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The latest news, tips and resources straight from the Google Analytics team.
  • October 21, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

    Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

    Google Surveys, a new product from Google Analytics Solutions, launched on Wednesday. Google Surveys makes it easy to get fast, reliable opinions from consumers on mobile devices and across the internet. The goal, as always, is to help you make more informed business decisions, understand your marketing impact, and take the pulse of your brand.

    Today we’re excited to talk with Dylan Lorimer, Lead Product Manager for Google Surveys, about how this product fits in with the rest of Google Analytics Solutions and what the future looks like.

    Q: What is Google Surveys?
    Lorimer: Google Surveys is a online market research tool for making fast, informed, data-driven business decisions. It gives businesses access to conduct research against a representative sample of users on the web and on our mobile app, Google Opinion Rewards. It’s the evolution of Google Consumer Surveys, a product that’s been in the market since 2012 and fields 1M surveys a week.

    Q: How does Google Surveys differ from Google Surveys 360?
    Lorimer: Google Surveys 360 is our enterprise research product; it’s a fully-supported research tool that is integrated into the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Users get advanced audience targeting, dedicated support and consolidated billing, all of which make it easy for big organizations to use. Google Surveys has fewer advanced targeting features, but it’s a pay-as-you-go product so that anyone can use it. Google Surveys is currently available in U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Google Surveys 360 is available in U.S. and Canada.

    Q: How is Google Surveys different from other market research tools?
    Lorimer: Traditional market research research often involves long, time-intensive surveys answered by individuals who have signed up to respond to surveys for compensation. The process is typically slow, costly, and out of reach for most businesses who want to make a quick and informed decision. Google Surveys aims to make high-quality research more accessible, and to bring the customer voice into the process of media performance measurement.

    Q: Why is Google Surveys now part of Google Analytics Solutions?
    Lorimer: Google Analytics Solutions is a set of powerful tools that helps marketers use data to understand their consumers and how they behave. Google Surveys bridges the gap between metrics-based performance measurement and the need many marketers have to get qualitative feedback from their customers on their cross-channel, cross-media marketing campaigns. Google Surveys has grown on its own over the past few years. When we saw the investment Google was making with Google Analytics Solutions to empower the marketer — something we’ve been focused on with Google Consumer Surveys for a few years now — it felt like the obvious choice to provide a missing tool in the portfolio.

    Q: What are some examples of how customers are using Google Surveys?
    Lorimer: YouVisit, a leading virtual reality company, just used us to find out how many of their clients were aware of virtual reality. They suspected a significant number of consumers were at least aware of the concept, and that some percentage would want to try it. But to convince clients to invest in virtual reality content, YouVisit needed hard facts. How many people wanted to try virtual reality? How many were even aware of it? YouVisit turned to Google Surveys to gather those numbers, and they were pleasantly surprised. A statistically significant sample from Google Surveys let them extrapolate that 23 million Americans had already tried virtual reality. With this data, YouVisit can confidently educate clients on virtual reality’s power to engage consumers.

     “Google Surveys empowers YouVisit to accomplish our mission by better understanding what the end customer wants in immersive experience — so we can create those experiences that emotionally engage, that are impactful, that drive a real-life action.” 
    – Suzanne Sanders, Senior Marketing Communications Manager, YouVisit 


    Q: What does the future look like for Google Surveys?
    Lorimer: The future is bright! We see immense potential and we’re excited about new ways we can help marketers and even developers reach their target audience, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure. We’re already serving surveys to over 10 million respondents, so in some ways pulling insights from that is a big data challenge for us — which is the kind of puzzle we like to solve best at Google. So there’s a lot we think we can do to be proactive about providing actionable data to our customers. Google Surveys as a research tool is just the beginning.

    We hope you found this additional information useful. Ready to get started with Google Surveys? Learn more at g.co/surveys.

    Happy surveying!


  • October 20, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

    Spotlight on Google Surveys 360: Getting to “Why” is now easier and faster than ever before.

    Yesterday, we launched Google Surveys 360, a powerful new part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Sometimes it’s enough to know what your customers are buying, where they’re going, and how they’re purchasing. But to really understand their decisions, you want to answer a harder question: Why are they doing it? To get the answer, it turns out you just have to ask.

    That’s why we introduced Surveys 360: to provide a quick, cost-effective way to ask why. The new Surveys 360 is designed to help you get more out of market research by making it easy to create online and mobile surveys that help you make more informed business decisions, faster. You ask the questions, and people browsing the web will answer them as they wait to access premium content like news articles or videos, or as they use the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app.

    Surveys 360 offers several advanced features that help you reach high-priority audiences, test markets, and gain a better understanding of your impact. They include:

    • User list to help you measure the effectiveness of your media campaigns by surveying people exposed to your ads and videos 
    •  ZIP Code targeting that delivers your surveys to high-priority or test markets 
    • Custom Audience panels that take the pulse of brand perception among key consumer groups
    • Occupation and industry targeting to help you do business-to-business research with hard-to-reach professional audiences 


      Surveys 360 quickly analyzes your data and delivers it in easy-to-navigate graphs, demographic segmentations, and cross-tabs. That makes it easy to find fresh insights and help your business thrive.




      BuzzFeed improves client campaigns with Google Surveys 360 

      BuzzFeed is one company using Surveys 360 to measure campaign performance and improve its ad effectiveness.

      BuzzFeed is a global news and entertainment company that creates content intended for sharing, and helps advertising clients tell brand stories with engaging video campaigns. Campaign videos are less like advertisements and more like content people want to share. As they get shared, the campaign reach is extended.

      To prove the impact of this innovative ad strategy, BuzzFeed turned to Surveys 360. As BuzzFeed launches each video campaign, it also releases surveys across the Google Surveys Publisher Network and the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app. They ask people exactly what their client brands want to know: Are the campaign videos memorable and understandable? What messages mattered most and why? Did they motivate sharing? What do consumers want to know next? BuzzFeed uses the Surveys 360 user list targeting feature to automatically put the right surveys in front of the right respondents: people who have seen or interacted with campaign videos.

      Low-cost, high-quality survey data from Surveys 360 lets BuzzFeed give its clients a complete picture of campaign performance, fast. It helps them prove the value of the current campaign and even suggests strategies for the next campaign.

      “With Google Surveys 360, we get more timely results. Everybody seems to want to run these studies to get an understanding of how their campaigns are performing … and what things should we do to make it more impactful in the future.”
      – Margo Arton, Director of Ad Effectiveness, BuzzFeed 

      BuzzFeed’s culture of data-driven experimentation creates success for their clients. Watch our BuzzFeed video case study for more details.

      This is only the beginning! We’ll continue to iterate and offer new features for Surveys 360 in the coming months. It’s available for purchase today in the accounts of all Analytics 360 Suite users in the U.S. and Canada. Go to g.co/surveys to learn more.

      Happy surveying!



    • October 19, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Announcing: Google Surveys 360, the newest product in the Google Analytics 360 Suite

      Today we’re excited to announce a major addition to the Google Analytics 360 Suite and a big step toward bridging brand and performance marketing — the arrival of Google Surveys 360.

      Now for the first time, marketers of all types can get fast, accurate market research — in combination with their marketing performance and analytics data — to help them make key business decisions at the speed of today’s digital world. Google Surveys 360 makes doing market research as easy as buying an airline ticket with your favorite app. It’s available for purchase today in the U.S and Canada as part of the Analytics 360 Suite.

      “Nest uses the Google Analytics 360 Suite and recently beta tested Google Surveys 360. By using our website analytics data, we surveyed shoppers who browsed our product pages but left without purchasing. As marketers we wanted to know: why did shoppers leave our site without purchasing? And that’s exactly what we learned. This insight has given Nest an opportunity to address buyers needs — adding more in-depth product information to our site, turning browsers into buyers.” 
       -Harry Tannenbaum, Head of Analytics, Nest 


      Why surveys? Why now? 


      We launched the Analytics 360 Suite earlier this year with a big goal: to bring enterprise-class marketers the full and integrated set of data and marketing analytics products they need to compete in today’s multi-screen and hyper-speed world.

      Mobile continues changing the customer journey, as 96% of us now use smartphones to get things done.1 More devices, more channels, more choices: the shift is affecting every phase of the funnel from awareness to purchase. And that’s changing the nature of marketing itself. Marketing organizations that used to be divided into brand and performance teams — one for perceptions and trust, the other for sales and leads — are seeing those worlds come together. Marketers are realizing that brand and performance are inherently tied together, with data as the bridge.

      In these conditions, market research has been slow to adapt. Companies spend a lot of money to get to the “why” behind the what, how and where, but traditional research means hiring a research firm, waiting three months or more, and then getting data that’s siloed and may not be sharable.

      This is exactly why we’re integrating Google Surveys 360, previously called Google Consumer Surveys, into the suite. With a panel of 10M+ online respondents and 1M surveys fielded weekly, it offers enterprise marketers (of all types) access to a brand new layer of data and insights into what consumers are doing and thinking.


      An entirely new type of consumer insight 


      Whether you’re a market researcher or a digital or brand marketer, Google Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone in the organization to create a survey, find a specific audience sample, and generate statistically significant results — in just a few days. It’s flexible and powerful, with advanced features that include custom panels to survey specific audiences and the ability to measure ad effectiveness, target by geography (ZIP code), industry, and occupation.

      But that’s just the beginning. Let’s take a look at an example of how integrating Google Surveys 360 into the Analytics 360 Suite drives real value for marketers: tying brand marketing to performance marketing and measuring offline and online interplay, such as consumer response to TV ads.

      TV advertisers and digital marketers now have a fresh way to view performance across every stage of the funnel — all in a matter of days. Google Surveys 360 makes consumer ad awareness and interest research possible: just deploy an online survey to a validated, representative sample of respondents in the geography of your choice. Google Surveys 360 can ask questions about TV ad recall during and after broadcast, then follow up with questions on topics like intent and favorability. Combine this with data modeling and analysis by Google Attribution 360, and the result is a full-funnel view of marketing performance, from awareness to action. (See how Google executed this strategy during the 2016 Summer Olympics.)




      “We put an emphasis on innovation. Collecting competitive data and industry benchmarks is critical to do this. Google Surveys 360 helps us get data on the current state of the market. The results are reliable and delivered at the speed we need so our teams can continue developing the best products without delay.” 
       – Corinna Proctor, ‎Sr. Manager, User & Design Research, Lenovo 


      What’s next? 


      Google Surveys 360 is a big addition to the Analytics 360 Suite family. It’s also a cousin to Google Surveys, our pay-as-you-go online market research tool — available in 12 countries. We’re excited about the ways both of these products can help businesses make fast, informed data-driven business decisions.

      Marketers and developers can finally reach the target audience they want, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure, in days rather than months. There’s much more we think we can do to provide actionable data to our Analytics 360 Suite customers and integrate survey data even more with the other products in the suite.

      To learn more, watch this blog for the next couple of days! We’ll dive deeper into this new product and show you how it works. Additionally, as part of this update, we’ll begin to sunset our older information hubs so check out these new resources:




       Happy surveying!

      1 Google “How Mobile Has Changed the Way We Get Things Done” study, September 2016. 



    • October 18, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Digital Analytics Association Symposium in San Francisco presents ‘Stranger Things: What’s Lurking in Your Data’

      You can avoid the Demogorgon of Digital Analytics by attending the DAA SF Symposium on November 9th where you’ll get tips and tricks on personalization and how to survive Black Friday from your friendly neighborhood Digital Analytics practitioners. Join us for a full day of great topics covering the latest from the struggles to the new developments in our world and come out prepared to face the stranger things lurking in your data. You’ll meet an awful lot of awesome people (like you) who can help you avoid the Upside Down of Analytics. We won’t let you end up like Barb.



      Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting awesome tips and real-world solutions to the challenges we all face everyday. Our lineup includes:
      • June Dershowitz, Head of Data Governance, Twitch 
      • John Wallace, Analytics Entrepreneur 
      • Kevin Dalias, Director of Predictive Data, RadiumOne 
      • Josephine Foucher, Product Manager, Hotwire 
      • Zann Aeck, Director of Digital Marketing, Net App 
      • Martijn Scheijbeler, Director of Marketing, TheNextWeb 
      • John Mesh, Google Product Manager, Optimize 360 
      • Caitlin Anderson, Web Optimization Analyst, American Eagle 
      • Anita Fong, Analytics Manager, Clorox 
      • Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google 
       For the first time, the DAA San Francisco Symposium will also be hosting a “Women in Analytics” lunch, sponsored by Google. This lunch is open to all symposium attendees and will feature a panel of esteemed women in the analytics industry who will share their thoughts on the industry, career, and the future. Questions and participation encouraged! Can’t make the whole day? Join us just for lunch!

      Theme: Stranger Things: What’s Lurking in Your Data 
      When: November 9th, registration starts at 9:30am, program 10:00am to to 4:30pm, followed by a networking reception 
      Where: Galvanize San Francisco-SoMa, 44 Tehama Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 
      Cost: Members of the DAA: Early Bird $75 | Standard $99 | Onsite $124 Non-Members: Early Bird $99 | Standard $124 | Onsite $149 Lunch-only: $20 (includes catered box lunch and panel speakers/discussion) 
      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 Prolet.

      Posted by Krista Seiden, Google Analytics Advocate

    • October 14, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Never Leave Your Data Unattended: 6 Custom Alert Areas You Shouldn’t Miss

      Alexander Rehnborg works as SEO Specialist at Visma Spcs, a Google Analytics 360 customer, supplying over half of all small business owners in Sweden with accounting software.

      Did you ever log on to Google Analytics to casually explore statistics, only to discover you’d missed out on important changes? As marketers we cannot afford to be “too late.” 

      Changes to consumer behavior, website performance and traffic trends often occur quickly without much notice. Still, a lot of marketers only explore their analytics data manually during certain days of the week or even month. Imagine your important AdWords campaign or product page suddenly taking off, and you’re not in the control room to react?

      With that in mind, I will discuss six vital areas you should monitor automatically with what I believe to be a the vastly underused feature in Google Analytics: “Custom Alerts.” If you didn’t read yet, check out last week’s announcement on the home of Custom Alerts.

      Automated and Custom Alerts

      Luckily, Google Analytics offers several features to monitor important data changes and alert you instantly. Two of the most important features are Custom Alerts and Automated Insights. The latter is a newly introduced part of the GA Assistant app for Android and iOS, using machine learning to discover critical insights among your data and alert you instantly.

      In addition to the automated insights, you have the ability to set up your own custom alerts according to the KPIs you’re especially interested in, and be alerted by both email and sms. Once you receive the alerts, you may click on the link for the report to be taken straight into a dashboard, only displaying the metrics changes you’ve been alerted about.

      This gives you complete focus on quickly understanding what has contributed to the change in data. You will find the Custom Alerts under the customization tab in the left sidebar of the View you want to monitor (see screenshot below). 



      You will find Custom Alerts under the Customization tab in the left sidebar.

      6 Custom Alert Areas You Shouldn’t Miss

      The scope and magnitude of the data change you’re monitoring will vary according to each business. Therefore it’s important to continuously refine the alerts guided by the common data movements you’ve seen historically for your site. Let’s start out with the six basic areas of metrics we want to monitor, inspired by LunaMetrics’ excellent guide.

      1. Emergency

      This is one of the main reasons you want to monitor your data in the first place – if something goes wrong, you want to know as soon as possible. Since the quickest alert you may receive is being sent daily, it’s recommended to pay extra attention to the Automated Insights function inside the Google Analytics Assistant app. Each of these alerts will be set to a daily time period.

      Average Page Load time > 10 seconds Today

      Be sure to set a couple of these alerts, one for the entire site and one for each page critical to your business. Slow load times not only affect engagement and conversion, it may affect your organic search ranking as well. Regular problems with load time may point to technical problems that should be addressed. Unsure of how well your site is performing today? Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

      No Sessions Today

      If this alert goes off, you’ll probably have some investigative work to do.

      No Conversion / Goal X Today

      If you’re running an e-commerce platform, this value might be a purchase, trial or demo download. For businesses offering services, no events triggered by contact forms may be the most important conversion metric. Whatever your key conversion KPIs are and depending on how often conversions normally occur, you want to monitor this daily or weekly.

      2. Performance

      Monitoring the performance of your site is like having a doctor constantly checking up on your health. Even though irregularities occur naturally, many sites suffer from poor server performance, cluttered or poorly written web code and other factors directly affecting your business online. These alerts you may set to weekly or monthly, depending on your traffic and needs. For every alert about an increase, you also need one for a decrease.

      > 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Page Load Time Compared to Last Month

      A monthly check-up here is just what every site needs. It’s recommended to manually look for the top-5 or top-10 pages on your site with the slowest load time, and adding these under a custom alert for special monitoring.

      > 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Redirection Time Compared to Last Month

      Especially larger businesses that perform redirects regularly ought to make sure these do not slow down the response time for the visitor. Some web servers don’t handle larger volumes of redirects all too well.

      > 10% Increase / Decrease in Average Server Response Time Compared to Last Month

      More businesses should demand high performance from their web servers. Especially small businesses often make the mistake of purchasing web space from providers that underperform.

      > 10% Increase / Decrease in Page Download Time Compared to Last Month

      This is a useful alert for the entire site when working with content marketing. When working in a large team of editors, it’s not unusual to discover unnecessarily large images embedded into pages, effectively prolonging the page download time.

      3. Traffic

      Without it, your online business dies out. Monitoring traffic is essential to develop your content marketing efforts and understand which parts of your site are really delivering as you expect. Alerts set to a weekly time period should work out fine.

      > 10 Non-Domain Sessions Today

      Possibly not alarming, but if you’re receiving sessions from unknown/unidentified domains, you may be target of spam. Apply the value “(not set)” with regex to Hostname.

      > 10% Increase / Decrease in Content Sessions Compared to Last Week

      Weekly monitoring for sites focusing on content marketing, volumes might vary between businesses. If you’ve got several URL paths with content, you may use regex to define those paths, such as “content-a|content-b|content/small-business”.

      > 20% More / Fewer New Sessions Compared to Last Week

      This gives you insight into the nature of your traffic over time. If you ran a PR campaign the previous week, did you manage to deliver a great portion of new sessions?

      > 20% Increase / Decrease in AdWords Clicks / Cost / CPC / CTR / Impressions Compared to Last Week

      Your search engine marketing professional will love these automatic alerts, giving you weekly feedback on the paid search traffic and which campaigns contribute to any significant changes.

      4. Engagement

      Your focus here may lie entirely on classic metrics for user engagement, or you may add a mix of social media metrics to measure your efforts in those channels. Both daily and weekly alert periods make sense here.

      > 5 Social Shares Today

      This will vary according to your business, but following social shares of your content from your site ought to be a part of all content marketing reporting.

      > 10% Increased / Decreased Bounce Rate Compared to Last Week

      This debated but still interesting metric may point to engagement improvements or issues, especially if applied to specific landing pages with individual alerts.

      > 20% Shorter / Longer Average Session Duration Compared to Last Week

      Like with bounce rate, this may or may not point to deeper improvements or issues with user engagement. Clicking on the report link from the alert will highlight which pages contributed to the change.

      5. Conversion

      If you’re running a larger e-commerce website, you’ll want to measure a lot more than just a general conversion rate. You may experiment with alerts for average order value (AOV), revenue and pure number of transactions. Because metrics like AOV may change a lot depending on your product offerings online and sales trends, you may want to choose monthly alerts summarizing broader changes.

      > 10% Increase / Decrease in Conversion Rate Compared to Last Week

      Depending on how many conversion goals you’ve got set up, this may point to an overall conversion rate, or consist of several individual alerts for all your important conversion goals.

      6. Settings

      Some traffic changes are simply down to how it’s attributed. Keep a watching eye on these and related metrics.

      > 20% Increase in Not Set AdWords Keywords Compared to Last Week

      Here you use the value “(not set)” with exact match for Keyword. If you’re alerted about this, you need to talk to your search marketing professional to make sure all campaigns are correctly set up.

      > 100 Sessions Missing Campaign Parameters Last Week

      Even though it may be difficult, it’s never ideal to run ad campaigns without tagging the campaign links correctly. The volume and time period will vary between businesses, but a suggestion is to apply the value “(not set)” with regex to Medium. From here on you may dive deeper to discover unattributed traffic.

      Closing Thoughts

      It doesn’t matter if you’re a Google Analytics professional with years of experience or a beginner currently attending the Google Analytics Academy. Automatic monitoring of your analytics data is an essential part of digital marketing today. Over time you may find that it’s more effective to be alerted about actual changes, rather than “looking” for them. With that said, when alerted you need to do what you’ve always done, which is to manually explore the data in detail and dig out the insights.


      Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Valentina Borovaya, Google Analytics team

    • October 10, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Improvements coming to the Google Analytics desktop UI

      Over the last ten years, Google Analytics has added many new features and reports. For the last few months, we’ve been working to build a simpler Google Analytics while still retaining the key functionality that people frequently use. The changes highlighted in this post are the first part in a series of improvements that you will see in the next few months.

      Below is a summary of the changes that all Google Analytics users will begin to see over the next few weeks.

      1. Simplified navigation
      • A brand-new navigation using Google’s Material Design standards
      • Removal of the “Home Customization Reporting Admin” subheader bar
        • Admin is now pinned to the bottom of the navigation
      • Resizeable left navigation to allow for more space in the canvas

      Pitch 1 Copy.png


      2. Customization, all in one place
      • Previously , reporting customization items were spread out: Dashboards & Shortcuts in the left-nav; Custom Tables, Custom Reports, etc. in the Customization tab; Custom Alerts in a tab in Intelligence Events
      • Now, all customization elements are contained in a “Customization” left-nav element:

      Pitch 2.png

      3. Simplified Google Analytics View switching
      • The old “Home” account/property/view picker page has been replaced by the new picker in the header, which allows you to switch views from any page in the product
      • Note that for Analytics 360 users, you may need to switch organizations to see the set of accounts you are trying to get to

      ezgif.com-gif-maker (3).gif

      4. A streamlined login flow
      • Logging in now automatically takes you to the last Google Analytics View you were looking at the last time you logged in
      5. An adjustable default date range
      • You can now change the default date range that Google Analytics reports load with. This can be changed in your Google Analytics user settings
      • Setting it to shorter times (like 7 days) has several benefits. For example, many campaign changes, website experiments, etc. will have impacts hidden in a 30-day view but immediately visible on a shorter timeline
      • Defaults are now set to 7 days for all standard GA users
      6. Goodbye to a couple of pages:
      • Intelligence Events:
      • In-Page Analytics: The In-Page Analytics report has been removed from Google Analytics web UI. You can still access in-page analytics with the official Chrome Extension

      All Google Analytics users will begin to see these changes in the next few weeks. We hope these changes improve your Google Analytics experience!
      Posted by Ajay Nainani, Product Manager, Google Analytics

    • October 5, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Spotlight on Google Tag Manager: Open and Secure Tag Management

      With Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360, we make it easy for marketers to manage tags on their sites and apps for fast, flexible implementation of new marketing technologies. Last week at SMX East, we announced that we’ve added more than 20 new tag templates to Google Tag Manager to empower marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. This is one of a couple recent changes to make Tag Manager more open and more secure.

      New third-party tag templates

      Google Tag Manager already includes easy-to-use tag templates for many Google and non-Google tools. And, while we support implementing all other tags using a variety of custom tag types, we’re dedicated to expanding the number of third-party tag templates available to you. Tag templates make it easy to add and maintain tags on your sites and apps without code. This means that less technical users can be more involved, errors are less likely, and your sites are ultimately more secure.

      To make it easier and safer to deploy third-party tags, we’ve developed an open format that allows vendors like Microsoft, Twitter, and Nielsen to implement and maintain their own tag templates in Google Tag Manager. For companies whose products depend on tags, having a tag template in Google Tag Manager is a great way to make implementation easier than ever.



      “The seamless integration of Digital Content Ratings — a key component of Nielsen’s Total Audience measurement framework — into Google Tag Manager will enable easy deployment and rapid adoption of Nielsen measurement with savvy digital clients.”
      – David Wong, SVP of Product Leadership at Nielsen



      Our Vendor Tag Template Program allows tag providers to natively integrate with our tag templating system. Google performs a security review of each tag that is submitted through the program. The resulting tags are integrated into Tag Manager, and displayed with the company’s logo and an easy-to-use form to configure and deploy the tag.


      “At Hotjar we’re obsessed about giving our users fast and actionable insights about how their visitors are using their site. Our top most priority is making it easy and simple to set up Hotjar. For this reason, we’re extremely excited to provide ‘out-of-the-box’ support for Google Tag Manager.”
      – David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar



      Some recent additions include:


      Are you a vendor who would like your tag supported? Learn more about the Vendor Tag Template Program and enroll here.

      Secure container loading

      At Google, we constantly look to develop products with best in class security. Google Tag Manager already has a host of security features such as user access controls, 2-step verification, malware detection, and tag blacklists. We’ve now also made some changes to the Google Tag Manager container snippet — given out in our user interface and documentation — to improve security and performance even more.

      Previously, the Tag Manager container snippet loaded containers in a protocol-relative manner. That is, on pages with an https:// URL, the container would be loaded securely using HTTPS. Our new snippets will always use the secure protocol (HTTPS) by default, regardless of the protocol of the page. This helps protect containers from malicious parties and snooping, and in many cases, will also improve performance.

      You’ll also notice that we’ve made a change to how we recommend Tag Manager be implemented, now with the container snippet split into two parts:
      • A JavaScript snippet that should be implemented as high in the <head> of your page as possible to ensure the best tag performance. This change is especially important if you plan to use Tag Manager to deploy Google Optimize.
      • An iframe snippet that should be implemented just after the opening <body> tag. This snippet handles firing of image pixels for users with JavaScript disabled, and also enables Google Search Console verification.
      To get the best performance, it’s recommended that you implement both container snippets following the latest installation instructions.

      What if you already have Google Tag Manager implemented on your site? Not to worry: These changes are optional, and your existing implementations will continue to work without a problem. To get the highest level of security and performance, you can update your implementations at your earliest convenience.

      Happy tagging!


    • October 4, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Spotlight on Data Studio: Beautiful Reports and Collaboration Just Got Easier

      We launched Google Data Studio (beta) in the U.S. earlier this year, and last week, we expanded availability to 21 additional countries.* We’re excited to offer Data Studio to companies across the globe so they can easily create and share reports and dashboards, and ultimately use insights and collaboration to make better business decisions.

      Organizations today collect an increasingly large amount of data. In a world of web analytics, CRM systems, and third-party sources, data-driven decisions should be easier than ever before. However, all of this data has presented a significant challenge: making it easily accessible and useful.

      Having multiple data sources that live in silos within your organization compromises your ability to spot critical business opportunities and issues when they matter most. This is a widespread challenge, with 84% of marketers saying they don’t believe their data sources are well-integrated, according to a 2016 Forrester study.

      Data Studio solves this problem by allowing you to easily connect your data and create beautiful, informative reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Create up to five custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing. All for free.

      Get started today so you can:

      • Put all your data to work. Easily access the data sources you need to understand your business and make better decisions.
      • Transform your data. Quickly transform raw data into easy-to-follow reports and dashboards — no code or queries required.
      • Build engaging reports and dashboards. Data Studio gives you the ability to create meaningful, shareable charts and graphs that bring your data to life.
      • Leverage teamwork that works. Work together quickly, from anywhere, by sharing reports via Google Drive.

      Not sure where to start? Good news: We’re releasing our first batch of templates today to remove that hurdle. Businesses can use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes.



      Get started for free.

      Happy reporting!
      The Data Studio team

      *Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam


    • September 29, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      An Easier Way for Everyone to Improve the Customer Experience: Meet Google Optimize

      Nearly 9 in 10 business leaders in a recent survey said that improving the customer experience is fundamental to their future success and brand reputation.1

      Yet less than half of business leaders say they have actually taken action around their customer experience activities.2

      Today, consumers have higher expectations for businesses to deliver more personalized site experiences based on the information they’ve shared. Businesses need to be able to quickly discover useful insights from their data and act on what they’ve learned.

      To help those leaders (and everyone else) take action to deliver more personalized site experiences, we’re happy to introduce Google Optimize. It’s a free version of our popular enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360, which was announced earlier this year.

      Google Optimize will start rolling out globally next month. If you’d like to be one of the first to use it, visit our signup page. We’ll send you an invitation by email as soon as it is available.

      Making it easy … 

      Google Optimize helps any business test and deliver better website experiences. And to help guide you through the process, we’ve made it easy every step of the way:
      • It’s easy to implement. Test new and engaging web experiences across your entire site in minutes. Google Optimize is built on top of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager so you can either add a single line of code to your existing Google Analytics implementation, or serve the Google Optimize tag directly using Google Tag Manager. 
      • It’s easy to use. Use the Google Optimize WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor, to change just about anything on your site – text, images, layouts, and more – just click to edit! There is no need to recode your site each time you want to test a new experience. 
      • It’s easy to understand and act on results. Google Optimize calculates results based on your existing Google Analytics metrics and business objectives. It’s clear to see what you should do next to drive even more impact for your business.
      … And powerful 

      With Google Optimize you can create and deploy a variety of experiment types: Choose from A/B, multivariate, or redirect. For any experiment, Google Optimize offers powerful capabilities:
      • Native integration with Google Analytics. Test what matters to your business. Because Google Optimize is built on Google Analytics, you can more quickly and easily identify areas of your site that can be improved upon. Then in Google Optimize you can use your existing Google Analytics goals and metrics as your experiment objective. 
      • Advanced statistical modeling. Google Optimize uses Bayesian statistical methods to model the real-world performance of your experiments. We’ll show you how much more effective one variant is over the others, leading to more accurate results that you can trust. 
      • Sophisticated targeting tools. Google Optimize will help you deliver the right experiences to the right customers at the right moments.
      Ready to deliver better site experiences? 

      With Google Optimize, you’ll have all the basic capabilities you need to get started with site testing – making it perfect for any business. Google Optimize is free for anyone to use, so why not give it a try? Visit our signup page today.

      And if you are part of a larger enterprise or business with more sophisticated testing and support needs, check out Google Optimize 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. With Google Optimize 360, you’ll be able to take your site experiments even further by delivering custom experiences to your Google Analytics audiences. You’ll also be able to run more experiments across your site at the same time and add additional experiment objectives — even after an experiment has started. Talk to a sales representative to learn more.

      Happy testing!

      1“Two Years’ Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis.” The Storytellers, March 15, 2016. Quoted on eMarketer.com. 
      2“Data Elevates the Customer Experience.” Forbes Insights / SAS, May 2, 2016. Quoted on eMarketer.com.



    • September 28, 2016   Published ~ 8 years ago.

      Announcing: Smart, Fast-Acting Analytics — For Everyone

      This past March, we launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products designed for the needs of enterprise-class marketers in today’s multi-screen world. 

      Today we have another exciting announcement. Next month we’ll start rolling out a new product: Google Optimize — a free version of our enterprise-class testing and personalization product, Google Optimize 360. Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

      Businesses of all sizes need tools to measure and succeed 

      First of all, why this free product now? Because companies big and small face the same challenge today: Consumer expectations are higher than ever in a mobile-first world. How can brands be more useful to people in their moments of need? With ever more data flooding in, marketers need access to the right data so they can uncover useful insights — and act on them quickly.

      The companies that are already making this leap from data to action are transforming their businesses by becoming more useful to consumers throughout these micro-moments. How? Analytics and testing are the key. In fact, according to an Econsultancy survey of 4,000 marketers, the top two digital trends in 2020 are going to be a focus on customer experience (24%) and personalization (23%).

      That’s what has led to today’s announcement. We’ve made several advancements to the free versions of our analytics products to bring modern measurement to everyone, and help them create happier customers by providing more relevant experiences. Let’s take a closer look.


      1. How can every business deliver personalized customer experiences?
        Google Optimize
        (beta). This free web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool helps businesses improve their customer experiences and business metrics. Because it’s built on top of Google Analytics, businesses can use their existing information to experiment and personalize site experiences with minimal setup requirements. Request an invite.

      “With Google Optimize, we’ve been able to provide more engaging content to The Next Web’s readers – converting them from new readers to loyal customers.”
      Martijn Scheijbeler 
      Director of Marketing - The Next Web



      1. How can everyone access and share powerful data?
        Google Data Studio
        (beta), our free reporting and data visualization product, is now available globally in 21 new countries.* It enables businesses to easily spot and share insights, and collaborate to drive better decisions. Additionally, next month we’re launching report templates, making it even easier to get started. As with templates in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, businesses can create, edit, and use a library of templates to get up and running in a matter of minutes. Get started. The enterprise and free versions of Google Data Studio launched earlier this year in the U.S. These updates are also available in Data Studio 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.  



      1. How can everyone get useful insights, not just more data?
        Google Analytics
        , our free customer analytics product and measurement centerpiece, analyzes customer data from all touchpoints — and soon it’s becoming even smarter. Following the launch of our automated insight stream in the Google Analytics mobile app, we’re excited to announce Session Quality Score: A new metric that incorporates machine learning to predict the likelihood of a visitor making a transaction (purchase) on your site or app. Businesses can use session quality score to provide better customer experiences and / or remarket to their most engaged website visitors. This feature is coming soon in beta and will also be available in Analytics 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.




      1. How can everyone gain full visibility into customer journeys?
        Google Tag Manager empowers marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code), and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows. And today we’re greatly expanding our openness by integrating an additional 20 tags from Quantcast, Twitter, Microsoft Bing, Nielsen, and many more. See the full list of supported tags here. These updates will roll out over the next couple weeks and are also available in Tag Manager 360, part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

      Modern measurement for everyone 

      Put simply, that’s our goal with these new free products. As today’s businesses are shifting to compete on customer experience and personalized marketing, we want to give all businesses the tools and access to compete — and ultimately, drive better online consumer experiences.

      If you’re interested in learning more, please watch our blog this week and next. We’ll dive deeper into each product announcement and show you how they work. In the meantime, check out the resources below to learn more.
      As always, you can visit our website to sign-up for our free analytics products.

      *Canada, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam

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