Linking all of your AdWords accounts to Google Analytics

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to use multiple AdWords accounts with Google Analytics more effectively.

Previously it was only possible to link a single AdWords account to a single Google Analytics account. This made it more challenging to use auto-tagging and the AdWords reports inside of Google Analytics.

Starting today, you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account. The new data sources section in the Google Analytics account settings area makes it easy to use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import your AdWords data into Google Analytics.

Let’s take a look at how to set this up:

Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account.

If you want to link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account, you need to set the new version of Analytics as your default:

1. Sign into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.

2. Click New Version at the top right of the page.

3. Click Make this version default.

If you skip this step, you won’t see the new linking interface when you sign into AdWords.

Linking your accounts

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. Click the Reporting and Tools tab, then click Google Analytics.

3. Click the gear icon at the top right.

4. Click All Accounts at the top left of the page.

5. Click the account to which you want to link the AdWords account.

6. Click the Data Sources tab.

7. Click the AdWords tab.

8. Click Link Accounts button.

If you are linking from a My Client Center child account the process is very similar. You can more in this article: Linking Analytics Accounts to My Client Center (MCC) Accounts.

Improvements to applying AdWords account data to multiple profiles

Now that you can link multiple AdWords accounts to Google Analytics, we’ve also made it easier import your AdWords data into multiple profiles in Google Analytics. We have put together a quick video demonstrating how to do this:

If you’re less of a visual learner, you can always find instructions on how to link accounts in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Happy linking!

Gavin Doolan

Google Analytics Team

Read More

Introducing two new versions of the Management API

Today we are releasing two new versions of our Management API into public beta; a brand new version 3.0 and a backwards compatible version 2.4. While the data the API exposes is the same, both versions migrate the Management API from the existing Google Data Protocol to Google’s new API infrastructure. This impacts the way you request and handle data from the API.

With this change, we are also announcing the deprecation of the legacy version 2.3 of the Management API. It will continue to work for 2 months, after which all v2.3 requests will return a v2.4 response.

The biggest changes in switching to the new versions are that developers need to register their applications via the Google APIs Console and use a developer token. Also the URL endpoints have changed, which influence how you request OAuth authorization tokens.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

Version 3.0
Is the latest major version of our API and is not backwards compatible. Features include:

• A faster response over version 2.3


• An improved quota policy


• Integration with the Google APIs console to manage API access and request more quota


• OAuth 2.0 is now the recommended way to Authorize users


• The URL to make requests is now at https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/management/...


• The API response is more compact using JSON


• New Google API client libraries, which support many more languages


• Support for the Google Discovery API

All future development of the API will be done to this version so we also added some exciting new data only in version 3, including:

• Event goals are fully represented


• An internal web property id which can be used to deep link into the GA user interface


• Profile configurations for the default page and site search query parameters

Version 2.4
This is a minor version upgrade and we tried hard to make it backwards compatible with the existing Version 2.3. New changes include:

• A faster response over version 2.3


• An improved quota policy


• Integration with the Google API console to manage API access and request more quota


• Continued support for existing authorization mechanisms; OAuth 2.0 now supported


• The URL to make requests is now at https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v2.4/management/...


• Supports XML response only


• The Google Data JavaScript client library will not work with this version

The XML output from this version is the same as version 2.3 so the existing Google Data client libraries will continue to work.

If You’re a Developer, What You Need To Do
Take a deep breath and get excited ;)

While we typically don’t share our roadmap, to alleviate any concerns, we wanted to give you some insight on where we’re going and how this release fits into the bigger picture. Today’s release adds two new versions to the Management API, v2.4 and v3.0. We also have a Data Export API that provides access to report data, which is still on version 2.3. In the future, we plan to do a similar upgrade to the Data Export API Data Feed by releasing two new versions for it, and deprecating version 2.3. At that time, we also plan to completely deprecate the Data Export API Account Feed.

The future of our APIs is to access all configuration data through the Management API and all processed report data through the Data Export API.

So for now, if you are already using the Management API, we recommend you migrate to the latest and greatest version 3.0.

If you are still using the Account Feed in the Data Export API, we highly recommend you test out the new Management API and start planning your migration. But, you can probably wait to do a full migration until all our APIs are on version 3.0.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out in our Management API developer group.


Posted by Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Read More

Introducing Multi-Channel Funnels: discover untapped opportunities in your conversion path

An ad is clicked, and a purchase is made. Marketers have long used Google Analytics and similar tools to see which marketing efforts drive sales and conversions. Measurement is fundamental to ROI-focused marketing. Now, we’re taking this measurability a few steps further.

When a customer buys or converts on your site, most conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked. In reality though, customers research, compare and make purchase decisions via multiple touch points across multiple channels. So marketers that measure return solely on the last channel that a customer touches before conversion are getting an incomplete picture, and potentially missing out on important opportunities to reach their customers.

That’s why we’re excited today to introduce Multi-Channel Funnels to all Google Analytics users. This set of five new reports in Google Analytics gives marketers insight into the full path to conversion over a 30 day period, not simply the last click.

By looking at interactions across most digital media channels, including clicks from paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads, you can understand how different channels work together to create sales and conversions.

We’ve been piloting Multi-Channel Funnels with several customers over the past few months, and we’ve seen our customers gain valuable insight into the buying-cycle and understand the often hidden contribution of channels like social and display to conversions.

One of our early partners in the pilot, HUGO BOSS, uncovered significant contributions from upper funnel efforts, helping to better inform marketing strategy. "Knowing more about how our customers find us is very important, and this data helps us make better decisions. We found out that nearly two out of every three conversions involves more than one touch point,” said Patrick Berresheim, Director E-Commerce/CRM for HUGO BOSS. “It's now possible to value the contributions of assisting channels, which had previously been hidden by looking only at the last click.”

If you use Google Analytics on your website, and have goals or e-commerce tracking enabled, you can begin using the reports today by clicking on the My Conversions tab, with no further setup required. If you are an AdWords customer, make sure to link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to get the most detail on your ads performance. Starting today, you’ll see complete data in the reports for the past two months, and we’ll be expanding to encompass data back through January 2011 in the coming days. Update: This data is now available in Multi-Channel Funnels reports.

To help you learn more about the type of analysis you can do using Multi-Channel Funnels, including advanced features such as conversion segments and custom channel groupings, we’ll be scheduling a free webinar - look out for the registration details on the blog in a couple of weeks or sign up here to be notified by email. We’ll be walking through the reports and common use cases and you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions - we hope you’ll be able to make it.

Update: September 1, 2011 10:30am PST - Conversions are now available in the Multi-Channel Funnel reports going back to January 2011

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Google Analytics

Read More

Web Analytics TV #20 - The lost episode with a Special Guest

Welcome to another magical episode of Web Analytics TV! This time we have a special guest Caleb Whitmore from Analytics Pros, who is also a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Welcome Caleb! If you’re having difficulty implementing Google Analytics, Caleb has built the exceptional GAPE, Google Analytics Pros Engine, solution which simplifies tracking on your website. Check it out!

Ok. We had so much fun doing this episode, you are going to have a blast as well.

Web Analytics TV, as you well know by now, is powered by your questions. In this episode we had questions from Australia, India, Denmark, England, Germany Netherlands and so many other places. Y’all rock!

If you’re new to this show, our process for this show is simple.

Step 1: You ask, or vote on, your favorite web analytics questions. Vote on next week’s questions using this Web Analytics TV Google Moderator site.

Step 2: From a secret undisclosed location at the Googleplex Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski answer them. :-)

Here is the list of last episodes questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:

• (0:37) eCommerce conversion rate in custom reports


• (1:05) Pan session analysis


• (2:28) Controlling conversion attribution


• (4:20) Impact of changing the campaign cookie timeout


• (6:19) Tracking users across multiple sections of a website


• (7:56) Tracking internal site campaigns in GA


• (8:21) Report filters to mimic Custom Variables profile filters


• (9:10) Tracking embedded YouTube videos


• (10:24) Determining all organic traffic to a particular page


• (11:52) Drilling into channel paths in Multi Channel Funnels


• (12:32) Excluding traffic from bots


• (13:48) Reporting the number of visitors between two sites


• (15:08) Using a single vs multiple landing pages to track different campaigns


• (17:00) What metrics to use for a single page website


• (19:35) Filtering monitoring solutions like Gomez


• (20:13) How you can use _getVisitorCustomVar


• (21:21) Creating funnels with groups of URLs


• (22:08) Why you can see more visits than pageviews (esp in Android tracking)


• (23:47) Can you influence the timestamp of requests to GA


• (24:05) How to track conversions for non-ecommerce websites


• (24:51) Configuring goals that match both on pages and events


• (25:55) Why you should change to async tracking


• (27:18) How sampling in Google Analytics works

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Tracking internal campaigns (house ads) by Justin Cutroni


• Youtube Player JavaScript API Reference Docs


• Vinny’s Demo to track embedded YouTube videos with Google Analytics


• Understanding Multi-Channel Funnels by Justin Cutroni


• A custom report to measure cross site traffic with source and referral path


• Use paditrack to segment funnels


• Phone call tracking solutions which integrate with Google Analytics


• Using different match types to group pages in goal funnels


• Optimizing Android Apps with Google Analytics - Google I/O video


• I got no ecommerce. How do I measure success? by Avinash


• Measure macro and micro conversions by Avinash


• Sampling conceptual overview article

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below.

This series would not be possible without your awesome questions. Please submit them on our public Google Moderator site, and while you are there don’t forget to vote for your favorite questions.  Avinash and I will answer them in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Read More

New Google Analytics SDK for Android - Version 1.3

Today we’re announcing a new and improved version of the Google Analytics SDK for Android. This release is jam-packed with lots of good fixes, improved methods, and most importantly, better campaign tracking!  Read on for all the juicy details.

General Campaign Tracking
This new feature is probably the most exciting one for this release.  The SDK now supports the ability to set campaign referral information at any time, instead of at installation time.  This gives advertisers the ability to now track ads which lead people to user their app. To learn more about this feature and how to use it, check out the new campaign tracking section in our documentation.

Anonymizing Ip Addresses
To provide more privacy to your users, we added a new setAnonymizeIp method in the GoogleAnalyticsTracker class. This removes the last octet of the IP address prior to storage and makes the tracking more anonymous 

Configuring The Sample Rate
If you are getting a large volume of traffic, you can set the tracking sample rate to only send a portion of data to Google Analytics. Once configured, the tracker will decide based on visitor ID whether to send hits.

Deprecations
We are deprecating the start and stop methods in favor of the startNewSession and stopSession. The existing methods will continue to be in the library, so your applications will still work when you upgrade, but we highlight recommend you move to these new methods.

Bug Fixes
In this release we were also able to fix three bugs:


1. We’ve fixed a few issues with how the SDK accesses SQLite. As a result you will see less warnings and the SDK now uses less memory!

2. We’ve fixed a bug that might occur if you’re using custom variables.

3. The tracker no longer uses the application context passed to the SDK when starting up.  This should avoid memory leaks caused by holding Activity Contexts beyond the life of the Activity.


We hope you’ll find this latest version of the Google Analytics SDK for Android to be a big improvement over previous versions.  We also hope you realize we’re committed to making Google Analytics a first class provider of mobile app analytics as well as web analytics.

There’s plenty more coming for the Google Analytics SDKs for both Android and iOS.  Stay tuned.



Posted by Jim Cotugno and Neil Rhodes, Google Analytics Tracking Team

Read More

Update to Sessions in Google Analytics

Updated: 8/17/11 at 2:10 PM PST

Beginning today, there will be a small change in how sessions are calculated in Google Analytics. We think this update will lead to a clearer understanding of website interactions. We also want to explain how these changes might impact your reports.

What’s changing?

Currently, Google Analytics ends a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When a visitor closes their browser.

If any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session.

In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

As before, if any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the user will be the start of a new session.

How will this affect my Google Analytics data?

This change only applies for visits going forward from today, and your historical data will not change. We’re bringing the definition of session in line with the common definition of a visit. If a visitor leaves your site and returns soon after with a different traffic source value, each visit will be measured with its own session.

Since Google Analytics will start new sessions for all new campaign information, sessions will now have the more accurate attribution information. This will be especially helpful if you use Multi-Channel Funnels. Additionally, by continuing a session when the user closes their browser for only a very short time, sessions will more accurately model a user’s engagement with the website. Overall, this change may slightly increase the number of visits. Based on our research, most users will see less than a 1% change.

We are excited about this update, and look forward to providing you with a better understanding of your website activity. Please leave any question about the change in the comments.

Update 8/17/2011 2:10 PM PST:

We identified an issue responsible for unexpected traffic changes following our recent update to how sessions are defined in Google Analytics. A fix was released at 2pm PST Tuesday August 16th.

The issue affected some sites using the following configurations:

1. If a user comes to a customer’s site with a space in some part of their traffic source data, then revisit the same landing page during that session by refreshing the page or later pressing the back button, a new session will be created for every hit to that page. (Clicking a link elsewhere on the site that leads back to the page should not matter.)

2. Google Analytics implementations using multiple trackers (an unsupported configuration) are also affected when a space is included in the traffic source data. These sites will see fewer visits from new visitors, and more visits from returning visitors (with some variation due to different implementations).

Again, a fix for this issue was released yesterday. Please let us know if you continue to see unexpected traffic changes. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Read More

Improvements in Custom Reports: Better builder, more metrics, and custom navigation

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gilles Roux, an Analytics engineer will discuss some recent improvements to custom reporting in Google Analytics.

Creating custom reports in Google Analytics is a great way to answer specific questions about how users interact with your website or keep track of the metrics that really matter to you.

Since releasing the new Analytics earlier this year you have sent us lots of great feedback. Thank You! We have been hard at work integrating some of your suggestions and adding new features that will make custom reports more useful and easier to use.

Simplified custom report builder

The custom report builder has an updated look and feel that simplifies the process of creating and editing custom reports. The sections are now clearly labeled, with optional settings at the end, and the metric groups are shown on a single page without the need to switch tabs. We have also added the ability to quickly reorder metrics and dimensions using drag and drop. We hope these improvements will help you create reports that look just the way you want, in just a few minutes.

More metrics and dimensions!

We know - when it comes to analyzing your website usage, the more metrics the better. That’s why we have enabled 45 additional metrics and dimensions inside custom reports. These cover a wide variety of areas such as mobile, social, goals, site search, e-commerce and advertising. All metrics and dimensions are now organized in categories to make the list more manageable.

When viewing a custom report that has an explorer tab, you will now be able to select a secondary dimensions, which can be useful to perform a deeper analysis of your data without having to make changes to the custom report.

Custom navigation

The custom reports overview page is the central place to view and manage all your custom reports. You will now notice a ‘New Category’ button to create your own categories, in which you can group related custom reports. You will also be able to reorder reports, for example to make sure that your most important ones are conveniently shown at the top of the navigation.

We hope these improvements will help you create powerful reports that are targeted to the specificities of your site. As always, please don't hesitate to send us feedback, and expect more features in the near future.

Posted by Gilles Roux, Google Analytics Team

Read More

Looking for Developer Evangelists

Do you love Google Analytics? Are you passionate about web technologies? Want to help drive cutting edge Analytics extensions and integrations?

If this sounds like you, then we're looking for qualified and inspired engineers to join our Analytics team to help 3rd party developers get the most out of our product. You'll work with a variety of Google Analytics technologies, including the JavaScript tracking code, Mobile SDKs, and Data APIs. You’ll write sample applications, help partners troubleshoot integrations, and present best practices at conferences. In short, you’ll help to make engineers just like you even more successful!

If you’re interested we’d love to hear from you.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Developer Programs Engineer

Read More