Every year, Google Analytics Certified Partners and Premium customers descend upon Mountain View for our annual summit. Google Analytics team members and Google thought leaders share a glimpse into the future of Analytics and our users and partners have the opportunity to network and share ideas. The 2013 theme of the Summit is Access, Empower, Act. So how does that translate to practical terms? As shared at the Summit, we want to help you do 3 things:
Act
You heard details on how Analytics helps you accomplish each this morning in the livestream sessions from our VP Engineering Paul Muret and Product Management Director Babak Pahlavan. We also wanted to share an update of what new features were announced in case you missed anything. Following is round up of some of the cool things we're working on shared at the Summit:
Paul Muret, Google VP of Engineering, delivering opening keynote
Access
Google Tag Manager: Auto-event tracking - no more custom-code needed
Tracking events on the page has been a major pain point, both for those that use Google Tag Manager and those that don’t. Until now, if you wanted to tell Google Analytics that a user has clicked a button or submitted a form, you’d need to add custom JavaScript to the page. Launched October 1st, Auto-Event Tracking lets Google Tag Manager users listen for events on the page without adding any custom code, and then fire data to Google Analytics or other tags. This lets you deploy and iterate your measurement campaigns faster.
APIs For Enterprise
Large companies have unique needs; they have many websites and many users. In the past, it could take many hours to setup Google Analytics. With our new Google Analytics Enterprise APIs, IT teams can programmatically setup and configure Google Analytics accounts, saving time, and giving them more time to analyze data.
GA Premium SLA Expansion for Google Tag Manager
All data collection on your site requires tagging, so being able to rely on Google Tag Manager is absolutely critical to Google Analytics customers. We’re very pleased to announce that we’ll be rolling out a Service Level Agreement for Google Tag Manager to Google Analytics Premium customers in Q4 of this year. This will give Premium customers the assurance they need on the reliability of their tag management, backed by Google’s rock-solid infrastructure, as well as implementation support to get them up and running.
Empower
Unified Segments - segmentation that’s better, faster, smarter
We’ve recently re-imagined segmentation to make it even easier for new Analytics users, yet also more powerful for seasoned analysts and marketers. Updates include user segmentation, cohort analysis, sequence segments, segment templates and a fully refreshed UI. Originally announced in July, at the Summit we announced this is now available to a majority of users, and 100% by end of 2013.
ABCs (Acquisition, Behaviors & Conversions) - revamping traffic sources to be more intuitive
Acquisition in Google Analytics contains some of the most popular reports in our product and are accessed daily by active users. That’s why we’ve been thinking about how to evolve these reports to better present your key metrics in intuitive groups while improving channel flexibility. We know how important these reports are to you, and so we’re pleased to share a sneak preview of the new Acquisition reports in Google Analytics to provide a window on your users’ Acquisition-Behavior-Conversion (ABC) cycle: how you acquire users, their behavior on your site after acquisition, and their conversion patterns. They will replace the ‘Traffic’ Sources’ section on the left hand navigation.
Audience Reporting - get a deeper understanding of your users
One of the biggest challenges for online marketers is the lack of information about the people visiting their properties and buying their products. Unlike in physical stores where a manager can tell a lot about the sorts of people coming and going -- What age are they? What’s their gender? What are they interested in? -- online merchandisers and marketers are often flying blind. Audience Reporting solves this problem by providing age, gender, and interest categories as dimensions in Google Analytics. Find out who your site visitors are and gain a better understanding of who your most valuable (highest converting) audiences are so you can effectively reach your best prospects on the Google Display Network. Taking into account demographics and interests, you can efficiently target, bid, and optimize your creative to improve your campaign’s performance.
GA Premium BigQuery Integration - more granular and complex querying of unsampled data
The BigQuery integration is a feature for Google Analytics Premium that allows clients to access their session and hit level data from Google Analytics within Google BigQuery for more granular and complex querying of unsampled data. For those unfamiliar with Google BigQuery, it’s a web service that lets you perform interactive analysis of massive data sets—up to trillions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand. Plus, your data is easily exportable. This feature is now available for Premium users.
Analytics Academy and In-Product Help - sharpen your measurement skills
The world of digital analytics is changing fast, and we want to help analysts and marketers stay current. We’re excited to announce two new educational initiatives, Analytics Academy, is our new online learning platform (also known as a massive, open, online course or MOOC for short). We’ll be offering instructor led courses in analytics related topics multiple times a year. You can sign up for our first course, Digital Analytics Fundamentals, here. We’re also adding more help resources directly in Google Analytics. Simply access the new education window using the education button in the menu bar.
Act
Google Play integration with Mobile App Analytics: see the full picture of your app users
We recently re-imagined in-app analytics from the ground up, speaking the language that matters to app developers and marketers. Since launch, the insights provided by Google Analytics for Mobile Apps are already helping hundreds of thousands of app developers and marketers create more successful Android and iOS apps and experiences by measuring metrics at all stages: acquisition, behavior and conversions. Today we’re excited to announce that the integration between Google Analytics and Google Play, previewed at I/O 2013, is now available to all users! This is especially exciting for app developers and marketers because it’s the first time - and only way - to get a holistic view of the Play acquisition funnel in one easy to understand report.
As we move into 2014 and digital analytics becomes more central to how organizations of all sizes make decisions, we look forward to making our products even better. We’ll be sharing more in-depth news about each of these features over the next few months along with more details on launch dates. Stay tuned to the Google Analytics blog and follow us on Google+ and Twitter so you don’t miss a thing.
Posted by the Google Analytics Team.
