academy used it to monitor the effect from CBS’s 60-minutes show. We’ve seen that many clients have similarly used real-time to check effects of offline TV and radio campaigns.

Another common source of viral traffic is social networks and we recently added an implicit traffic sources medium of “social”. This is the same grouping that is used in the Social Reports and allows you to segment your traffic by your top social networks. I can access this breakdown by clicking the “Social Referrals” link highlighted in the screenshot below.

This takes me to a report where my traffic is segmented by traffic source type = “Social” and I can see the networks that are driving traffic.

Additionally, while it is interesting to see which page/screen your visitors are currently on, it is sometimes useful to see which pages have gotten the most page views. You can now get this real time view data from the content report.  Check it out now by clicking the Pageviews tab I’ve highlighted below. Clicking on Active Visitors allows you to toggle back and forth.

And as a final shout out we always love the unintended use cases for real time such as extending bedtimes for the little ones.

We’ve been hard at work improving these reports for you and have many more exciting features coming down the pipeline so stay tuned!

Posted by Linus Chou, Google Analytics team

Digital marketing made (much) easier: Introducing Google Tag Manager

Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.

Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies

Tags are tiny bits of website code that can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.

We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:

Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:

• Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
• Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
• Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
• User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
• Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months

We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please contact us here to become a tag vendor.

Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”

“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”

Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.

Get started today at www.google.com/tagmanager.

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics Mobile App SDK Updates - iOS6 Support And More

Mobile app measurement is critical to the future of marketers, developers and entrepreneurs. Since the Mobile App Analytics beta launch in July, we’ve been receiving great feedback from many app developers and advertisers in the beta testing program. We’ve been using that feedback as well as our own roadmap to improve Mobile App Analytics. This week we’re excited to share new versions of the beta SDKs with a few important updates:

Added armv7s (iOS6) support 

This will enable app tracking within iOS6 apps / compatibility with new Apple devices.

Added support for social interaction tracking

Are there social elements in your apps? Understanding how they are used is critical to improve their performance - especially as the integration of social and mobile grows closer.

Refined Google Play sources reports

This fixes a bug that previously prevented Google Play sources report from accurately reporting campaigns on most devices running Honeycomb or later.

Fixed CoreData issue in iOS SDK and several issues in Android SDK

Our use of coredata on iOS is more compatible with multi-threaded environments; and fixed the issue for Honeycomb and later devices to measure install campaigns for google play properly.

As a reminder, here’s the link to enroll the mobile app analytics beta and start your journey with the new Google Mobile App Analytics.

For users who are using old SDKs (v1), updates are also available for iOS and Android, with the two major updates:

• Added armv7s (iOS6) support
• Added support for 50 custom variables (Premium only)

Please keep the questions and suggestions coming as you try out the updated SDKs.

Posted By JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team

Ecommerce Filtering and Custom Variables

We’re always looking to improve the way you can analyze metrics in Google Analytics, and ecommerce is one subset of data that is of particular importance to many of our users. That’s why we are making updates to our tracking code and processing which will result in improvements to filtering and custom variables for ecommerce sites. These changes will allow you to better filter, segment and categorize the revenue generating portion of your traffic. 

We wanted to notify users in advance of the expected rollout Friday in order to ensure you are prepared and aware. 

What’s changing: You will now be able to utilize custom variables for your ecommerce data, allowing you to better segment your revenue generating traffic. We will also be expanding filters for ecommerce to support page title, hostname, request URI & internal search term. Previously ecommerce data didn’t respect profile filters for “page-level” data. 

As an example: Say you are tracking www.website.com and store.website.com. In order to analyze store traffic separately you have created a duplicate profile with a filter that includes traffic to store.website.com only. Currently, ecommerce reports would include data across both store.website.com and website.com which is not working as expected. Following this change, ecommerce reports would respect the filter to only include data from store.website.com which we believe is the correct behavior. 

Important Note: If you have any profile filters for page level data (i.e. hostname or URI filters, which are somewhat common), keep in mind that this change will mean ecommerce data is only included for the subset of traffic you are filtering for. We would strongly encourage you to take a look at your filters to ensure there are no unexpected disruptions following this change. 

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Get social, mobile, and 40+ new data points with the Google Analytics API

Google Analytics Core Reporting APIs enable a powerful and flexible way to analyze, report on, and ultimately optimize such things as web and mobile experiences, conversions, and sales.

Today we’re adding over 40 new metrics and dimensions that can be queried through the Core Reporting API. This enables developers to create reports that are similar to what is available in the Google Analytics web interface for important areas such as social and mobile. See a full list of additions on the Core Reporting API changelog.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new and a few helpful questions the data can answer.

Social Data
Now you can get data for both on-site interactions with social buttons as well as off-site social data from social data hub partner networks.

• Which content receives the most comments on social networks?
• What are the conversion rates for visits from social networks?
• For social buttons embedded in my property, which ones get used most often and for which content?

Mobile Devices
For mobile visits to your site, get all the good stuff like like brand, model, and input type.

• What are the top 10 mobile devices used to visit my website?

Geo
We added a new dimension to indicate the Designated Market Area (DMA) where traffic came from.

• What are the Top 10 Campaigns for the San Francisco Bay Area DMA?

Page Path Rollups
Create your own drill down reports with these new dimensions that allow you to roll-up metrics to hierarchical levels of your property.

• What does the performance of my website look like across different sections?

App & Exception Tracking
If you’re using the Google Analytics SDK for iOS/Android v2 beta, you can now retrieve App View and Exception metrics.

• On a daily basis, how many views did my mobile app get?
• On a daily basis, how many exceptions occurred in my mobile app, and how many exceptions were fatal? 

User Timings
New ways to report on all things related to user timing data.

• What were the time measurements for all user defined timings?

Related Resources:

• Dimensions & Metrics Reference for a list of all available metrics & dimensions. 
• Google Analytics Query Explorer to help you build queries and try out the Core Reporting API.
• Core Reporting API changelog for a list of the 40+ new dimensions & metrics.

Posted by Pete Frisella and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API team

Get To Your Data Faster: Announcing Shortcuts In Google Analytics

We’re pleased to announce the addition of Shortcuts to Google Analytics. Shortcuts help you get to the exact view you want of your data in GA in record time. Rather than having to go through the "find report, add segment, change, sort" process daily, with Shortcuts you can do it once, save it, and come back to it in a single click.

How to create a Shortcut

Creating Shortcuts is simple. When viewing a standard or custom report in Google Analytics, click on the “Shortcut” button found on the report’s Utility Bar:

Then, give your new Shortcut a name:

Once named, you'll be taken straight to your report in the new "Shortcuts" section in the "Home" tab. Your report configuration has been stored, and your report shows up on the left side of the screen.

The following information is saved as part of a Shortcut:

• Standard or custom report for context
• Currently viewed tab on the report
• Sort order
• Advanced segments
• Graphed metric

Notably not saved is the date range and sample size. This is because they are very dependent on the data you are looking at.

Using Shortcuts

In the "Home" tab in Google Analytics, there is a new section called "Shortcuts". Here, you can find all of the shortcuts you’ve created, and navigate to each one. Clicking a Shortcut will "reset" the segments that are applied - so you know you'll always see the same customization every time you use a Shortcut.

If you make any changes while viewing a Shortcut and you want to have those changes persist for the next time you view the Shortcut, just click on “Save” from the report’s Utility Bar:

Managing Shortcuts

You can easily manage your Shortcuts from the Overview page, found under the Shortcuts navigation on the “Home” tab. From this page, you can also delete any of your created Shortcuts:

What else should you know?

• Shortcuts can be emailed and exported like any other standard report.
• Deleting a Shortcut will remove that report from any scheduled emails, as with deleting a custom report.
• Shortcuts apply at the profile level, like the rest of reports in Google Analytics.

This is a continued step in making your experience with Google Analytics as efficient as possible. We hope you find Shortcuts a useful feature.  

Posted by Andrew Seguin, Google Analytics Team

Automate Google Analytics Reporting using Google Apps Script

Many people have been asking for a simple way to put Google Analytics data into a Google Spreadsheet. Once the data is inside a Google Spreadsheet, users can easily manipulate Google Analytics data, create new visualizations, and build internal dashboards.

So today we released a new integration that dramatically reduces the work required to put Google Analytics data into any Apps Script supported product, such as Google Docs, Sites, or Spreadsheets.

Here’s an example of Google Analytics data accessed through Apps Script and displayed in a Google Spreadsheet.

Custom API Dashboards - No Code Required

We know that a popular use case of this integration will be to create dashboards that automatically update. To make this easy to do, we’ve added a script to the Spreadsheets script gallery that handles all this work - no code required. The script is called Google Analytics Report Automation (Magic).

This script is a great template for starting your own project, and we’ve had many internal Google teams save hours of time using this tool. Here’s a video demoing how to build a dashboard using this script:

You can find this script by opening or creating a Google Spreadsheet, clicking Tools -> Script Gallery and searching for “analytics magic”.

Writing Your Own Script

Of course many developers will want to write their own code. With the new Analytics – Apps Script integration, you can request the total visitors, visits, and pageviews over time and put this data into a spreadsheet with just the following code:

// Get Data.
var results = Analytics.Data.Ga.get(
    tableId,
    startDate,
    endDate,
    'ga:visitors,ga:visits,ga:pageviews',
    {‘dimensions’: ‘ga:date’});

// Output to spreadsheet.
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().insertSheet();
sheet.getRange(2, 1, results.getRows().length, headerNames.length)
    .setValues(results.getRows());

// Make Sandwich.

To get started now, read our Automated Access to Google Analytics Data in Google Spreadsheets tutorial. Also check out the Google Analytics Apps Script reference docs.

Solving Business Problems

Are you ready to start building solutions using Google Analytics and Google Apps Script?

We’d love to hear new ways you use this integration to help manipulate, visualize and present data to solve business problems. To encourage you to try out this integration, we are giving out Google Analytics developer t-shirts to the first 15 developers to build a solution using both APIs.

To be eligible, you must publish your solution to either the Chrome Web Store or the Spreadsheets Script Gallery and include a description of a business problem the script solves. We’ll then collect these scripts and highlight the solutions in an upcoming blog post. After you publish your script, fill out this form to share what you’ve built.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you can do with this integration.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski   profile Nick is a Senior Developer Programs Engineer working on the Google Analytics API. In his spare time he likes to travel around the world.

Introducing the Multi-Channel Funnels Reporting API

Measuring how marketing efforts influence conversions can be difficult, especially when your customers interact with multiple marketing channels over time before converting. Last fall, we launched Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, a new set of reports that help shed light on the full path users follow to conversion, rather than just the last click. One request we’ve had since the beginning was to make this data available via an API to allow developers to extend and automate use cases with the data. So today we’re releasing the new Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels Reporting API.

The API allows you to query for metrics like Assisted Conversions, First Interactions Conversions, and Last Interaction conversions, as well as Top Paths, Path Length and Time Lag, to incorporate conversion path data into your applications. Key use cases we’ve seen so far involve combining this conversion path data with other data sources, such as cost data, creating new visualizations, as well as using this data to automate processes such as bidding.

For example, Cardinal Path used the new Multi-Channel Funnels API, Analytics Canvas ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and Tableau Software to help their client, C3 Presents, uncover how time and channels affected Lollapalooza ticket sales in an analysis dubbed “MCF DNA.” The outcome was a new visualization, similar to a DNA graph, that helped shed light on how channels appeared throughout the conversion funnel.

MCF DNA Visualization in Tableu Software

In another case, Mazeberry, an analytics company from France, helped their client 123Fleurs decrease customer acquisition costs by 20% by integrating data from the Multi-Channel Funnels API into a new reporting framework. Their application, Mazeberry Express, combines media cost and full conversion path data to provide new Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Return on Investment (ROI) metrics that provide a more complete understanding of how online channels are working together to influence conversions.

Mazeberry Express Screenshot - Focus on a Channel

Please note that this functionality only works with the new v3.0 API libraries, so you should upgrade now if you haven’t already (see our migration guide). We look forward to seeing how you make use of this new data source.


Posted by John Huang, Software Engineer

A simpler way to re-connect with your website visitors

Google Analytics has always provided powerful tools to help you better understand your website visitors and improve their experience. Some of you have also started using insights from your website to optimize your remarketing campaigns and re-engage customers who have visited your site. But this has traditionally required you to add a second tag to your site for remarketing, in addition to your existing Google Analytics tag. To simplify the process, we’re rolling out Remarketing with Google Analytics in beta, to help you make the most of those valuable insights.

Remarketing with Google Analytics helps you create remarketing lists based on certain audiences who visit your website and show interest in your products, without having to tag your site twice. This can help you more easily create remarketing campaigns to show ads across the Google Display Network (GDN). 

We’ll be rolling this beta feature out in waves by the end of the summer to all Google Analytics users who are account administrators with at least one linked Google AdWords account. Once the feature is available to you, you can learn about the steps to enable it in your account by clicking on the "Admin" tab in the upper right corner of Google Analytics, then look for the tab for "Remarketing Lists.”

Remarketing can help improve the relevancy of the ads that users see online. We’re also committed to giving users increased control over the ads they see on Google and across the web with tools like Mute This Ad, the Ads Preferences Manager, and the Google Analytics Opt-out.

To learn more about Google’s suite of remarketing tools, please visit the AdWords blog here.

Happy analyzing... and happy remarketing!

Posted by Jesse Savage, Product Manager

Making Google Analytics Content Experiments Even Better

A few weeks ago, we announced Google Analytics Content Experiments.  Since our announcement, we have been busy making Content Experiments available to Google Analytics users and improving it based on your feedback.  We'd like to tell you about a few changes that we have recently introduced:

Content Experiments available to everyone. Every Google Analytics user can now access Content Experiments. You can find this feature under "Experiments" in the "Content" section of your Standard Reports.

Support for relative URLs. Using relative URLs affords you increased flexibility when defining the location of variations.  This is particularly useful if you have experiments running on multiple domains, subdomains, or pages. You can learn more about using relative URLs in Content Experiments by reading our Help Center article.

Ability to copy experiments. You can now copy experiments by clicking the Copy experiment button on the Edit Settings screen of the experiment you want to copy. If you are running an experiment on a page, this allows you to run additional experiments after the original one finishes without having to add experiment code to your page or otherwise modify it.

Improvements to the experiments report. We've added regular Analytics-report capabilities to the experiment report, such as: Site Usage, Goal Set, and Ecommerce tabs, and the option to choose which variations you want to plot in the graph.

Click the above image to view the full report

We hope that you find these improvements useful. Our team is working hard to make Content Experiments in Google Analytics even better. Stay tuned for more news!

Posted by Inna Weiner, Software Engineer

Moving Google Analytics Forward - Retiring The Old Version

After a year of supporting both the old and new versions of Analytics, we are now fully transitioning and leaving the old version behind. This means that as of tomorrow we’ll be removing the link to the previous version which sits at the bottom of Google Analytics pages and all your analysis will take place in the new version.

It’s been a long journey to this point, and we hope you’ll find value in all of the features that the new version of Google Analytics offers. And our help center is a great resource to be sure you’re getting the most out of these new features and reports. The new version has been completely rebuilt on a more powerful platform that lets us move faster and develop more amazing features including these recent launches:

• Real-Time shows you what’s happening on your site as it happens. Immediately see the impact that online campaigns, TV ads, or mentions at a live event can have on engagement with your website.

• Multi-Channel Funnels provides insight on the full path to conversion over a 30 day period. The variety of marketing channels used to find your website, and not simply the last click, so you can make better decisions on your marketing investments.

• Social Reports help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on the metrics which matter to your business.

• Mobile Reports show how visitors from mobile devices and AdWords mobile campaigns engage with your website. See how many pages they visit, how much time they spend, as well as conversion and ecommerce insights to help you optimize your mobile strategies.

• Content Experiments enables you to show different versions of a page to different visitors, then using a new advanced statistical engine measures the results of each to determine which is the most effective version.

We have received some really great feedback over the last year on what’s working and what’s not; we’ve been listening very closely and doing our best to incorporate the feedback and ideas.  We are continually working to improve upon Google Analytics and help provide you with tools to make better decisions for your website and marketing programs, so please keep providing the feedback.  You are our most important source of ideas for innovation!

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics

Data At Your Fingertips: Announcing The Google Analytics App For Android

We are pleased to announce the launch of Google Analytics App for Android phones!

With the Google Analytics App, you can access the same accounts and profiles you see when you open Analytics from a desktop browser, but you’ll see reports that are optimized for your phone. 

Swipe through these reports to see the essential data about your websites and apps anywhere, anytime:

• Real-Time: See the number of visitors you currently have and a list of the pages (for websites) or screens (for apps) that are currently popular.
• Dashboard: Monitor the KPIs and user metrics you care about the most. By default, you’ll see your Daily Unique Visitors and your Goal Conversion Rate, but you can customize the dashboard to change which reports, metrics, or segments you see.  
• Automatic and Customized Alerts: Google Analytics detects statistical anomalies in your data and can send you an alert when something unusual happens. See either automatic alerts, or customize your settings to send alerts based on your own benchmarks. 

Screenshot: The Realtime Report

Screenshot: The Dashboard

Visit Google Play to download and install the app to keep up with your data anytime, anywhere.

Peng Li, on behalf of the GA Mobile App team

Measuring a Mobile World: Introducing Mobile App Analytics

Mobile is changing the way that people communicate, work and play, and much of the growing adoption and innovation we're seeing in the industry is driven by mobile apps. There are already more than 600,000 mobile apps on Google Play alone, and we expect to see continued momentum throughout the industry. Mobile is also becoming front and center for marketers and businesses. As more of them understand the value of mobile apps, sophisticated measurement tools are becoming core to how marketers and app developers invest, analyze and market their apps. 

That’s why today we’re announcing a new set of reports in beta called Mobile App Analytics that help marketers and developers better measure their mobile apps. The reports are tailored for mobile app developers and marketers, speaking the language that matters to them. They are designed to measure the entire mobile customer journey - from discovery to download to engagement. This enables the creation of app experiences that are more useful and engaging through data-driven decisions at each stage of the app lifecycle:

1. Acquisition and user metrics such as downloads and new users
2. Engagement metrics such as retention, crashes and conversions
3. Outcome metrics such as app sales and in-app purchases

Layout of new Mobile App Analytics reports

Here’s an outline of the new Mobile App Analytics along with screen grabs of selected reports:

Acquisition and User Analysis Reports - discover your best sources of new users

New and active users - measure the number of new and active users who launch your app everyday and analyze your most valuable segments. 

Google Play traffic sources - understand which traffic sources are driving new users and in-app conversions through Google Play to fine-tune your marketing initiatives. 

App versions - keep track of the distribution of active users over the older and newer versions of your app so you know what to support.

Device overview - check out the top mobile devices and OS versions that your app runs on, and optimize the experience for each device.

Engagement Reports - see how users interact with your app

User behavior - assess how loyal your users are, how frequently they use the app, and the engagement level of each loyalty group.

Engagement flow - visually see the screens, actions and paths users take to move throughout your application in order to optimize usage.

App crashes - see trends in crashes and exceptions that will help you troubleshoot problems on certain devices and operating systems.

Outcome / Business Impact Reports - identify whether users are accomplishing your goals

Goal conversions - set up conversion events in your app, like spending 10 minutes in the app, or clicking on ads to gauge success.

In-App purchases - if you sell virtual or tangible goods in your app, you can measure the number of purchases and the revenue generated.

The new reports are part of a holistic experience tailored for mobile app measurement, including a new and lightweight SDK v2.0 that’s easier to implement and is opt-out ready, with a streamlined back-end infrastructure.

We’ve also revamped our sign-up process, so new users can choose whether they want to start measuring their website or their mobile app. This means you’ll be just 3 clicks away from setting up your app analytics account and downloading the SDK.

We will be opening the beta up to whitelisted users in waves, so if you’re interested in using Mobile App Analytics for your app, please complete this beta signup form and we’ll get you started soon. We anticipate the reports will be available to all Google Analytics users by the end of the summer.

Also, if you are at Google I/O be sure to attend the Google Analytics session “Measuring the End-to-End Value of Your App” (from 11:30AM - 12:30PM today, June 29) where our lead engineers will tell you more about Mobile App Analytics and some other exciting things we’re working on.

Posted By JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team