Take your social strategy to the next level with Learn with Google Hangouts and Webinars

Over the next few weeks, we’re offering four opportunities to learn more about Google+ for your business. We kick off with a Learn with Google Hangout on Air with bestselling author +Chris Brogan on November 5th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Chris will cover tactics for successful social marketing and discuss his new book, “Google+ for Business: How Google's Social Network Changes Everything.” RSVP for the Hangout on the Google+ Event page. 

Learn Chris’s recipes for how to grow and engage your Google+ community to build your brand and drive your business’s visibility and conversions. Hear about Chris’s own experiences helping companies succeed in their content marketing and social projects. Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author, CEO of Human Business Works, and advises companies on marketing, business strategy, communications and more.

If you have a question for Chris, leave your question as a comment on the Google+ Event.

Boost your success with Google+

Want to learn more about using Google+ for your business? Sign up for our Learn with Google webinars. Here are some great upcoming webinars to help you get the most out of social for your business:

• Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement (Thurs, Nov 8, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video (Wed, Nov 14, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)

Posted by the Google Analytics team

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

Building A Centralized Digital Marketing Platform With Google Analytics

The following is a guest post contributed by Google Analytics Certified Partner Daniel Waisberg.

Think about your business as a train. It has a locomotive and several wagons, each with its own function and importance (e.g., a restaurant wagon, a restroom wagon, and a luggage wagon). Now, let's say Google Analytics is the locomotive of the train, it is used to drive the business forward in a data-driven way. Together with it we find several important wagons: AdWords, AdSense, Webmaster Tools and others. How would you like those wagons to be tightly integrated?

This is the idea behind Google Analytics Integrations, an eBook that describes the official integrations available on Google Analytics. Currently it is possible to integrate the data from several Google tools into Google Analytics such as AdWords, AdSense, Webmaster Tools and YouTube. This enables marketers and analysts to import a wealth of information into Google Analytics, presenting a broad picture of their digital marketing efforts. 

In the eBook you will find a step-by-step guide to linking those tools as well as an explanation of what you can do with the resulting data. Let's suppose you are a new advertiser using both Google Analytics and AdWords, but the accounts are currently not linked. While you can use AdWords reports to analyze effectiveness of your campaigns, by linking the accounts you will be able to understand the bigger picture of website behavior in comparison to your AdWords campaigns. This information can help improving campaign performance by shedding light on which campaigns are failing as a result of suboptimal targeting, poorly designed landing pages, or poor ads; and which campaigns are succeeding. 

For example, let's look at the "Day Parts" report on Google Analytics (if your accounts are already linked here is a direct link to the report). 

The Day Parts report is for exploring hour-of-day and day-of-week dimensions. This report is useful for gaining insights into optimizing ad scheduling in campaign settings within AdWords.  

Click image for full-size

In the figure above, we see that this advertiser sees its traffic peak between 5 and-8 P.M. When adding a secondary dimension of per visit value, however, we see that the per visit value of visitors is highest during the morning hours of 6-9A.M: 

Click image for full-size

If this was your report, the practical next step you would take would be to adjust the ad scheduling settings in your campaigns to drive more traffic to the site during those morning hours, as that traffic is more valuable. Here is how to do it:

1. Navigate to a specific campaign in the AdWords interface.
2. Choose the Campaign Settings tab.
3. Under Advanced Settings, click the plus (+) box next to Schedule: Start Date, End Date, Ad Scheduling.
4. Next to Ad Scheduling, choose Edit.
5. Change mode from Basic to Bid Adjustment.
6. Under Time Period (next to day of week), click to reveal an overlay.
7. Adjust the bid settings (by a percent multiplier to increase or decrease bids). There is a button to copy to other days to speed up making these changes.
8. Click OK and then save.

If you are interesting only in the AdWords integration, check the Google Analytics For PPC eBook, which includes only information about integrating and analyzing AdWords using Google Analytics. This eBook had an important contribution from Yehoshua Coren. 

Daniel Waisberg is author of Google Analytics Integrations and Founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement and Optimization portal.

German-speaking Google Analytics User Conference and Training Day

On October 8^th and 9^th the second German-speaking Google Analytics User Conference (http://www.analytics-konferenz.at) is coming up. The conference will be held at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria. 

The Google Analytics User Conference is a two-day event, featuring a Google Analytics Training Day (12/10/08) for beginners and the Google Analytics Conference (12/10/09).  The Conference will include 24 different sessions in three tracks, which provide a valuable insight into new Google Analytics technologies, efficient strategies, optimization and trends. Here are some highlights from the agenda:

• What´s new and exciting with Google Analytics
• Customer Journey & Multi-Channel Analysis
• Improving ROI and Conversion-Optimization with Google Analytics
• E-Mail/Social Media/Mobile Tracking
• AdWords in Google Analytics & Search Analytics
• Advanced Traffic Attribution
• Tech-Sessions: Implementing Events, Custom Vars, Advanced Google Analytics Tracking Codes etc.

Attendees
The interactive and informative day is designed to help all attendees getting the most out of Google Analytics. It connects people who love and use Google Analytics, Google team members, opinion leaders, industry experts, online-marketers, web-developers and others who are interested in web analytics. Take the opportunity to learn from Google Analytics pros and peers and share your experience and knowledge. Register now and get:

• Tips and tricks from industry insiders to improve the bottom line
• Tactical and practical advice which you can apply rapidly
• Guidance how to manage multiple campaigns across multiple platforms
• Align Google Analytics with overall business goals, etc.

Tickets: 
Attendees can choose one day or the other, or may attend both days at a discounted rate.

List Price: € 390,- each day (Training Day or Conference). Both days cost € 680. Find out more at http://www.analytics-konferenz.at/anmelden.

This is an event not to be missed! We are looking forward to meeting many of you at the conference. See you soon! 

Presenting Partners

The conference is presented by the following Google Analytics Certified Partners and leading agencies in Austria and Germany: e-dialog, elements and webalytics. Furthermore the event is being produced in cooperation with national and international companies, associations and media: Monster Worldwide, Searchmetrics, intelliAd, Digital Analytics Association, DMVOE, Marketing Community Austria, WirtschaftsBlatt, Computerwelt, Horizont, Werbeplanung.at,  ITPress, iBusiness, t3n, WebsiteBoosting, eStrategy and Conversion Boosting.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Social that Adds Up

Earlier this week HootSuite Enterprise hosted Adam Singer, from Google Analytics, to share how you can use Google to measure social performance. With over half of people talking more online than they do in “real life”, digital social media is a critical platform for marketers, but how do we measure its impact?

Most marketers use platform metrics as performance indicators, but often they cannot be linked to sales. Engagement is the easiest and often the most measured social metric in terms of followers, fans and comments. However, revenue is often the more important (and more difficult to measure) metric that can help marketers determine an ROI for their social media efforts. Google offers two solutions that can help drive social media performance: Google+ and Google Analytics social reports. 

Building relationships on Google+ may improve other parts of your marketing plan. Google+ is integrating social in all the Google products marketers already use, which can help them drive deeper engagement with their target customers, be more relevant by offering social recommendations when customers need them most and remain accountable by providing transparency of how their ad dollars are performing. 

With Google Analytics Social reports you can tie your social media to metrics you care about. Here are some top tips Adam covered in the webinar:

• Find something you can measure (micro or macro-conversions) and sprint in that direction. Focus on how separate channels can drive different types of site actions, which can be tied to a value you determine.
• Measure success criteria directionally. Benchmarks are uncommon and do not necessarily translate across products, services or industries.
• Create your social posts with a measurement goal in mind. Be sure to include a call to action to inspire your audience to act.
• Understand and connect with your audience differently across the different networks. Try not to post the same thing on each platform, customize and use what works best.

Thank you to those who could join, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to Adam (+AdamSinger on Google+) or watch the webinar recording here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Stat Source: Socialnomics, 2009

Google Analytics User Conference, October 3 - 4

GAUGE (Google Analytics Users’ Great Event) Boston is approaching quickly. For those who don’t yet know, GAUGE is a training conference led by Google Analytics Certified Partners, and will help sharpen your GA skills through learning practical knowledge from other users that you can put to use immediately. 

The two-day event includes:

• 21 hands-on sessions and workshops led by top Google Analytics experts, including Analytics Pros, ISITE Design, Cardinal Path and LunaMetrics
• Two keynote addresses: 
• ‘The Art of Storytelling’ by Jason L. Baptiste at Onswipe
• ‘Seeing the Forest AND the Trees: How NPR can see detailed behavior data at massive scale to drive unprecedented insight’ by Steven Mulder, NPR, and Alex Langshur, Cardinal Path
• Presentations from the Google Analytics team, including analytics advocate, Justin Cutroni
• Analytics Helpdesk where you can receive direct consultations

Use code GABLOGBO12 for a 10% registration discount. We also offer a 15% discount for members of the Digital Analytics Association and a 50% discount for Government, Non-Profit employees, and Full-Time students.

In addition to the User Conference and Training Day, our attendees are invited to the GAUGE Hacknight & Google Analytics Application Showcase on October 3rd from 5:30pm - 8:00pm.

This networking reception and application showcase gives developers of Google Analytics integrated products the chance to pitch their creation to a panel of industry leaders, Googlers, and the audience. Any individual or company that has developed a product, platform, application, or other tool that integrates with Google Analytics is invited to apply. 

Apply here to pitch your product. 

If you aren’t attending GAUGE but still want to attend the Hackathon, request an invitation here.

If you’re not able to attend GAUGE Boston, consider attending our San Francisco event in April 2013.

I hope to see you in Boston or at a future GAUGE event.

Posted by Caleb Whitmore, Founder & Chair: GAUGE Conference & Analytics Pros

Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement

Join us for a webinar Tuesday, September 18th 11am PT, in partnership with Hootsuite, to learn how we can make better decisions based on performance metrics of social networks using Google Analytics social reports. Register today, it’s open to everyone! 

Adam Singer, the Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, will go beyond the current social metrics of followers, +1’s, likes and others, to discuss the true impact your social media is making on your brand’s bottom line. We often are asked about how businesses can measure their social media and how they can capture the value they create for their consumers. Many of our current metrics allow us to measure the reach of our message, but not necessarily the ROI. What impact does social have on a company’s performance? Learn how to connect visits to your social pages all the way through to a sale or conversion on your website. It’s time to prove the value of social media with the right measurement metrics.

You’ll also learn how social media can actually influence other media performance and drive conversions. When you verify your Google+ Page, Google may show more endorsements for your business from your customers and supporters within the search results page. This can raise the social awareness of your business and increase its relevance. Because 77% of US consumers trust recommendations from their social media connections more than any other media source, seeing a +1, can help them make a purchase decision. On average, search ads with annotations have a 5-10% uplift in clickthrough rate. Some of our advertisers have seen even higher uplifts, H&M achieved 22% uplift, Cadbury achieved 17% uplift and Laterooms.com achieved a 9% uplift in clickthrough rates on their search ads.

Start measuring the value you’re creating through your social media campaigns! 

Sources: Google Research 2012; Google internal data

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Multi-Channel Funnels: Webinar, Checklist, Tips & Tricks

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Mark Your Calendars For These Upcoming Analytics Events

Next week Google Analytics team members will be presenting on several key areas of measurement, both online and in-person. Be sure to mark your calendars and join us as we share ideas and best practices about everything analytics.

Google Developers Live Event (Online)

Make the Web Fast: Measuring performance with Google Analytics Site Speed reports

How well does your site perform? Are the slow pages affecting your conversation rates or driving away potential visitors and clients? In this perfcast, we will talk with Justin Cutroni and Ilya Grigorik about the new "real user measurement" (RUM) capabilities available in Google Analytics: we will discuss how the data is collected, what it means, and take a deep dive into some of the advanced use cases of how you can leverage this data within Google Analytics.

Date: Tuesday, August 14 at 2:00pm PST

How to watch: watch live at following GDL link, or add the event to your calendar on Google+.

Search Engine Strategies (San Francisco)

Google has several unmissable sessions at SES. Be sure to attend these two focused on measurement:

Business Optimization in a Digital Age

We were promised that Marketing one day would become rocket science. Well, we are almost there! Search continues to become more complicated, and more exciting. Then there's Social and Email and Display and Video and... so many more things. It is hard to understand how to do one thing right, much less try to do all of them right. In his exciting keynote Avinash Kaushik will share his unique perspective on balancing multiple media channels, leveraging super awesome metrics, grounding your digital existence in driving economic value, and leveraging the Clear Line of Sight model to ensure you are optimizing across all four of the most important business drivers.

Date: Tuesday, August 14 from 9:00-10:00am PST

Understanding the Mobile Customer Journey

Mobile apps are changing the consumer world and app developers, brands and marketers continue to invest heavily in the development of applications. This session will be an open dialogue about:

• How there are currently more than 600,000 mobile apps on Google Play - and why you need to understand how your app is found, why it is critical to stand out and why mobile analytics are key to improve your apps performance in increasingly competitive marketplaces.
• Brands increasingly creating mobile applications to reach their customers, and why they need to track and report end-to-end measurements of their results (as well as integrate mobile measurement holistically across digital tactics).
• What are some of the best practices to begin mobile campaigns (landing pages, click-to-call, analytics, integrations, etc.).
• Examples of brands, SMBs etc. using mobile in an effective way.
• The future of mobile - where it is headed and when.

Moderators:

Jason Wells, CEO, ContactPoint

Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Date: Wednesday, August 15 from 10:30-11:30am PST

How to attend: SES runs from Tuesday, August 14 through Thursday, August 16. If you’re in San Francisco, check out the agenda page for the full details of our sessions and be sure to come out and say hi.

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics team

Webinar this Thursday: Multi-Channel Funnels

Over the past few months, we’ve hosted a series of webinars on marketing attribution, exploring how you can get better results by understanding and valuing your customers’ full journey -- from the first ad they see until they make a purchase.


This week, please join Neil Hoyne, Google’s Global Program Manager for Attribution, for an in-depth look at Multi-Channel Funnels. Neil will discuss how Multi-Channel Funnels can reveal customer interactions across different digital media, show how these channels work together to create sales and conversions, and how these tools tie to the larger attribution narrative. We’ll explore the different reports and discuss how to get the most out of Multi-Channels Funnels to improve your campaign performance.

Date: Thursday, August 9, 2012
Time: 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT
Register: http://goo.gl/B49ma

Hope you’ll join us on Thursday!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Conversion and Attribution

Building Blocks of Digital Attribution: How to get started with Google’s attribution tools

What are the key steps to getting started with marketing attribution? Are you ready to move beyond the “last click” attribution model? How can you use Google’s tools to better understand your customer’s journey and calculate the impact of your digital marketing channels?








To help answer these questions, we’ve put together a series of webinars on attribution:

• Attribution Insights from Google and Econsultancy (4/26/2012) – watch recording here
• Building Blocks of Digital Attribution (5/24/2012) – watch recording here
• Search Attribution: AdWords Search Funnels (6/20/2012) – watch recording here
• Multi-Channel Funnels: Attribution Across Channels (8/9/2012) – watch recording here
• Attribution Modeling for Digital Success (11/2/2012) – register here

If you didn’t have a chance to catch last week’s webinar on Building Blocks of Digital Attribution, it’s a great place to start your attribution journey -- you can watch the recording above. During the webinar, Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution and Multi-Channel Measurement, discussed how to lay the foundation for digital attribution. First and foremost, it’s important to get your organization ready. In our work with customers and our recent attribution research, we’ve discovered that many companies try to pursue attribution before their culture or their data is ready. In the webinar, Bill describes the steps and the potential pitfalls to make sure your company is heading in the right direction.

Second, even if the organization has taken the necessary steps culturally, it’s challenging to find the right technology, and to ensure that technology is properly implemented.








We know that finding the right technology is a challenge, which is why Google offers several great attribution tools – including AdWords Search Funnels, Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, and Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics Premium. In order to get the most out of these tools, it’s important to ensure that the basics are set up correctly.  So, during the webinar, Bill also did a live demo of how to get started with AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics Goals. The setup is quick and easy – and once it’s in place, users can start accessing rich attribution data.

Naturally, we also received a lot of great questions from the webinar participants. We weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar, so here are some responses and more pointers on getting started with attribution.







How do you define “digital attribution”?
Digital attribution is the process of assigning credit to the various online interactions your customer has before a “conversion” (conversion = making a purchase or performing some other valuable action on your site). These interactions could include display ads, paid or organic search results, email campaigns, affiliate coupon programs, social network posts, and other digital interactions. Today, many marketers by default use “last click” attribution, assigning all of the credit to the last interaction before a conversion. By understanding the full path to conversion – including early “upper funnel” touch points – and giving credit to all of those interactions, you’ll be able to budget more effectively and design better marketing campaigns.

What about attribution beyond digital channels?
Attribution is about improving the measurement of how ad spend drives conversions. To address this challenging topic, it’s important to consider all the factors that might affect conversions. These factors include the digital channels mentioned above, as well as how users interact with your brand across multiple devices, and the influence of online advertising on offline sales. This webinar series is focused on how to get the most out of digital attribution.

How do I know which interaction is the trigger for the actual conversion, out of the entire funnel?
The goal of attribution is to more accurately measure the impact of all your digital channels on sales, including how these channels interact in the path to conversion. This means acknowledging that, in most cases, there is no single “trigger” for the conversion, but rather a group of campaigns or touch points working together to help drive a conversion. So, a user might see a display ad which makes her start thinking about your product, then a few days later view an organic search result, then receive a targeted email, and finally buy your product. In this example the email was the last pre-conversion interaction, but all three interactions probably had an impact on your customer’s decision. Attribution is the process of deciding how much credit you want to give to each of those interactions.

How do I set up those tools you discussed during the webinar? Can you provide more detail for advanced setup needs?
Our help center provides very detailed information about how to get your AdWords and Analytics set up correctly, and responses to frequently asked questions. Check out our pages on:

• AdWords Conversion Tracking
• Google Analytics Goals
• Ecommerce Tracking
• Linking AdWords and Google Analytics

In addition, if you'd like more help, we recommend contacting one of our certified partners – they can assist you with all aspects of implementation, as well as with interpreting your results. You can also check out our AdWords user forum and our Google Analytics user forum to get answers to your questions.

Does adding all this code to my website affect the site speed at all?
If the code is installed correctly by following the directions outlined on our help center pages (see above for links), it should not impact your site speed, or have only a very tiny impact. Setting up goals and conversion tracking will provide much richer data on how users arrive at your site and whether they’re doing what you want them to do once they get there. With that knowledge, you’ll be able to improve your marketing programs and your website.

What are some sample use cases for “event” goals?
A goal or a conversion can be more than just a purchase. Indeed, you can define multiple “micro-conversions” that represent various actions that are important to your business. So, you might use event goals to keep track of when a PDF was downloaded, or when a user watched a video or played an audio clip. Each of these “events” could be tied to goals that are of value to you. You can find more detail about event tracking in this article on the Google Developers site.

Why do I need to set up conversion tracking and goals? Can’t Google Analytics track without conversions?
It is possible to see some useful information without conversions, but defining conversions helps you measure what's important, rather than just general behavior. Plus, after you have these conversion tools set up in Analytics and AdWords, you’ll be able to access Multi-Channel Funnels, Flow Visualization, and Conversion Reporting in Google Analytics, as well as Search Funnels and Conversion Optimizer in AdWords. It’s quick and easy to get started, and it’s much more useful to look at a user’s path if you know that they’ve reached your desired end point and performed an action that’s valuable to your business.

Marketing attribution is a complex but very rewarding process – we hope that these tools and webinars will help you to get started.

Happy analyzing, and hope you'll join us for the next webinar in the series!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Conversion and Attribution

Future of Advertising Event - DoubleClick Insights

This post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog.

There has been explosive growth in ad technology over the last 20 years. From each of our perspectives -- whether you are an agency, an advertiser, publisher or a technology provider -- we can all still see unprecedented opportunities as the digital world continues to grow and diversify. 

We believe that as an industry, we’re on a common digital journey and that the next wave of innovation in ad tech will come from us all working better together.  

However, like all great opportunities, there are challenges and questions, such as:

• How do we unlock the next $50 billion of opportunity for digital advertising? 
• How do we deliver those immersive, interactive experiences to today’s empowered consumer demands? 
• What do we, as part of the ad tech ecosystem, need to build to create even more value for our clients and consumers?

On June 5th we’re hosting the DoubleClick Insights event to start exploring some answers to these questions.  Senior leaders from top agencies, advertisers and publishers will help lead the conversation -- and you’re invited to join via the live stream!  Register here.

The agenda will include topics such as:

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer - Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.  

If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come? Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

• Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai
• Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association
• Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi 
• Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe? Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier.  For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of:  Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing?  Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers?  Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including: 

• Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola
• Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA
• Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB 
• John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn more about our highlighted speakers go to the Speakers page on our site.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

DoubleClick Insights

Tuesday, June 5th 2012

9:00am - 1:00pm PST

Set event reminder today

Following us on Google+ or Twitter (@DoubleClick and @DoubleClick_pub)? Use the #dclkinsights tag as you're watching the event to ask questions or share comments during the event? 

Posted by Stephen Kliff and Scott Brown, DoubleClick Marketing

Answers To Your Burning Google Analytics Questions

Last week we hosted a webinar on Getting Started with Analytics and received so many good questions during the event that we didn’t have time to answer all of them. I’ve sorted through the hundreds of questions and below are answers to the most asked and interesting. If you missed the webinar or want to rewatch, it’s now available on the Google Analytics YouTube channel.




QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:
Can I measure if a visitor plays a video, downloads a whitepaper, etc?
Yes, use Event Tracking to learn about visitor actions like video plays, or PDF downloads that don't correspond directly to pageviews. And once you set up an Event it can also be tracked as a Goal. You can assign a value to these Events as a microconversion. Start with a larger objective that has a monetary value, like landing a big client, then map out the smaller steps leading up to that sale. For example, you may discover that for your business, an average of 7 PDF downloads corresponds to 1 sale. The value of a download would then be equal to an average sale divided by 7.

How do I learn if my website drives phone calls & offline conversions?
Many business’ customers start researching online, but then pick up the phone and call to complete the sale. Think about what activities a user may do on your website that would motivate them to call. Do they spend time viewing your portfolio, reading testimonials, or checking out prices? Set up Goals to measure these micro-conversion actions that will help you learn which of your sources are providing quality visitors. You can also add unique phone numbers to the landing page or ad that will enable you to identify when a user calls you what marketing source they came from. The GA App Gallery has call-tracking integrations and here is an example of how Google AdWords enables call forwarding and tracking by pay per click campaigns.

Can I track actions that happen on a 3rd party page like email newsletter sign up or checkout?
Since this action happens outside of your website, Google Analytics will not be able to measure it. If you work with a third party vendor check with them to see if they can share with you any tracking information they may have. Be sure to check out the Google Analytics App Gallery to see if there are 3rd party integrations like payment solutions, reporting or email marketing that could work with you to solve this problem.

How do I get Multi-Channel Funnels Assisted Conversion reports in my account?
Similar to your other Analytics reports, Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) are driven by the Analytics tracking code you have already placed on your webpages. No additional code is required to access MCF reports but you do need a Goal set up in your Analytics Account. Once you have goals set up, the MCF reports will be automatically filled with data for the visitor interactions that lead up to the completion of that goal. Keep in mind viewing MCF reports on a filtered profile can skew your data, learn more in our help center. We will also have a webinar focused on MCF reports coming soon.

Why do my visits in Analytics not match with AdWords or my website hosting service?
All of the AdWords reports in Google Analytics import data directly from the AdWords system, and they usually match the data in your AdWords account exactly. But there can be circumstances where the data can differ. For example AdWords clicks do not equal visitors, if a user clicks on your ad twice within thirty minutes without closing his or her browser this is registered by Analytics as one visit to your site, but it equals two AdWords clicks. Also your Analytics profile could be filtered to exclude visits from IP’s within your company, but your web hosting service could count those as visits. Here is a great article from our Help Center explaining this in more detail.

What is the best way to tag my marketing campaigns? And can I use a URL shortener?
If you need help creating campaign tags for links in your marketing campaigns (Search Marketing, Display Ads, Email Newsletters) check out the tagging tool in our Help Center. Remember to turn on AdWords Auto-tagging if you are running AdWords campaigns as this will automatically insert the campaign tags for you. Yes, you can use a URL shortener like goo.gl or other services out there to successfully pass your campaign tags through a nice short link.

If you’re interested in learning more about Google Analytics, we have a great webinar on Reaching Your Goals with Google Analytics. For more advanced users check out our Marketing Attribution Insights webinar, and watch the blog for more details about our attribution webinar series.

Posted by Ian Myszenski, Google Analytics team

Two new Analytics webinars -- for advanced and beginning users

Interested in learning how to use Analytics to make better decisions for your business? Here’s your chance; join us next week for two webinars.  We’re partnering with the Learn with Google team to present an introductory session on Getting started with Analytics, and a more advanced session covering one of the most requested topics - Digital Attribution & Conversion. Here’s a little more detail on what we’ll cover:

Getting Started with Google Analytics
Level of content: Beginner
Covers the basics you need to get started with Analytics. Highlights the most helpful reports for ecommerce, bloggers/publishers, and lead generation businesses. Learn how to tag your campaigns and set up goals to measure if your marketing is a success.

Presenter: Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate
Date: Wednesday May 23rd, 2012
Time: 12 pm PT / 3pm ET / 8pm GMT

Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
Level of content: Intermediate/Advanced
Learn what marketing attribution is and what it can do for your business. This webinar will cover the basics of how attribution works, and we’ll show you how to set up your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts to enable important attribution tools--Search Funnels and Multi-Channel Funnels.

Presenter: Bill Kee, Product Manager, Google Analytics
Date: Thursday May 24th, 2012
Time: 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT

These are free webinars, so be sure to register now and take a look here for more great webinars from other Google teams.

Posted by Ian Myszenski, Google Analytics team

Mark your calendar to ‘Hangout on Air’ and learn how to build a mobile site in minutes

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience1? With about half of all Americans now owning a smartphone2, it’s time for businesses to meet user expectations by delivering a mobile experience as good as the desktop experience. In short, it’s time to step up to the plate and build a site optimized for the mobile web.

 

Google can help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder.  In three easy steps you’re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site’s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version.  It’s free and takes just a few minutes to complete!

Join us on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST and watch as Google showcases how two businesses, Top Mast Resort in Massachusetts and Sava’s Restaurant in Michigan, go mobile and build mobile-friendly sites--live on air.

You’ll see how Top Mast is preparing to take advantage of mobile travel purchase intent - which is five times higher than online travel purchase intent, according to InsightExpress.  You’ll also see Sava’s move ahead of 95% of restaurants that do not have mobile-friendly sites, according to a study by Restaurant Science.

Finally, you’ll hear from the CMO of Dudamobile, Dennis Mink; he’ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site.

Details on how to tune in
1. Sign into Google+ on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST
2. Go to the Think with Google Google+ page
3. Look for the stream post and click to enter the live stream

Be sure to set a reminder in your calendar! If you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them with the hashtag #GoMoSite as a comment on the Google+ page.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing
Source: (1) Gomez 2011 (2) Nielsen February 2012

Marketing Attribution: Questions and Answers

Last week, we hosted a webinar on marketing attribution. We had a lively discussion about our recent attribution whitepaper, and we looked at Google’s solutions for attribution -- including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, and the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium. During the webinar, many of you wrote in with great questions, and we’ve provided answers below to some of the top questions.

If you weren’t able to join us last week, you can view a recording of the webinar here.

Questions & Answers:
Q: How can I learn more about getting started with attribution using Google’s tools?
A:This webinar was the first in a series on attribution -- please watch the blog for updates and registration information for our next webinar, “Building Blocks of Digital Attribution.” In the meantime, read on for some more tips.

Q: Where can I learn more about setting up conversions?
A: Setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics is one of the most valuable things you can do to make your reports actionable and meaningful, and getting these set up properly will allow you to use Google’s attribution solutions. There are resources available in the help center to help you set up goals and ecommerce tracking. You can also view the recording of our recent “Reaching your goals with Google Analytics” webinar.

Q: When should I use AdWords Search Funnels compared to Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels? 
A: Both tools can give you insight into how your customers ultimately end up converting on your site. If you are using AdWords Conversion Tracking today, Search Funnels is available without any additional configuration. You can see the interactions your customers have with your search ads leading up to conversion, including both clicks and impressions. However, you can only see these interactions for paid search on Google AdWords.

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics allows you to analyze traffic sources beyond search, including display, social, email, referrals, affiliates and more - putting your conversion path data in a broader context. Using these reports requires installing Google Analytics tracking code on your site, and setting up goals and/or ecommerce tracking (see links above) -- once these are set up, Multi-Channel Funnels reports work automatically. Note that you  are not able to analyze search ad impressions in Multi-Channel Funnels.

Watch this blog for updates on future webinars in our attribution series that will provide more details on Search Funnels and Multi-Channel Funnels.

Q: How much of an impact does the use of multiple devices have in skewing the numbers we see in these reports? 
A: Mobile and other devices are becoming increasingly important. Multi-Channel Funnels will report on conversion paths that take place on a single device, but not across devices. For example, if a user visited your site on a mobile phone, and then completed a purchase in a desktop browser, those interactions would not be included in the same conversion path.

Q: Can I report on both AdWords Keyword and Matched Search Queries in Google Analytics?
A: You have the option to view either the AdWords Keyword or the Matched Search Query by choosing these dimensions in the data table. Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling support a wide range of AdWords and non-AdWords dimensions for reporting and creating attribution modeling rules.

Q: Can you add your own models to the Attribution Modeling Tool or they are all built in? 
A: You can create and save custom models in the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium. Custom models allow you to create rules that adjust credit based on attributes like the traffic source (e.g. search vs. direct), position (first, middle, last) the level of engagement driven (time on site and page depth), and timing (how much time prior to conversion).

Q: How do advertisers take action on attribution data?
A: Attribution data can help advertisers identify marketing efforts that may be undervalued or overvalued under models such as the last click, so they can adjust their marketing programs. For example, a general keyword like “shoes” may show fewer conversions compared to a more specific, branded term for a type of shoe on a last click basis. However, applying a model that gives some credit for searches prior to the last click may show that “shoes” is credited with more conversion value. When making optimization decisions around which keywords to invest in or cut, advertisers can look at multiple models, and then experiment with investing in keywords that show higher value under alternative models. Similar methods apply to channels like display, social, email, and affiliates. This can help identify areas of opportunity that are missed when using only the last click.

Happy Analyzing!


Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, Google Analytics team