Tuesday, 30 April 2013

A version of this post originally appeared on the DoubleClick search blog.

Back in October, we announced the beta release of display remarketing from search ads, which allows advertisers to use insights from paid search clicks to remarket to audiences across ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or the Google Display Network (GDN) -- all with a seamless, tagless workflow. 

We’re excited to announce that display remarketing from search ads is now out of beta, and is available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. This brief video provides a visual explanation:


Already, customers have shown some impressive results. Anton Kanis, Head of Business Solutions, Netherlands for OmnicomMediaGroup, has been using the feature to remarket via DoubleClick Bid Manager. Kanis notes “Display remarketing from search ads is proving itself to be a very valuable feature, often outperforming regular funnel remarketing and sometimes even search in terms of CPA.”

If you’re interested in trying display remarketing from search ads to take advantage of more cross-channel opportunities, reach out to your DoubleClick representative, visit the DoubleClick site, or contact the DoubleClick Search support team at ds-support@google.com.

Posted by the DoubleClick Team

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.


The tool draws on Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorized sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries. Purchase paths in this tool are each based on interactions with a single ecommerce advertiser.

You’ll find benchmark data for:
  • how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
  • how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey
The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:
  • As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.
  • Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:
  • Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey
We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values. 

For example,
  • in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.
  • in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.
  • in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:
  • In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work
For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Try The Customer Journey to Online Purchase today on Google’s new Think Insights website.

Happy analyzing!

Wednesday, 24 April 2013

The following is a guest post from Jeff Sauer, Vice President at Three Deep Marketing, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Jeff writes often about Digital Marketing at his Jeffalytics Blog and he writes about Travel on his Free World Traveler blog. 

I have long compared Google Analytics to the slogan for board game Othello: "A Minute to Learn, a Lifetime to Master" because it is so easy to get started, yet there are so many customization options and continuous product improvements that it takes years to master all aspects contained within GA.

The Google Analytics team has done such an amazing job at making the product easy to use that a significant portion of the web measures their website performance with Google Analytics. With that said, I've found that because it is so easy to use, not all marketers are aware of the advanced features contained within GA.

While conducting in-person Google Analytics training the past several years, I have been looking for the best way to show my students just how much they can do with Google Analytics. While a comprehensive classroom session goes a long way, a more elegant way of simplifying the complex is also valuable in the long run.

After much brainstorming with colleagues, we came up with the idea of creating the Periodic Table of Google Analytics, inspired by similar periodic table pieces that have ran in the past by well known marketing focused websites. Since the concept works so well for displaying many elements in one place, it worked perfectly for defining the 60+ elements that were included in the Periodic Table of Google Analytics. We hope you enjoy the results!


We created the table to be consumed in many different ways. On Jeffalytics.com, you will find an interactive version of the table which gives an explanation of each element as you hover over. You can also find a printable PDF version of the document for printing at home. Last, we have created an embeddable graphic that you can share on your site.

Posted by Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Bonjour, guten Tag, & hola -- we’re expanding Google Analytics Premium to France, Germany and Spain. Google Analytics Premium is all the power and ease you expect from Google Analytics standard, plus extras that help larger businesses get the most from its robust capabilities. Google Analytics Premium provides access to a dedicated services and support team, service guarantees, and greater data processing power - all for one flat fee.

Now companies can purchase directly from our network of Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers in France, Germany, & Spain. Leading up to this launch, we worked with a select few European reseller partners and well known global companies to help us kick the tires and ensure that Google Analytics Premium has been regionally tested for success. Big thank you to our clients 3 Suisses, Rocket Internet, Privalia Group & LAN along with our first reseller partners fifty-five, Trakken, e-Wolff, WATT, Webanalytics.es & Metriplica for sharing with us their experience using Google Analytics Premium.

Here are a few ways that they’ve found Google Analytics Premium to be helpful:


Headquartered in Croix, France
With a presence in almost 20 countries throughout Europe, 3 Suisses is a major e-retailer and the 2nd largest fashion and home-decor site in France. In order to continually improve customer service and site performance in Europe, 3 Suisses chose Google Analytics Premium in part for the close collaboration with Google’s teams. The main objectives are:
  • Improve the purchasing experience of millions of customer on their websites
  • Optimize the performance of product merchandising for over a million visitors per day
  • Enrich CRM programs with web analytics data in order to develop a 360-degree view of customers
  • Boost the fast-paced development of 3 Suisses’ e-commerce activities
In order to quickly reach these business objectives, 3 Suisses is working with 55, a long-standing partner well known for its expertise in Business Analytics. 55 are helping to implement and leverage Analytics in all realms of their business organization. A major objective for 3 Suisses is to allow marketers and managers alike to make fast decisions that can help them to achieve their ambitious e-commerce growth targets. The Analytics interface is incredibly user-friendly and easy to use, which makes it an important asset to foster a broad user adoption across 3 Suisses’ teams.



Headquartered in Berlin, Germany
Rocket Internet is a leading international online venture firm & incubator, with over 100+ companies launched in over 25 countries since 1999. Rocket Internet decided to purchase Google Analytics Premium via Trakken Web Services in Germany to support their growing businesses. The additional product features helped them break through the limitations they had been experiencing with the standard version of Google Analytics. Google Analytics Premium’s dedicated account support and increased features helped them to truly scale and grow data driven decision-making across all of their businesses. Read the full case study



Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain
The Privalia Online Fashion Group was founded in Barcelona in 2006, as a private club that offers flash sales on fashion’s top brand at exceptional prices exclusively for its members. They selected Google Analytics Premium through authorized reseller WATT to gain insights on how their users respond to content tests, personalization, and on different types of devices (mobile, tablet, desktop). Read the full case study

Google Analytics Premium meets the demanding digital analytical needs of Privalia. We find it to be a  comprehensive, flexible, easy to use solution, with a rich pool of professional users in Spain. We have confidence that we can scale with it being backed by Google and the support of its local partner network (Google Analytics Certified Partners). We’ve been impressed at the constant innovation, with new features and improvements released each year without losing usability.
 - Andres Flores, Marketing Business Intelligence & Web Analytics Manager, Privalia.



Headquartered in Las Condes, Chile and operating in Spain
LAN Airlines is one of the top flight carriers in the world, flying to 96 destinations across Latin America, North America, Europe, and Oceania. Their website LAN.com is a key component of their sales path, they have selected Google Analytics Premium through authorized reseller Metriplica.com in Spain to help them find insights on their digital marketing. They want to find the right information to enable them to make decisions fast, and expand use of analytics throughout their company with the ease of use and robustness of the Analytics Premium platform. They also receive constant support and training from Metriplica to help them grow sales through data based insights.

Google Analytics Premium provides businesses with more processing strength for granular insights, a dedicated services and support team, service guarantees and up to 1 billion hits per month, all for one flat fee. For those with more than 1 billion hits, tiered pricing is available.  Google Analytics Premium helps power the analytics of world-class brands including Travelocity, Gilt, TransUnion, Zillow, Papa Johns & IGN.

We’re excited to see how analytical companies in France, Germany, and Spain take advantage of the data, flexibility and account support offered by Google Analytics Premium. If you would like to learn more about Google Analytics Premium and how it can help your business, contact the Google Analytics sales team or one of our Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers.

Posted by Clancy Childs, Google Analytics Premium Team

Monday, 22 April 2013

Since launching Google Tag Manager last October, we’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of great clients and help them to become more agile marketers, boost their website speeds, reduce IT infrastructure headaches, and improve ROI for tagging related projects. We’ve seen impressive growth since the beginning of the year, with nearly 300% growth in traffic and 120% growth in enterprise customers.

We’ve just added a new “Success Stories” page to our website to highlight some of our favorite customer stories. You’ll find case studies from Airbnb, a community marketplace for accommodations, GoPro, maker of wearable cameras, and Magazine Luiza, a large online retailer in Brazil. These are just a few of the many enterprise customers now using Google Tag Manager -- and check back soon, we’ll be adding more stories to the page.


Google Tag Manager is designed to be easy and self-service, but if you’d like extra help (for example, if you have a complex web property with lots of existing tags), many of our clients have worked closely with our Partners, including GoPro, who worked with partner Analytics Pros.

We hope you’ll find these stories inspiring and helpful as you get started with Google Tag Manager.

Friday, 19 April 2013

Join the Google Analytics Certified Partners for Google Analytics Conference Nordic in Sweden. 

The event takes place on May 23rd in Stockholm. You can expect to hear expert tips on how to get maximum value out of Google Analytics, and learn from other organizations, such as VisitSweden and Resurs Bank, using the tool. 

Started in Stockholm 2011, based on an initiative by Outfox who gathered the other Google Analytics Certified Partners, the conference sold out the first two years. Now that the conference is returning for the third consecutive year, it will be visited by Paul Muret, Google Analytics Engineering Director and founder and CEO of Urchin Software acquired by Google in 2005. Urchin technology became what you know as Google Analytics today. Paul will hold the keynote presentation.

Learn about Universal Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Attribution Modeling, Cost Data Upload, Data Visualization, and much more. 

Erik Modig from Stockholm School of Economics will also share his insights into human behavior and modern advertising strategy and you'll also meet Mike Kwong, a software engineer working on Google Analytics backend. 

Our Stockholm conference includes:

• Clinics/huddles led by top Google Analytics experts
• Case studies from businesses and other organizations
• A live demo of how to add new sources of data to Google Analytics
• Opportunities to interact with peers and experts
• A more creative venue, The Rival movie theatre
• Fun and games during breaks
• ...much more!

To join us in Stockholm on May 23rd, visit the conference site and secure your ticket before it's sold out again.

Readers of this blog get the price of  2490 SEK if signing up before May 15th, and by entering the discount code "VIP Google" as a note before submitting the form.

If you want to be the first to know about other upcoming analytics events in Sweden, follow Outfox on Google+.

Posted by Lars Johansson, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Thursday, 18 April 2013

The following is a guest post by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

Universal Analytics introduces a new set of Google Analytics features allowing businesses to gain a deeper and more strategic understanding of what’s capturing the attention of customers as they move from online to offline. So how can Universal Analytics help businesses turn customer data into sales? We at Loves Data designed a simple experiment to find out.
Who drinks coffee? Who drinks tea? How much? How often? When? The answer to these questions reveal the role our espresso coffee machine and tea kettle play in productivity - and any need to order more tea or coffee! Take a look at our video to see what we learned.
Our experiment at Loves Data also measured how often and how much time team members spent standing in front of a display screen in the office viewing our website analytics.

Montage: Loves Data’s Universal Analytics office experiment will benefit businesses:

Experiment creates a new path to customers
Our team designed an experiment to dive into Universal Analytics by creating interactive scenarios inside our office. We integrated sensors and RFID readers to capture data about coffee and tea making behaviour in our office. We also measured each time the fridge was opened, when one of our team updated a support ticket, client hours were logged, code was committed, administrative tasks, and viewing of our Google Analytics dashboard display.
New Business Opportunities
Measuring users across platforms opens up new business opportunities. The RFID keys we’ve used in our experiments can be used to measure loyalty card usage. We can use Universal Analytics to enable retailers with bricks and mortar stores to measure customer behaviour and to improve and integrate online and offline sales and marketing.
Here are a few Universal Analytics opportunities we have identified at Loves Data for our clients:
  • Integrated measurement and analysis of in-store POS systems along with desktop and mobile e-commerce platforms
  • Measuring offline macro and micro conversions through physical buttons or integration with CRMs
  • Measuring physical interaction for example at display booths at conventions or artworks at major exhibitions through to online engagement on associated websites
Our office experiment provided ourselves and our clients with a range of valuable insights and showed that with Universal Analytics we can measure just about anything!
Posted by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Learn more about Loves Data on their website, Google+ or check out their digital analytics and online marketing blog.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

Working as a practitioner in house at a technology company, one of my jobs is to teach my team members how to fish with Google Analytics. What should they be looking for in GA? Where do they start? What is meaningful? Are the campaigns being measured? Are the microsites tagged? These are the types of questions I get everyday, and very likely, you do too. 

I've narrowed down my tips to 3 key things I try to get people comfortable with first (bite sized bits to get them hooked). 

1. Event Tracking
Most of the things that people are interested in are actions on a page. Did a visitor click on button X? Did they complete form Y? Watch video Z? These are all questions we can answer with event tracking. 

Because event tracking in Google Analytics is a blank slate in terms of setup and use, there is no one right answer for how to set it up and use. Given that most of my account was setup before I arrived in this position, I too have had to get used to a new architecture. The way I do this, and the way I explain it to my colleagues, is by investigating the event hierarchy. What are the categories, actions, and labels? How is data organized into these three tiers? 

While there is no one 'best way' of organizing an event tagging hierarchy, and while it will vary site to site, I like to set mine up like this:
  • Category: location of event (Homepage, About Us page, Resources page, etc)
  • Action: action the user took (Video, Whitepaper download, Start Trial, etc)
  • Label: specifics about action (Video name, Whitepaper name, detail of linked clicked if there are multiple with same action (ex. Learn more - product A, learn more - product B, etc) 
2. Advanced Segments
Advanced segments are a great way to filter data to be more specific to the question you are trying to ask. For example, you can create a segment for a region (North America = US + Canada), or you can create a segment for a set of pages (meaning visit applies to homepage and/or about us page). To evangelize and teach this, I've created a Google doc that I've shared with my team with step by step instructions and links to some pre-built regional segments. 

As an account admin, it's great to share out globally the segments you make that may apply to multiple consumers. And you can easily share links to segments for users to apply to their own account.

Regional Segment example:

3. Shortcuts
Normally when an internal user asks for GA training and/or help pulling a report, it's for something they plan to look at on more than one occasion. Depending on how complex the report is, it may be useful to create a shortcut.

Ex. Your account has 5000 uniques pages tracked in the pages report. You are interested in 4 pages that all share the same sub-domain (they may be steps in flow - example: www.myshoppingsite.com/women, www.myshoppingsite.com/accessories, www.myshoppingsite.com/handbags, www.myshoppingsite.com/gucci). 

You can filter the pages report (using advanced filters) to show only these 4 pages. Then you want to know how many visits to those pages had a checkout, so you apply a checkout segment onto the report. Then you also want to define that group one more step by only looking at North America traffic, so you apply a second advanced segment for North America. Then, just for kicks (or analysis) you want to know what the landing page was for this subset of purchasers, so you apply a secondary dimension for landing page. 

Now that's a fairly complicated report that took several steps to build. Your may not want to go through all those steps the next time you need this report (nor as an admin/power user do you want to have to show them again), so you can create a shortcut for this report. The shortcut link is a new beta feature located on the top nav bar that allows you to save a report as is and provides a shortcut link on the left hand nav to get back to it quickly. Pretty handy.

As an admin or power user: Once your users have these three functions handled they will a) be able to pull a lot of their own data, freeing up your time, and b) feel more confident and excited about using Google Analytics to make data driven decisions. Win-win.

Posted by Krista Seiden, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

The Dashboards feature in Google-Analytics is a great way to arrange a set of related custom widgets into a report you look at frequently (for example, see dashboards for a variety of use cases in our Solutions Gallery). Today we’re expanding dashboards’ functionality with four new real-time widgets that you can and plug into any dashboard (new or existing) of your choosing!

1) Setting up a real-time widget
If you have set up a dashboard widget before, then this will be very familiar to you. Create a new dashboard or click on the +Add Widget menu option of an existing dashboard.


Pick any of the four widgets available in the Real-time: section and customize the widget. Below I have created a widget that shows me active visitors from Canada but split up by Traffic-Type:


Here is how I set up this widget:


I chose the ‘Counter’ real-time widget and gave it a custom name (“Canada Active Visitors”), then set up a ‘Group by’ on ‘Traffic type’. This is how I see the split between referral and organic in the widget. Finally, I set up a filter to only show visitors from Canada.

2. Combining with other dashboard widgets
By creating and combining widgets, you can perform many types of analysis at a glance.

Using filters you can compare different segments of your real-time traffic. For example you can create two separate widgets that have different filters for the Country dimension (say Country==USA for one and Country==Canada for another) and you can compare real-time USA traffic versus India traffic, side by side.

You can go further and set up real-time and non real-time widgets on the same dashboard. 
Here is how one of my dashboards looks like (I use it to monitor and understand how traffic from Canada behaves after a blog post):



I have 5 widgets and widget #4 is a non real-time widget that gives me context on where I get visits from across the globe over the last month.

We hope you will enjoy creating new dashboards with these widgets and sparkling some real-time magic on existing dashboards!

Monday, 15 April 2013

At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster. A faster web is better for both users and businesses - faster pages lead to better user experience and improved conversions.

The Site Speed reports in Google Analytics give every website owner detailed data on the speed of their web pages, as experienced by real users.

Last year, we published a study on the speed of websites around the world based on one week of aggregated Site Speed data from opted-in web publishers.

Over the last year, we have seen significant improvements in the core infrastructure that powers the Internet: the web browsers have gotten faster; there have been quite a few LTE/4G deployments making mobile networks a lot faster; and processing power on mobile devices continues to increase at a rapid pace.

To determine whether these improvements in technology are making the web faster, we present recent Site Speed data and compare it with the data from last year.

Here are the results.



While access from desktop is only a bit faster, it is still impressive given that the size of the web pages have increased by over 56% during this period. It’s great to see access from mobile is around 30% faster compared to last year. This is evident from the histograms below as well. For desktop, there is not a significant change in the bucket distributions, but for mobile we see a shift from slower buckets (i.e. higher page load time) to faster buckets.



Taking a look at change in the speed of web pages for a few specific countries, for most of them, there is a slight improvement in page load times on the desktop.


However, there is a significant improvement in page load times on mobile.



The following interactive world map compares the relative improvement in median page load times for desktop over the last year.


This map shows the same data for mobile (Countries without enough data for accurate measurement either this year or last year are shown as having 0% improvement). Speed improvements are greater for mobile in most of the world.


If you are a web site owner, you can analyze and speed up your web site using the PageSpeed products, and check the resulting improvements in Site Speed reports.


Monday, 8 April 2013

The following is a guest post contributed by Caleb Whitmore, founder of Analytics Pros and the BEST Practices Conference, Google Analytics enthusiast, and aspiring mountaineer.

Join us on May 2nd in San Francisco to learn about the best practices for Google Analytics. At this interactive conference you will be engaged, learn strategy for Google Analytics and be trained in using and optimizing the tool.

We think about our conference like this:


 Looks like useful fun, right?  We promise it will be well worth your time.  

A side note, just in case you were wondering: my prior conference, GAUGE (now “retired”) was an initiative to bring together users across the Google Analytics community to learn from each other. The BEST Practices conference series builds on this legacy and delivers hands on tutorials and interactive sessions.

Look forward to hear from thought leaders in the Google Analytics space, including Google’s Jesse Nichols, Andrew Wales and Ian Myszenski.  We are excited to have Dan Siroker from  Optimizely and I will weigh in with my latest finds and processes as well.  We will talk and work with you on Universal Analytics, Multi-Channel Funnels, Attribution Modeling and more tips and tricks that we apply to our use of GA. 

Our San Francisco conference includes:
  • An after-party event hosted by the Google Analytics Premium team at the San Francisco Google office
  • Hands-on sessions and workshops led by top GA experts
  • Interactive “Table Topics” lunch session, including teaching and roundtable discussion on Universal Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mobile Strategy and more
  • Opportunities to interact with digital analytics peers and experts
  • Insights into the Google Analytics strategies of leading companies
  • An amazing conference venue that allows for big-picture thinking, the Jewish Contemporary Museum
Join us in San Francisco on May 2nd for our Spring event.  Use discount code BESTAnalyticsBlog for a 20% discount off the Conference Pass. We also offer a 50% discount for government, non-profit employees and full-time students.

And don’t forget to check out other BEST Practices conferences as we storm the country. We’re headed to Boston on October 3rd and back to the Pacific Northwest in Seattle on November 14th - don’t miss out!

To keep up to date on what’s coming, follow our team at @analyticspros and @BEST_con to hear about the latest speakers, locations and events. As a bonus, this video should provide a good introduction to our event if you've never been to one in the past:



We hope to see you in San Francisco this Spring. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Caleb Whitmore, Google Analytics Certified Partner

Monday, 1 April 2013

We believe you should be able to access your Google Analytics data from wherever, whenever. And while yes, it’s pretty convenient to be able to export data to Google Spreadsheets or send a report to an email recipient with a few simple clicks, we recognize there are other ways people like to be able to share their data as well. That’s why we’ve re-imagined our Export and ‘Send To’ options to give you even more options and support some of our favorite legacy technology.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a new set of old school export and send-to options that aren’t just useful, they’re fun. So flex those creative muscles and think of all the ways you might use these to do your job better:


Updated export options - moving beyond web:

CDROM: not only can you soon export to CDROM, we’ll automatically label the CDs for you to avoid the dreaded stack of unlabeled CDs that plagued users in the past. Bonus: insert your CDs into your car CD or portable CD player and we’ll play either upbeat or melancholy sounds, depending on if your reports are trending the right direction.

3.5 Floppy: have you ever wanted to access your reports on your old IIGS, 486 or similar? Yes it takes us back to those joyful memories of coding forever, hitting execute and watching with glee as it drew a blue star in 30 seconds. Take your data easily to them (or share with a friend) via a colorful 3.5 floppy. Now you can work on reports while you also play classics like The Oregon Trail or Odell Lake.   

Sticky note: ever just wanted to share one quick dashboard with your boss that shows how your conversions are trending “up and to the right,” but you just can’t get them to read your email? We hear you. Export just one graph to a bright fluorescent sticky note and put it right on their desk where they can’t ignore it. You’ll soon be the most talked about marketer at the water cooler. 

Papyrus: papyrus, the thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant is back. First manufactured in Egypt as far back as the third millennium BC, it is actually still used by communities living in the vicinity of swamps. We’ve heard the requests loud and clear: papyrus report exports would be an exciting option that would provide a “wow” factor at your next presentation and make your data more tangible. Just be sure you keep them in a dry climate where it is most stable. Next time your HIPPO questions the data break out the Papyrus and Abacus and prove them wrong!

Updated 'send to' section - beyond email:

Fax Machine: have a client or executive who prefers to receive faxes? No problem. You can now export reports, in full color, directly to the fax machine of your choice along with a branded cover page.

Electronic Telegraph: have a friend still obsessed with 1800’s business culture? Put on a monocle, your classiest suit and get ready to send a telegraph with an encoded message of the data of your choosing. For those super important “your eyes only” reports we also support encrypted morse code options as well. Note, the cost of sending 10 words (approximately 45 characters) is $1.55 (per the going rate of the 1850’s) so choose the data you send wisely. 

Carrier Pigeon: pigeons aren’t just used to sort our web index any longer. We’ve trained a select set of our trusty PigeonRank™ pigeons to fly your reports to their intended recipient. Note there is a weight limit associated with this option, so only choose rows 1-25 of data are selected at most or your pigeons may not be able to take off.  

Telegram Messenger: sometimes, it’s necessary to send a physical person to deliver your reports. The send via telegram option will dispatch a telegram messenger on a Google bike to share a physical printout of the reports of your choosing. A future iteration of this option will include telegram messengers dressed up as characters who can deliver “hug-o-gram” reports to cheer people up.

We hope you enjoy these new options and share your data in even more places! 

Posted by the Google Analytics team

...and yes, this is our April Fools' Day joke.