Daily Data-Informed Decisions With Google Analytics Premium and Google BigQuery

The American Precious Metals Exchange (APMEX) is the leading purveyor of precious metals, serving millions of customers worldwide. The company partnered with E-Nor, a Google Analytics Premium Authorized Reseller, to better understand the customer journey and gain insights to improve marketing initiatives.

The first challenge they tackled was to integrate various data assets by exporting Google Analytics Premium data to Google BigQuery. This was accomplished using both the BigQuery export and the User ID features to connect website behavioral data to the company internal customer profiles. This enabled APMEX to use data more effectively to interact with different types of customers.

In addition, by bringing Google Analytics data into the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, they empowered their internal teams to make data-informed decisions on a daily basis. For example, when customers call, site usage information is now available to the customer representative talking them. 

“We have found BigQuery data to be immediately actionable. It focuses our marketing efforts, personalizes our onsite experiences, and improves the effectiveness of our sales department. When used in conjunction with our current data systems, there is seemingly no question about our customers that cannot be answered. It’s that powerful.”— Andrew Duffle, Director FP&A, Analytics & Optimization, APMEX, Inc.

As a result of the work mentioned above, APMEX has decreased the average cost per acquisition (CPA) by more than 20% while maintaining the same level of new customer orders. 

They have also used Google Analytics Premium data to build a statistical model to target valuable customers earlier in their life cycle. For customers identified in the model, the company has increased email open rates by 58%, email conversion rates by 62%, and revenue per email by 163% as compared to the overall business. 

To read more about how APMEX and E-Nor used Google Analytics Premium along with BigQuery in order to make more informed decisions, download the full case study.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate.

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New media partnerships and ad solutions for mobile app promotion

As complexity increases in the app ecosystem, successful developers are looking for new ways to measure, manage, and optimize across multiple ad networks and operating systems.  This morning, at our annual I/O conference, we announced via Livestream a new set of media partnerships and ads offerings designed to meet the unique needs of mobile app marketers.  

Transparent, open and reliable measurement solutions

For app developers looking to drive installs and engagement, it’s critical to understand the effectiveness of various media partners and placements. That’s why we have been investing in solutions to help developers apply consistent measures across a fragmented ecosystem of ad networks, and understand the quality of users that each delivers.  

Google Analytics for Apps provides an industry-leading solution for in-app analytics that is increasingly benefiting advertisers as they seek more transparency into ad effectiveness across networks.  You can already use Google Analytics to track the performance of your mobile app install campaigns and understand the lifetime value of your users on both Android and iOS. As of today, we’ve built partnerships with 20+ ad networks including InMobi and Millennial Media since launching iOS conversion tracking late last year. Data integration with these partners provides a comprehensive view of app value across networks based on the metrics developers care about (i.e., LTV and retention), helping you make better decisions on where to spend your advertising dollars. In the next few months, you’ll be able to “postback” your conversions to referring networks in order to optimize your traffic -- all made possible with a single SDK. 

And it's not just about our measurement solutions.  We recognize that developers should have choices when it comes to attribution vendors, and are committed to open solutions for the industry.  That’s why we also announced the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into AdWords. Working with third parties, including Adjust, Appsflyer, Apsalar, Kochava, and Tune, we are able to increase measurement accuracy between different trackers in AdWords, ensuring your data is accurate and  reliable.

By partnering with these leading ad platforms and tracking systems, we believe we can make the entire mobile apps ecosystem stronger and more connected -- all with the goal of making developers more successful.

But we didn’t stop there. 

It’s easier than ever to promote your apps across Google 

For developers looking to promote their app, we offer a variety of placements across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, and YouTube.  And earlier this year, we announced Search Ads on Google Play. By showing ads alongside app search results, you can reach consumers right when they’re looking for a new app, at the moment they are ready to install. 

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Today we announced Universal App Campaigns, a new campaign type that allows advertisers to reach consumers across Google media more efficiently and effectively.  Universal App Campaigns offers a simple way to set up install ads for your Android apps in AdWords or directly from the Google Play Developer Console. 

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With a single campaign, you can scale your reach across Google Search, the AdMob network, mobile sites, YouTube and Google Play. Just provide us with a few inputs about your app — what your ad creative will say, the audience you wish to reach, and how much you want to spend — we’ll do the rest for you. Behind the scenes, our ad creation and bidding engines will help maximize performance for your campaigns so you can spend more time building and enhancing your apps.  Search Ads on Google Play and Universal App Campaigns will be rolled out to developers and advertisers in the coming months.

Complete solutions for your entire business

Today at I/O we also announced solutions to help you develop apps, engage users organically, and earn more money from your app.  Our innovations in analytics and ads are designed to complement these offerings, and allow you to grow your business with measurement solutions that are open and reliable, and promotion tools that make ad buying easier and more effective.  Thank you to all the developers out there who are building these experiences. We look forward to engaging with your apps and supporting your ongoing innovation by working closely with you and your partners in the ecosystem.

Posted by: Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management

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Marketo Scores 10X Higher Conversion Rate With Google Analytics

"Google Analytics has helped us increase the effectiveness of our AdWords remarketing campaigns by improving the targeting of our audiences and allowing us to present more relevant ads." 

—Mike Telem, VP of Product Marketing at Marketo 

Marketo, a leading marketing automation company, is a strategic partner for thousands of companies. To take their own marketing to the next level, Marketo needed an analytics platform that was flexible enough to combine external data with user site behavior. They wanted to seamlessly leverage that data to improve the relevance of their marketing.

Marketo used a two-step approach for their marketing: first they used Marketo's Real-Time Personalization (RTP) product to identify characteristics—such as product interest and industry type—of Marketo's website visitors. Then they passed this data to Google Analytics in the form of events. This allowed Marketo to see Google Analytics visitor demographics and behavior information next to Marketo's RTP-identified characteristics for a more holistic picture of their user base in Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics as the single source for customer data, Marketo segmented audiences in Analytics based on conversion stage or business vertical. With native integrations between Google Analytics and AdWords, Marketo was able to pass these specialized remarketing lists to AdWords and serve more personalized remarketing ads to its users in just a few, easy clicks.

These tailored ads had a huge impact and Marketo saw a jump in both engagement and conversions. Across the board, remarketing with Google Analytics drove a 10X higher conversion rate compared to traditional display marketing campaigns. Marketo also saw 200% more conversions in its B2C segment and an increase of 150% in conversions for its enterprise visitors.

To read the full case study, click here. 

Posted by: Kelley Sternhagen, Google Analytics Marketing 

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Google Analytics Hackathon in London - Retrospective

On March 25th, the Google Analytics Premium team hosted the first Google Analytics Hackathon in London. 18 developers from several agencies worked on the Google offices for a full day session of ‘hacking’. They connected devices like motion sensors, cameras, Raspberry Pi mini computers and even helicopters to send data to Universal Analytics using the Measurement Protocol - using “simple” technology to simulate real world applications.

The goal of the event was to help agencies innovate and think out of the box about how to use the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol with to collect valuable data from other sources than just websites and apps. Each group received a ‘hackathon kit’, consisting of Raspberry Pis, motion detectors, cameras, Google Glass, smart watches, barcode scanners, credit card readers, Smart Things home automation sets, beacons, some basic python scripts, documentation and one Android controlled helicopter.

The teams were free to build what they wanted and came up with great solutions. Here are the most innovative ideas:

1. A helicopter enthusiast racetrack: Hobby pilots swipe their member cards to log to the system and fly a remote controlled helicopter along a racetrack - Google Analytics successfully measures lap times and stores them with the pilot customer ID.
   
2. The burglar alarm: Detects a burglary using real time events in Google Analytics with a motion detector and a camera.
   
3. Healthy cat: Decides how much you feed your cat at night based on how many times the cat entered and left the house as measured by Google Analytics.

Here are some of the feedback we received from developers.

“It was an inspirational session and we already started experimenting with measurement protocol more and come up with some innovative ideas tailored to our clients” - BadriNarayanan Srinivasan, iProspect UK. 

“Something to highlight about the event was the chance to work with new and interesting technologies (bar code and card scanners, Android watches, Google Glass) and to integrate these with Google Analytics. Learning about new applications to help integrate GA/the use of the Measurement Protocol with Android and iOS apps was also awesome” - Jeff Lukey, Periscopix

“The day was brilliant and organised very well. It was great to be given such a wide range of technologies to try and use” - David Nwosu, DBi

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Romina Rodriguez 

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Supermetrics: Bringing more of your cost data into Google Analytics

The following is a guest post from Supermetrics, a Google Analytics Technology Partner.

Google Analytics has some great tools to help you keep track of how well your ad campaigns bring new users to your website, including Goals, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Enhanced Ecommerce. But acquisition or conversion data alone don’t give you the full picture of ad performance. To understand how well your campaigns are doing, you need to contextualize conversion rates with cost data. 

Set up automatic cost data uploads 

AdWords linking lets you see your AdWords data imported to your Google Analytics account, though getting data from other sources can take longer and be a more manual process. You can make the process easier and go faster with a tool like Supermetrics Uploader add-on. 

Built using the Google Analytics Data Import feature, Supermetrics Uploader lets you set up automatic daily uploads from your Facebook Ads and Bing Ads with just a few clicks. You can also use Supermetrics Uploader to to import historical advertising data going back several years, and use it to manually upload CSV formatted data from any source. If your ad destination URLs are tagged with utm parameters, the imported cost data will be mapped to Google Analytics session data, and you’ll immediately see your return on ad spend (ROAS) and revenue per click (RPC) metrics for each campaign.

Watch this one-minute video to get an overview of Supermetrics Uploader.

See all of your cost data in your reports

Supermetrics Uploader can help get you a clear picture of how all your campaign spend compares with the results without having to switch between different reporting systems.

Within twenty-four hours after scheduling your first upload with Supermetrics Uploader, your data will start appearing in your Google Analytics Cost Analysis report, and in any of your Custom Reports that include ad cost, impressions, or clicks. All of your imported data will also be available in any 3rd party tools that connect to the to Google Analytics Reporting API.

For more information, visit the Supermetrics Uploader listing in the Google Analytics Partner Gallery or the Supermetrics Uploader website.

- The Google Analytics Developer Relations team

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