DAA SF Presents ‘Getting Data Right: Optimizing Performance Using Quantitative & Qualitative Practices’

This year the annual Digital Analytics Association (DAA) San Francisco Symposium is taking place on Thursday November 13^th  and will be hosted at University of San Francisco. The theme is "optimizing performance using quantitative and qualitative practices". The DAA SF chapter has lined up industry leaders who will be sharing their thoughts and experiences. We are expecting a great afternoon of discussion followed by a networking reception. Following are the event details:

Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting real-world solutions to the optimization challenges we all face everyday. They will be discussing the principles of qualitative data collection, optimization and the relation to quantitative data they've put into practice. This year we are piloting a new, more interactive format: 15 minutes of content from speakers followed by 10 min of Q&A from the audience, so come ready to participate in a day of analytics sharing and learning, and leave with ideas to put into practice. Our lineup includes:

• Sarah Cho, Survey Monkey
• Jason Conrad, Foresee
• Joe Megibow, Chief Digital Officer, American Eagle
• Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google
• Jim Sterne, Founder, eMetrics
• Rahul Todkar, Intuit
• Jimmy Wong, LinkedIn
• Ryan Zander, Sport Vision

By attending you will:

• Learn how industry leaders use quantitative AND qualitative data to improve their businesses
• Discover how your analytics can drive savvy optimization across multiple channels
• Uncover how marketing attribution's data output leads to more informed marketing decisions
• Learn the latest on optimization best practices from practitioners and vendors 

Theme: Optimizing performance using Quantitative AND Qualitative practices

When: November 13th, registration starts at 12:30, program 1:00pm to to 5:30pm, followed by a networking reception

Where: University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117

Cost: $25 for DAA members/$75 for non-members

Event website and registration: register here.

Space is limited so register early!

This Symposium is organized by local DAA members and volunteers. We encourage you to become a member of the DAA and join our local efforts. Become a member and reach out to one of the local chapter leaders, Krista, Charles or Feras.

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Announcement from the Emetrics Summit

Today, in a speech to the entire Emetrics Summit audience, Brett Crosby from Google announced the beta launch of a new tool, Website Optimizer.

Website Optimizer is a free tool that helps AdWords advertisers test different landing pages and determine which one drives the most conversions. A true multivariate testing tool, Website Optmizer allows you to test variations of headlines, promotional copy, and images. The tool allows you to update your site with the winning test combination and continue to experiment.

The beta launch of Website Optimizer is a limited release that is offered to AdWords advertisers on a sign-up basis.

Professional, consulting and implementation services for customers will be provided by select Google partners such as Optimost, EpikOne, and ROI Revolution who include Website Optimizer within their suite of professional offerings.

For more details, read the Google AdWords Blog post.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Online Retailers: The Secret to Seasonal Success in 2014

Plan ahead.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the holiday rush begin earlier and earlier. And we’ve also noticed that the shopping frenzy is extending beyond the traditional season, with transaction rates in 2013 boasting lifts even after Christmas. These trends make for a lot of opportunity for online retailers, but you need to play your cards right. The most important thing you can do to ensure seasonal success is to plan your digital strategy now.  We’ve analyzed transaction behavior from a portion of our Google Analytics accounts over the 2013 holiday season to develop a guide for seasonal success. 

Which days drive the most transactions?

In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft a strategy that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.

As digital retailers are well aware, Cyber Monday is THE digital shopping day of the year.  It generates the most transactions of any single day and, in 2013, saw a transaction rate lift of 170% over average.  In second place is Black Friday, a day that has increased in digital importance over the last three years. By 2013, the transaction rate on Black Friday was 114% higher than average.  Beyond these two stars, the table below shows you the top days in 2013 by transaction volume and the lift in transactions rates on each day.

In general, beyond Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the Mondays and Tuesdays before Christmas in December tend to generate the highest volume of transactions.  Interestingly, the highest transaction days are not correlated to the days with the most sessions (traffic to your site), so avoid using the top session days as a proxy for the top transaction days.

How can I drive sales on the top transaction days?

The holiday season generates some of the highest transaction rate spikes and the lowest dips for the entire year. In order to drive digital sales successfully, it’s important that you adjust your bids for auction-based media, such as search ads, appropriately to account for higher transaction rates on key dates and throughout the season.  As you navigate the holiday season, use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier for auction-based media (learn more about bid adjustments). This adjustment schedule reflects the increased value of clicks that are more likely to convert, and helps ensure that you stay ahead of competitors and  get in front of the right consumers. The transaction rate lift for the top days are shown in the table above, while the chart below gives you an idea of the lift for the weeks surrounding the holiday season.

As you can see, the top days generate some of the biggest transaction rate lifts, but there’s also plenty of upside in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving as well as right before Christmas.  A smart retailer will generate a bid schedule for the entire season, starting 4-5 weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Marketing to consumers is notoriously tricky and often trend-driven, making the holiday season a difficult and uncertain time for retailers. However, with proper pre-season preparation, digital retailers can set themselves up for seasonal success in 2014.  If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach to your business, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking tool.  For more strategies for the holiday season, check out our holiday tips blog post and best practices checklist.

About the Data

In order to perform this analysis, we looked at billions of sessions across millions of Google Analytics accounts. We used session and transaction trends; and we looked at the percentage of sessions that included a transaction to calculate transaction rates. The data includes only accounts that have authorized Google to share website data in an anonymous way (read more). For questions, comments, or praise please contact us at gaqi@google.com 

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg from the Google Analytics team.

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Making tag management more accessible and powerful

Today we are happy to introduce improvements to Google Tag Manager that will make both marketing and IT teams happy: 

• New APIs that tailor the power of Google Tag Manager to your unique needs
• A new intuitive interface to help you launch and edit tags even faster
• More 3rd-party templates to make tagging easier

Many large enterprises use Google Tag Manager to streamline and simplify website and mobile app tagging. It helps marketers control the end-to-end process of adding website tags, while IT departments save time they can spend on more strategic projects. InsureandGo has been using Google Tag Manager for all their tagging needs:

“Before, we missed opportunities because tag changes required a website release. Since we’ve enabled Google Tag Manager on the site, it’s enabled the marketing team to measure more on-site actions. For example, using Google Tag Manager to track on-page events such as specific clicks and form submissions helps us understand more granular customer actions, how to market and what to sell. We can make decisions much quicker and see within a few weeks whether the strategy has worked, whereas before it would have taken six to nine months.” Simon Everett, Head of Marketing

Let's look at the new features.

Introducing Google Tag Manager API

Sometimes you just want things your own way. We understand! The new full-featured Google Tag Manager API lets you customize the infrastructure to suit your needs, whether that means building your own tools or better integrations with your existing workflow. From creating and managing users to previewing and publishing containers and tags, the API provides all the power of the web interface.

For example, the new API makes it easy to manage user access in bulk. It's easy to set permissions for many users at once, or set up your own role-based permissions and let the API give the right level of access to the right people in your organization.

Agencies can use the API to easily manage large tagging setups for their clients: create a master container template, specify variations (such as the domain, or the ad campaign ID) in a Google Sheets doc, and use the API to automatically deploy to multiple containers and keep those containers in sync. 

Our partner Novartis has been able to scale more easily by using Google Tag Manager APIs:

We have a strong data-driven culture at Novartis and thus in the digital space we’re naturally interested in using data and insights to improve the usability and experience of our websites. With many brands and websites across the globe, collecting web analytics data can become time consuming. Two challenges we have faced are data consistency and tagging implementation across many sites. We developed a process where we use the Google Tag Manager API to eliminate a manual, error-prone, process and thus were able to shift our attention from several low-value tasks to determining how to create a great digital experience for our customers.

Angela Grammatas - Digital Analytics Manager for Novartis

More coverage for 3rd-party tags

Starting in the next few weeks, you'll see more 3rd-party templates in the tag creation flow. We've made it easier for marketers to add tags and minimize errors while doing so. When adding a new tag of your own, you'll select from a list of 3rd-party providers and be underway in just a few clicks. We now offer support for tags from AdRoll, Marin, Comscore, Bizo, Clicktale, Neustar, Distillery, Turn, Mediaplex, VisualDNA, quantcast, Criteo and many more to come soon. Don't see the tag you need? No problem: you can add it immediately as a custom HTML tag. You can also ask to have a new tag template included in future releases, as Tag Manager will continue to add new tag templates. You'll find the full list of tag templates in our help center.

Creating a new tag (click image for full-size).

A more intuitive interface

We think tag management should be easy even for non-technical users. Even if you're new to Google Tag Manager, you'll be using the improved interface within minutes. Tasks are intuitive and structured much the same way as in AdWords and Google Analytics. Our new updates include:

• A default workflow that's simpler and clearer
• Instant search and autocomplete that can help you find anything in your Google Tag Manager containers
• New keyboard shortcuts to simplify life for power users

The goal: enable marketing managers to easily add and update tags.

The new container overview page (click image for full-size).

We are confident you'll find the new Google Tag Manager easier to use and a more powerful solution for your web and app tagging needs. If you are already using Google Tag Manager, you can try out the new user interface today by logging in your accounts and following the instructions. New to Google Tag Manager? Get started today!

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager Google Tag Manager

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Dynamic remarketing now available to advertisers across all verticals

This post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Over the next few weeks we are rolling out dynamic remarketing to all verticals including hotels, flights, real estate, classifieds, jobs, auto, finance and education. Since we launched dynamic remarketing for retailers, many advertisers like Bebe Stores, Netshoes, and Build Direct have been driving better results and more profits from their remarketing campaigns.

Highlighting what matters most to your customers

Dynamic remarketing shows site visitors tailored ads that feature the products they viewed on your website, and related products they might be interested in. Let’s say you sell cars and offer hundreds of makes and models in multiple cities. With dynamic remarketing, you can build one ad that will dynamically show tailored messaging to your site visitors, like the cars they engaged with on your site, and similar cars in that city and price range. Beta clients across multiple verticals reported a 2x increase in conversion rates and 60% reduction in CPA, on average, when they added dynamic ads to their remarketing campaigns.*

Display ads built for mobile, optimized for conversion value 

• When advertisers add mobile targeting to their remarketing campaigns, we’ve seen conversion volume increase by 15% on average at the same price. That's why all our dynamic remarketing templates are mobile-optimized to deliver ads seamlessly across screens. Learn more. 
• Dynamic remarketing with automated bidding can boost performance by calculating optimal bids for each impression in real-time. This means if you sell an $800 camera and a $20 flashlight, AdWords will automatically prioritize winning more of the $800 conversions than the $20 conversions. This helps to maximize the total value of your conversions, not just the number of conversions.  Learn more. 

Customers driving success with dynamic remarketing  

In travel, Hotel Urbano built a single dynamic ad that showed each prospective traveler the package, hotel or cruise most relevant to them. Dynamic ads improved their return on ad spend by 38%, and drove 415% more revenue compared to standard remarketing. Mariana Filippo, senior marketing analyst at Hotel Urbano, says it made business more efficient “since we don’t have to change creatives every day across over 4,000 packages across 183 different countries. It keeps up with our frequency so we can deliver the right ad with the right user.”

In flights, Jet Airways customized ads based on where and when people were looking to fly, so someone browsing flights from New York to London could see a special offer on business class tickets on the exact day they’re looking to fly. They doubled conversions at a 65% lower CPA by adding dynamic ads to their remarketing strategy.




In local deals, India's largest online B2B marketplace IndiaMART used dynamic remarketing to recommend new suppliers to existing customers, increasing lead volume by 400% at a 60% lower CPA. Saugata Halder, product marketing manager at IndiaMART offers this advice: "For marketplaces like us, it’s imperative to showcase the wide range of products available to our buyers. Dynamic remarketing allowed us to reach a larger segment of our customers with personalized ads and to maximize the impact of our marketing efforts.”

Join us for a Hangout on Air

Learn how you can get started with Dynamic Remarketing. Join us for a live Hangout on Air with Google product managers and experts on Thursday, October 9th at 9:00am PT/ RSVP here.

For more information visit the AdWords Help Center. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can visit the Google Analytics Help Center to learn how to use your existing tags to get started with dynamic remarketing.

Posted by Jyoti Vaidee, Product Manager Dynamic Display Ads

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*Campaign results may vary across advertisers 

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