Launching Real-Time Events and Conversions Reports out of Beta

It wasn’t too long ago that we launched events and conversions in Google Analytics Real-Time reports. We’ve heard from many of you who are using Real-Time reporting to test changes to your site, create dashboards to monitor your traffic and goals, or make rapid decisions about what content to promote today.   

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Real-Time events and conversions reports will be coming out of Beta to all users over the next few weeks. Based on your feedback, we’ve refined these reports to make them even more valuable:  you’ll soon see them in App profiles, and we’ve also added dedicated metrics for Unique Visitors.  

Events and Conversions in App Profiles

Once the development is done, launching a new version of your app is always a bit nerve-wracking. So many problems can happen at that stage, and most of the channels for finding out that things went wrong aren’t very helpful for helping you know how your whole user base is seeing things. Wouldn’t you like to know what your users are experiencing, not just what your servers or social media are telling you? With event tracking in real-time, you can use event labels and values to measure interactions at your users’ devices, so you can best understand and respond to what users are seeing in the wild.

(Click image for full-sized version)

Perhaps your latest release adds some new social features, and you want to maximize the number of people sharing content. You can add an event to a small interaction, or a view snippet to a dedicated dialog screen. Once you’ve done that, create a goal based on that interaction, and see it show up in real-time as users help spread the word.

Unique Visitors for Events and Conversions

Google Analytics users are a creative bunch, and use events and conversions for an incredibly wide variety of things - from caffeine to detailed web interactions. We’re always doing our best to help you understand your users better, which is why we’ve added Active Visitors metrics to the Real-Time Events and Conversions reports. Sharing a link or staying on a page for several minutes is great, but it’d be even better to be able to understand what percentage of your users hit a certain event or reach a particular goal in real time.  

When you create a new advertising campaign, blog post, or social media engagement, your traffic usually goes up - but without a knowledge of how individual users behave, it’s difficult to see the quality of your traffic as it changes. By looking at Active Visitor Conversions in real-time, you can better understand your conversion funnel as it’s happening: whether users are just browsing, or whether they’re actively engaging and converting.  

We hope you find the new reports valuable! We’d love to hear how you use them - let us know in the comments. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Jon Mesh, Google Analytics team

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Improve your website’s performance with the new Speed Suggestions report

Users prefer fast sites. And businesses benefit from it: faster sites tend to have lower bounce rates, increased customer satisfaction and better engagement. Site owners agree, and it shows in their actions taken to optimize site speed: we’re pleased to see from our own benchmarks over the last two years the web is getting faster (not only desktop, even mobile access is around 30% faster compared to last year).

Making your own site faster is something you can act on today and one of the best ways to improve user experience. To help, we’re excited to launch the new Speed Suggestions report in our suite of website performance reports. Not only can you measure and visualize the performance of your website, but you can now also speed up the slowest pages with concrete and actionable suggestions.

Speed Suggestions report

The new Speed Suggestions report shows the average page load time for top visited pages on your website and integrates with the PageSpeed Insights tool to surface suggestions for improving the pages for speed. The PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes the contents of a web page and generates a speed score and concrete suggestions.  The speed score indicates the amount of potential improvement on the page.  The closer the score is to 100, the more optimized the page is for speed.

In the report, you can click through a suggestions link to see a page with all of the suggestions sorted by their impact on site speed. Example suggestions include reducing the amount of content that needs to load before your users can interact with the page, minifying JavaScript, and reducing redirects. Note that if you rewrite your urls before displaying the url in Analytics, or your pages requires a login (see the help article for more details), then the PageSpeed Insights tool may not be able to analyze the page and generate a score and suggestions.

If you would like to dig into the which of your pages take the most time for your users to load, check out the existing Page Timings report which breaks down the average page load time for each page.  Once you’ve identified your slowest pages, you can use the new Speed Suggestions report to improve them. For more general suggestions on how to improve your website, check out these performance articles, and read more about the new report in the detailed help center article.  As always, we welcome feedback on ways to improve the report for our users.

For more help, visit our Google Developers site with tools tips and ideas on making the web faster.

Posted by Chen Xiao, Google Analytics Team

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Digital Analytics Association Symposium in San Francisco: End-to-End Data Measurement & Visualization

The annual Digital Analytics Association (DAA) San Francisco Symposium is happening on November 12^th  and this year we are happy to host the event at Google’s San Francisco office. The theme this year is end-to-end data measurement and visualization and the DAA SF chapter has lined up industry leaders who will be sharing their experiences. We are expecting a great afternoon of discussion followed by a networking reception. Below are the event details, please join us!

Our lineup of great speakers is focused on presenting real-world solutions to the challenges you face everyday. The lineup includes:

• Jim Sterne, Target Marketing and the DAA
• Jon Miller, Co-founder and VP of Marketing at Marketo
• Michelle Kiss, Partner at Web Analytics Demystified 
• Joe Megibow, SVP/GM of Omni-Channel eCommerce at American Eagle Outfitters
• Senior Manager, eCommerce Optimization at Symantec
• Laura MacTaggert, Director, Web Analysis & Optimization at Salesforce.com
• and other great speakers

By attending you will:

• Learn how today's consumer interacts with your brand and how to leverage this interaction data for success
• 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 data visualization from practitioners and vendors 

Theme: End-to-end data measurement and visualization

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

Where: Google San Francisco, 345 Spear Street, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

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

Event website and registration: register here.

Space is limited so register early!

Last but not least, 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.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

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