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

Read More

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

Read More

Mobile-friendly sites turn visitors into customers

The following post originally appeared on the Google Mobile Ads Blog.

In this world of constant connectivity, consumers expect to find the information that they want, when they want it - especially when they’re on the go. We know that this applies to their web browsing experiences on mobile, so we took a deeper look at users’ expectations and reactions towards their site experiences on mobile. Most interestingly, 61% of people said that they’d quickly move onto another site if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site. The bottom line: Without a mobile-friendly site you’ll be driving users to your competition. In fact, 67% of users are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly site, so if that site’s not yours, you’ll be missing out in a big way. 

Discover these and more findings from, What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today, a study from Google (conducted by Sterling Research and SmithGeiger, independent market research firms). The report surveyed 1,088 US adult smartphone Internet users in July 2012.  

The problem (and opportunity) is big...

While nearly 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly site, 96% of consumers say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices. This is both a big problem and a big opportunity for companies seeking to engage with mobile users.

Mobile-friendly sites turn users into customers

The fastest path to mobile customers is through a mobile-friendly site. If your site offers a great mobile experience, users are more likely to make a purchase. 

• When they visited a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future
• 67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy a site’s product or service

Not having a mobile-friendly site helps your competitors  

A great mobile site experience is becoming increasingly important, and users will keep looking for a mobile-friendly site until they find one that works for them. That means your competitors will benefit if your site falls down on the job (and vice versa).

• 61% of users said that if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they’d quickly move on to another site
• 79% of people who don’t like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site
• 50% of people said that even if they like a business, they will use them less often if the website isn't mobile-friendly

Non-mobile friendly sites can hurt a company’s reputation

It turns out that you can lose more than the sale with a bad mobile experience. A site that’s not designed for mobile can leave users feeling downright frustrated, and these negative reactions translate directly to the brands themselves. 

• 48% of users say they feel frustrated and annoyed when they get to a site that’s not mobile-friendly
• 36% said they felt like they’ve wasted their time by visiting those sites
• 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company
• 48% said that if a site didn’t work well on their smartphones, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about their business

Takeaways

While the research confirms what we already suspected -- that mobile users actively seek out and prefer to engage with mobile-friendly sites -- it’s a sobering reminder of just how quickly and deeply users attitudes about companies can be shaped by mobile site experiences. Having a great mobile site is no longer just about making a few more sales. It’s become a critical component of building strong brands, nurturing lasting customer relationships, and making mobile work for you. 

To learn more about our study

• Click here and join our free webinar on September 26 at 1 p.m. EST  / 10 a.m. PST
• Get help on building a mobile-friendly site, visit howtogomo.com.

Posted by: Masha Fisch, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

How Posadas uses Event Tracking to analyze conversion funnel abandonment

One of the most important features you have access to in Google Analytics is the conversion funnel, which is particularly useful for analyzing your website’s efficiency in converting visitors into customers. Using the conversion funnel, you can easily find optimization points that will help you generate more profit for your business, perhaps without even increasing your advertising budget.

However, conversion funnels show aggregated data of all traffic flowing through them. That is, it does not let you make a differential analysis by product.

Posadas, the largest hotel chain in Mexico, with hotels in Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., Argentina and Chile, decided to adapt their Google Analytics implementation to segment the traffic flowing through the conversion funnel and make a differentiated analysis for each of their more than 100 hotels. In addition to segmenting traffic flow by product, Posadas was able to enrich the abandonment analysis by uncovering the opportunity cost of letting people leave the process before completing a transaction.

The conversion process is simple, it starts with a search for room availability in one of Posadas’ travel destinations. The search results provide a list of rooms for which the visitor can request an instant quote. After selecting the preferred room, the visitor proceeds to make the payment and complete the reservation.

Conversion Funnel:

• Step 1: Check room availability
• Step 2: Request an instant quote
• Step 3: Reservation payment

To get more details about this process, Event Tracking was implemented for step 1 and 2 of the conversion funnel by calling the function _trackEvent() while loading both pages.

The _trackEvent function has 5 parameters:

_trackEvent (category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

However, in this case we decided to use only two parameters for step 1:

• Category:  "Availability"
• Action: The unique identifier for the hotel being searched

_trackEvent ('Availability ', Hotel_Id)

and three parameters in step 2:

• Category: "Quote"
• Action: The unique identifier for the hotel being quoted
• Value: the total amount of the quote

_trackEvent ('Quote ', Hotel_Id, '', Quote_Value)

Of course, in the final step of the funnel —the sale— the e-commerce tracking code is implemented, so there’s no need to use Event Tracking as the reserved hotel Id and the final reservation cost are already tracked.

With this customized implementation, Posadas was able to get a data matrix that shows the differences in traffic flow for each of the steps, for each hotel. They were also able to look at the differences between quoted prices and actual revenue. In this matrix, Posadas can look for significant fluctuations in traffic and money amounts and discover potential optimization points with more detail than they might find in the standard conversion funnel report.

Abandonment matrix showing percentage of dropouts and the difference between quoted prices and actual revenue for each hotel

To further improve their analytics, Posadas decided to implement a survey to get feedback from their visitors and find out why they abandon the process in each of the high fluctuation points. After identifying significant fluctuation points and receiving feedback directly from their customers, they are able to make sound decisions when optimizing for particular hotels, perhaps by experimenting with specific sales promotions or pricing policies.

Monica Herrero, eCommerce & Online Marketing Manager at Posadas says:

"Analyzing the behavior of our visitors at this level of detail has many benefits. The first is the ability to track the differences in traffic flow through the conversion process separately for each of our hotels. We realized that there are some hotels that consistently show excellent conversion rates, but these special cases were hiding behind the average showed in the standard funnel report. The second benefit is finding the exact points in the funnel that we must optimize, which are different for each hotel. And the third benefit is discovering the reasons why our visitors abandon the process. 

With these three pieces of information we were able to improve our site and our sales strategies, which led to an 18% increase of our conversion rate on average, and an increase of up to 88% for some specific hotels. 

Understanding why people leave your site before converting and trying to retain them can be a challenging endeavor, but the benefit of doing so is highly worthwhile.”

As always, we invite you to try new ways to use the features Google Analytics provides, and to share those experiences with us.

Published by Enrique Quevedo, Google Analytics Latin America

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More