Bid Adjustment Reporting in Google Analytics

Our constantly connected world presents a great opportunity for marketers to be more effective and relevant to customers by optimizing for context -- device, location and time. Earlier this year, we launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take advantage of these new opportunities and manage their ad campaigns more effectively. Bid adjustments make it easy to raise or lower your bids based on user context.

To help you optimize your bid adjustments, we're introducing bid adjustment reporting in Google Analytics, allowing you to analyze performance for each of your bid adjustments across devices, locations, and time of day. You can access the new report by going to Traffic Sources > Advertising >AdWords and clicking the Bid Adjustments link.

With the new Bid Adjustments report, you can take advantage of the full range of visitor metrics available in Google Analytics to optimize your bid adjustments. This provides a window into your users’ behavior, allowing you to optimize bid adjustments based on behavior & goal conversion data like bounce rate and time-on-site.

In addition, with Ecommerce tracking enabled in GA, you can now use this data to fine-tune your bid adjustments in AdWords based on the actual revenue generated, instead of conversions. This means you can optimize for ROI instead of CPA goals.

A quick example illustrates this (illustrated in the above screenshot). Imagine a hotel chain has set Time bid adjustments of +20% on Saturday and Sunday after observing a better ROI on those days. Using this new report in GA, the hotel chain now observes that their ROI on Sundays is actually higher than on other days of the week. The hotel chain's analyst finds that customers book more expensive rooms and longer stays on Sundays. Using this information, the hotel chain increases its existing Time bid adjustment for Sundays.

This new bid adjustment report is available in all Analytics accounts that are linked to AdWords. We recently made it much easier to link your accounts, so now is a great time to do so if you haven’t already. 

Posted by Nikhil Roy, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team

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Digital Analytics Conference in Columbus, Ohio “Accelerates” Analytics Industry Knowledge

Join Web Analytics Demystified, a Google Analytics Certified Partner at ACCELERATE, their annual conference, held this year in Columbus, Ohio. This event will take place on September 26, 2013.

ACCELERATE is an opportunity to learn from the best in the industry in a concise and efficient format. Speakers from FedEx, Nestle Purina, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, Home Depot, many others will be sharing “Ten Tips in Twenty Minutes” on a wide range of digital analytics and marketing optimization topics. Topics at the 2013 event include analytics communication, mobile and social media analytics, tag management, turning around analytics implementations, big data, data integration, and much more. 

Google’s own Krista Seiden will be speaking on “Ten Tips for Getting the Most out of Google’s Analytics Platforms.” Tips will include Krista’s practitioner viewpoint on best uses of Google Analytics dashboards, advanced segments, Content Experiments and Google Tag Manager.

Tickets for ACCELERATE are only $99 USD. Web Analytics Demystified will also be holding two days of Advanced Analytics Education immediately before ACCELERATE. Learn directly from the some of the greatest minds in digital analytics today!

Learn more about ACCELERATE: Conference information, advanced analytics education, and past events.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

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How NRI Netcom uses Analytics to measure user engagement of responsive web design

The following was originally posted to the Analytics Japan blog.

Google recommends responsive web design as a way of optimizing for smartphones and tablets. Responsive web design is a method of identifying the device based on the screen size and adjusting the design using CSS, while sharing one block of HTML across all devices. The concept has also been discussed on the Webmaster Central Blog so head over there for more details.

This post will look at an example of using Google Analytics on a site enabled for responsive web design.

The case involves a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP), NRI Netcom, working on an overseas payment service website for their customer, Seven Bank. NRI Netcom installed Google Analytics for post-optimization data analysis to support Seven Bank's web publishing and marketing. The implementation enabled pages to be served to desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets using responsive web design, all from a single URL.

They used page-level custom variables in Google Analytics to enable NRI Netcom to access reports on each type of page sent out.

For example, page-level custom variables can be set up as follows to identify which CSS version is being displayed: PC, smartphone or tablet.

PC = 960 px or more  

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'fullsize', 3]);

Smartphone = 520 px or less

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'mobile', 3]);

Tablet = 520 px to 960 px 

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'tablet', 3]);

This enables metrics for each screen type to be compared at a glance, as shown below, using Google Analytics Reporting. (The figures on the report are not the actual figures.)

The actual setup was a little more complex. The three screen types (smartphone, tablet and PC) were added, and the display height and width selected for each user tracked. Then, Seven Bank deployed its website in ten languages, as this was to be an overseas payment service.

It was configured to handle three different types of devices, different screen heights and widths, and different languages, as well as to provide instant verification on the Google Analytics Reporting screen.

Several pieces of useful information began to emerge from the Google Analytics data. Firstly, as a result of optimizing for smartphones, there was a clear improvement in engagement and conversions amongst mobile users. Differences between tablet and smartphones were also observed. Engagement metrics such as average time on page and average page views differed widely. Metrics were also found to be clearly different depending on whether the same smartphone/tablet was held horizontally or vertically.

A number of other effects were seen which weren't particularly relevant to conversions. A clearer picture of referral paths for mobiles and their effect on conversions aided understanding of the efficacy of incoming traffic. Whereas organic search won out on pure referral numbers, the number of conversions from users clicking the Seven Bank inquiries link on smartphones to make a call (measured using event tracking) was clearly better at referrals routed through AdWords.

Interesting results were also seen for different languages. It was obvious, for example, that conversions on mobiles were much higher for specific languages.

All of this is actionable data which will continue to help Seven Bank develop marketing strategies and further optimize their mobile site  — read the full case study here (in Japanese).

Posted by Noriyuki Ouchi, Google Analytics Solution Consultant

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Re-imagining Segmentation In Analytics To Help You Make Better Decisions, Faster

One of the most popular and powerful features in Google Analytics is Advanced Segmentation. It lets you isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic. You can select from predefined segments such as "Paid Traffic" and "Visits with Conversions" or create your own segments with a flexible, easy-to-use segment builder. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to current or historical data, and even compare segment performance side by side in reports. 

We’ve recently re-imagined segmentation to make it even easier for new Analytics users, yet also more powerful for seasoned analysts and marketers.

Some of the key updated features include: 

User segmentation

Previously, advanced segments were based on visits. With the new segment, a new option is provided to create user segment. In a user segment, all visits of the users who fit the segment criterias will be selected (such as specific demographics or behaviors). It will be a useful technique when you need to perform user level analysis. 

When you are using a segment template, the text below the template name tells you which kind of segment you are building. When you are creating a segment from advanced ‘conditions’ and ‘sequences’, you can choose to create visits or user segments or even a combination of both. 

Cohort analysis

Measuring users in cohorts provides benefits in the consistency of analysis, and is a technique well applied in the offline world. It helps analyze the long-term benefit of specific groups of customers (for example, customers who first visited within a specified timeframe).

Sequence segment

Sequence segments provide an easy way to segment users based on a series of on site behaviors. For example, customers who started on a specific landing page, visited some particular pages and ended up converting.  User sequences now provide you with capability to define a sequence across multiple visits.

Segment templates

You can always build your segments from scratch, but for most common use cases, building segments from templates will be an easier choice. We have provided 6 templates as ‘Demographics’, ‘Technology’, ‘Behavior’, ‘Data of First Visit’, ‘Traffic Sources’ and ‘E-commerce’ for you to start with. You can combine the configuration in multiple templates to build a segment. 

Fully refreshed new UI

As seen above, the newly refreshed UI makes segmentation simple and makes this powerful feature even more useful. The new segment card design promotes segmentation as a critical analytics technique with better visibility and readability. For users maintaining a fair number of segments, new features are provided to filter, sort and search your segments in both grid view and list view.

The new segmentation version will be rolling out to all users over the next couple of months. View our help center article for more details on how to get started and check out our Analytics Evangelist Justin Cutroni’s blog for a post sharing more reasons to get excited about the new segmentation.

Additionally, the below video provides a quick overview:

Posted by Wayne Xu, Google Analytics team

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Creating a Standard Data Layer for the Tag Management Industry

It’s been an exciting few months for Google Tag Manager. As referenced in our previous post this morning, Google Tag Manager is now serving twice the amount of traffic it was in April 2013 and we have been steadily adding features. Recently, at Google I/O, we announced that  Google Tag Manager will also work with mobile applications. 

This week, a consortium of companies, including IBM, Accenture and more, along with the W3C, announced they are collaborating to create a standard Data Layer.  

The data layer is a core component of Google Tag Manager and a common way for all businesses to implement tag management tools. It’s a standard way to format data within a web page.  Think of the data layer as a central way for analytics and marketing tools to communicate and share data on a web page. 

It's typically used in two ways: 1. to store data and provide a clear separation between the data and presentation layer of the page and 2. to store data when some type of user activity occurs.  The information in the data layer can then be consumed by different web technologies, like analytics tools or marketing tools, through a tag management platform.

Through the W3C community group we’re supporting the effort to standardize the format and syntax of the data layer. This will make it a lot easier for businesses to add data to HTML  and access it with different tools. An industry-wide standard will create a common way that websites and tag management tools can interact - thus making it easier on site owners.

Standards can not exist in a vacuum. They need adoption. Please take some time to learn about this effort and the specification. You can learn more about the work at the W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Standard Community Group site where you can also review the first draft of the Specification. If you’re interested in participating please join the group and help us test and refine the spec.

Posted by Brian Kuhn, Lukas Bergstrom & Justin Cutroni, Google Tag Manager Team

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Solving Tag Management Problems for Large Advertisers

Last year we launched Google Tag Manager to make it easier for marketers to use tools like analytics, conversion tracking and Remarketing without having to edit website code. Google Tag Manager lets marketers place a single tag (a tiny piece of javascript code) on their site, and then with our easy-to-use UI, they can add or update other measurement and marketing tags without bugging the IT folks.

We’ve been thrilled by the response. Google Tag Manager is now serving twice the amount of traffic it was in April 2013, as a significant number of large advertisers with complex tagging needs have signed on.

I’d like to share a few recent Google Tag Manager success stories with you. They range across industries, but all of the customers profiled had a few things in common:

• They needed to deploy a large number of marketing tags to enable their advertising campaigns, often with complex logic around what data to include from the page, and which tags to fire when.
• Marketers were dependent on IT to deploy these tags.
• Limited IT resources meant slow turnaround time, lost insights, and lost revenue.

Smarter Travel Media (an online travel portfolio company), retailer Dafiti, and trip planning company Rail Europe all implemented Google Tag Manager to put marketers back in charge of deploying their campaigns. I’ll let them speak to the results:

“With Google Tag Manager, we can literally deploy a tag in minutes and provide marketing partners with all the custom data they might need. Now, we’re better equipped to optimize our digital campaigns than ever.”

-- Lothaire Ruellan, Director of Online Marketing, Rail Europe

“Google Tag Manager has been very useful so far, cutting our time-to-market on launching new campaigns and media partners, and reducing overhead on IT.” 

- Anderson Kenji Mise, Marketing Intelligence Manager, Dafiti

 “With the Google Tag Manager solution in place, we can deploy tags much faster and with far fewer resources. Therefore, the revenue justification can be smaller and we’re able to test new channels more frequently and with greater speed.”

-- Brett Malone, Senior Manager of Search, Smarter Travel Media

Read the full case studies here:

• Smarter Travel Media Google Tag Manager case study
• Dafiti Google Tag Manager case study
• Rail Europe Google Tag Manager case study

Get started with Google Tag Manager now at the GTM site, watch our introductory webinar for an overview or view our technical implementation webinar to answer your in-depth questions.

Update: have Google Tag Manager questions? We'll be answering them in this thread on Google+.

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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Introducing the Google Databoard: A new way to explore research

The following was originally posted to the Inside AdWords blog.

It’s important for businesses to stay up to date about the most recent research and insights related to their industry. Unfortunately -- with so many new studies and with data being updated so often -- it can difficult to keep up. To make life a bit easier, we created the Databoard for Research Insights, which allows people to explore and interact with some of Google’s recent research in a unique and immersive way. 

The Databoard is our response to three big challenges facing the vast majority of research released today. 

1. Ease of consumption: The databoard introduces a new way of sharing data, with all of the information presented in a simple and beautiful way. Users can explore an entire study or jump straight to the topics or datapoints that they care about. The Databoard is also optimized for all devices so you can comfortably explore the research on your computer, tablet, or smartphone. 

2.  Shareability: Most people, when they find a compelling piece of data, want to share it! Whether its with a colleague, client, or a community on a blog or social network, compelling insights and data are meant to be shared. The databoard is designed for shareability, allowing users to share individual charts and insights or collections of data with anyone through email or social networks. 

3. A cohesive story: Most research studies set out to answer a specific question, like how people use their smartphones in store, or how a specific type of consumer shops. This means that businesses need to look across multiple pieces of research to craft a comprehensive business or marketing strategy. To address this need, the Databoard allows users to curate a customized infographic out of the charts or data points you find important across multiple Google research studies. Creating an infographic is quick and easy, and you can share the finished product with your friends or colleagues. 

The databoard is currently home to four research studies including The New Multi-screen World, Mobile In-store shopper research, Mobile search moments, and more. New studies will be added frequently so be sure to check back often. To get started exploring the Databoard and creating your own infographic visit google.com/think/databoard. 

Posted by Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager

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40 New Data Points In Google Analytics API

Over the past year we’ve added many new features to Google Analytics. Today we are releasing all of this data in the Core Reporting API!

Custom Dimensions and Metrics

We're most excited about the ability to query for custom dimensions and metrics using the API.

Developers can use custom dimensions to send unique IDs into Google Analytics, and then use the core reporting API to retrieve these IDs along with other Google Analytics data.

For example, your content management system can pass a content ID as a custom dimension using the Google Analytics tracking code. Developers can then use the API to get a list of the most popular content by ID and display the list of most popular content on their website.

Mobile Dimensions and Metrics

We've added more mobile dimensions and metrics, including those found in the Mobile App Analytics reports:

• ga:appId
• ga:appVersion
• ga:appName
• ga:appInstallerId
• ga:landingScreenName
• ga:screenDepth
• ga:screenName
• ga:exitScreenName
• ga:timeOnScreen
• ga:avgScreenviewDuration
• ga:deviceCategory
• ga:isTablet
• ga:mobileDeviceMarketingName
• ga:exceptionDescription
• ga:exceptionsPerScreenview
• ga:fatalExceptionsPerScreenview

Some examples of questions this new data can answer are:

• What is the behavior (e.g. avg time on site) of tablet vs. non-tablet visits?
• Which versions of my app are getting the most usage?
• Which screens are generating the most exceptions, and for which app version and OS combination?

Local Currency Metrics

If you are sending Google Analytics multiple currencies, you now have the ability to access the local currency of the transactions with this new data:

• ga:currencyCode
• ga:localItemRevenue
• ga:localTransactionRevenue
• ga:localTransactionShipping
• ga:localTransactionTax

Time Dimensions

We also added new time based dimensions to simplify working with reporting data:

• ga:dayOfWeekName
• ga:dateHour
• ga:isoWeek
• ga:yearMonth
• ga:yearWeek

Sample queries:

• Visits by day of the week
• Visits and pageviews by ISO week

Traffic Source Dimensions

Finally, we've added two new traffic source dimensions, including one to return the full URL of the referral.

• ga:fullReferrer
• ga:sourceMedium

Sample query: the top 10 referrers based on visits (using full referrer).

For a complete list of the new data, take a look at the Core Reporting API changelog.
For all the data definitions, check the Core Reporting API Dimensions and Metrics explorer.
As always, you can check out this new data directly within our Query Explorer tool.
We’re very excited to release this data and thrilled to see what developers build next!

Posted by Srinivasan Kannan & Pete Frisella, Google Analytics API Team

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New AdWords Integration Platform

Advertisers like to see reports in Analytics which are fresh - reflecting their up-to-the-minute AdWords settings - and consistent with the AdWords reporting. Today, Google Analytics is excited to announce that it is rolling out a new AdWords integration infrastructure for our advertisers to realize these benefits. More importantly, the new integration is laying a foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly -  such as Ads - and paving the path for a rich set of reports such as enhanced campaign bid adjustments and Google Display Network targeting settings. Highlighted below are a few ways in which the new platform will start impacting AdWords reports in Google Analytics.

Improved data freshness and consistency

With the new infrastructure, reports will reflect the most recent AdWords settings such as campaign or ad_group names keeping them fresh and consistent with AdWords. In the example below, a user has renamed their campaign thrice from “Big Deal”   “Big Deals”   “Big Deal - Car Accessories”. In the current reports, visits are attributed to the three different campaign names while clicks are attributed to the newest campaign name. After this change,  both visits and clicks metrics would be associated with the most recent campaign name: “Big Deal - Car Accessories”, thus collapsing multiple rows into a single row.

Current Behavior

Campaign	Visits	Impressions	Clicks
Big Deal	542	0	0
Big Deals	381	0	0
Big Deal - Car Accessories	72	68724	1023

New Behavior

Campaign	Visits	Impressions	Clicks
Big Deal - Car Accessories	995	68724	1023

Laying the foundation for richer reporting

The new integration is laying the foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly and for creating new reports with speed. Very soon, advertisers would be able to access reports based on their Enhanced Campaigns’ targeting settings; reports containing rich information to help fine tune ads targeting settings and bid adjustments for improved ROI (Return On Investment).

Show and hide AdWords data via linking

The new integration allows users to show or hide data for auto-tagged AdWords accounts by linking or unlinking the account to a profile. If a user un-links an Adwords account from a profile, all historical data pertaining to the account would be hidden by rolling them up into (not set).

Over the next few weeks, the new AdWords integration platform will be rolled out to GA accounts gradually.

Posted by Narendra Singhal, Google Analytics Team

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Measure What Matters—A Better Approach to Social Attribution

Webinar on Tuesday 7/16
Register for the webinar here.

When it comes to web analytics, one of the biggest complaints from marketers has long been the lack of technology to measure the ROI of social media. Thanks to our exciting integration between Google Analytics and Wildfire by Google that was first announced at thinkDoubleClick in June, those blind spots are now a thing of the past. This webinar will demonstrate how social media impacts the customer journey and then show you how Google Analytics lets you measure that influence in detail.

We’ll start by showing you the best way to set up your modeling and reporting to include all your social marketing efforts. Then we’ll give you a live demo of the Google Analytics integration with Wildfire. Now you’ll be able to see exactly how each and every social message and page published with Wildfire drives traffic and revenue to your website.

The webinar features Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics and Jessica Gilmartin, the Head of Product Marketing for Wildfire by Google. They’ll be joined by Adam Kuznia, Social Media Manager for Maryland Live! Casino, who will share the story of how he built the gaming industry’s largest East Coast social media community from scratch in just six months using Wildfire and Google Analytics, and proved to his management team the ROI of social.

This webinar is Part 1 of a three-part educational series introducing Google and Wildfire analytics integrations, so be sure not to miss it.

Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 5pm GMT

Duration: 1 hr

Level: 101 / Beginner

Register here.

Posted by the Wildfire Team

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