Enhanced Campaigns for Display: Powerful Bidding Tools for a Multi-Device World

Last month we announced enhanced campaigns to help advertisers more simply and scalably reach their customers in a multi-screen world.  Today, we’ll look more closely at how enhanced campaigns work with your display campaigns.

Why Enhanced Campaigns For Display
In this constantly connected world, our customers are accessing information across multiple devices, and might look at 10 different sources - online reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, recommendations from friends and more - before making a purchase. Display advertising captures these signals and is an important part of connecting with consumers in this multi-screen world.  But determining the best way to reach the right person with the right ad is more complex than ever. Enhanced campaigns for display help you reach people with the right ads, based on people’s context like their location, time of day and device type -- all from a single campaign.

Key Features
Search and display use very different signals. In search, we use keywords to capture users’ intent. For instance, a travel booking website knows that a user searching for ‘Rome Vacation Packages’ is looking for a vacation in Rome. In Display campaigns, advertisers use a variety of other signals to reach their target customers with the right ad. In this example, a travel website may use:

• Interest Categories: to reach customers interested in “Rome”
• Demographics: to reach people 35-44, who have historically spent 3x the average
• Topic Targeting: to reach people browsing travel websites
• Remarketing: to reach customers who booked a vacation with them last year

In today’s constantly connected world, someone's intent and the actions they're looking to take may differ depending on their context, signals such as time of day, location and device:

• Time of day: Travelers typically book between 9am and 6pm
• Location: “People in the US” who may convert more often than people in Italy
• Device: Mobile users tend to browse on their smartphones, then book on their desktop

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to create multiple campaigns, this travel website can easily manage all of this in one place. In a single campaign they can adjust bids across these various signals to reach the right people with the right ads.

Learn More
More tips on how to use enhanced campaigns for display are available in the AdWords Help Center. To learn more on how you can take advantage of Enhanced Campaigns for Display, register for our upcoming webinar this Thursday March 21st, at 10am PST.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Management Director for the Google Display Network

Google Analytics Premium expands to Japan

Good news, or 良いニュース as they say in Japanese. We’re excited to announce that Google Analytics Premium is now available in Japan.

 

Google Analytics Premium offers all the power and ease you expect from the standard version of Google Analytics plus extras that make it great for large businesses. With more processing strength for granular insights, a dedicated services and support team, service guarantees and up to 1 billion hits per month, all for one flat fee. It provides access to more data, flexibility, and 24/7 support to help power the analytics of world-class brands including Travelocity, Gilt, TransUnion, Zillow, Papa Johns, & IGN.

Over the last year we’ve launched Google Analytics Premium in the US, UK, & Canada and our customers have been doing some really cool stuff, for example:

• Glit was able to gain a more holistic view of their customers by using the increased number of custom variables to power their predictive modeling 

• They found that access to unsampled data helped them to remove uncertainty and enabled them to act on test and campaign results with confidence

• Travelocity was able to provided greater access to data across their company, enabling agile, data driven decision making 

For more details check out the full case studies from Gilt and Travelocity.

We’re excited to learn how the data driven marketers in Japan will use Google Analytics Premium to find insights that help them to grow their businesses online.

Partner network provides expert support & customizable service 
We’re also pleased to have an international network of Google Analytics Authorized Resellers that have been quality checked to ensure they are best in class analytics consultants. They have highly trained analysis teams and can perform deep analysis projects to reveal valuable insights. Below is the select group of companies that we have partnered with in Japan:

          IMJ Ayudante
          e-Agency NRI Netcom
          Dentsu eMarketing One transcosmos
          Mitsue-Links

We plan to make Premium available to even more countries in 2013. If you would like to learn more about Google Analytics Premium and how it can help your business, contact the Google Analytics sales team or one of our Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers.

Posted by Clancy Childs, Google Analytics Premium Team

Enhancing Google Analytics Access Controls

Today we’re excited to announce that enhanced user-access control lists are coming to Google Analytics. Google Analytics users have long been requesting more fine-grained control over access to various parts of their accounts. We listened, and we're delivering that control over the coming weeks.

Recap of the current access control system

Previously, user access was controlled with a role-based system. A user could be either a full account administrator, or a simple report viewer on your profiles.

How the new system will work

First, we’re expanding where permissions can be applied.  We’ll allow permissions to be set not only at the Google Analytics account and profile levels, but also at the property level (learn more about these entities). Second, we’re enhancing the permissions any user can have. Instead of offering only two roles, (administrator & report viewer) we’re now allowing every user to have any combination of view, edit, and manage-users access. You can customize permissions for each user at the account, property, and profile level, providing a greater variety of access than was available with the previous role-based system.

For example, one user can have full access to an entire account, another user can have edit and view access to a single property, and a third user could have view only access to a set of profiles.

Properties inherit permissions set on their parent account, and profiles inherit permissions set on their parent properties. For example, a user with view access to an account, also has view access to all of that account's properties and profiles.

Migration

We will automatically migrate all accounts over the coming weeks. When your account is migrated, you will notice a new, richer user-management interface that looks like the following:

Click for large-sized preview

The migration will convert account admins to users with full (manage users, edit, and view) access to that entire account; report-viewing users in the current role-based system will remain as users with view access to relevant profiles.

Conclusion

By making these changes Google Analytics users will be able to better meet their access-control needs and have an even better analytics and reporting experience. Enjoy the new controls!

Posted by Tim Thelin & Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Understand Updates To Your Account With Change History

Have you ever wanted to learn more about changes made to your Google Analytics account, wanted to refresh your memory as to when a particular profile setting was changed, or wondered who on the team made a goal change? Now, all of that is possible with the launch of Change History.

What it does

Change History presents a summary of many important changes to your account over the last 180 days. Users will find records of changes made to users, accounts, properties, profiles, goals, and filters. This feature is available only to Analytics account administrators.

How to find it

We are rolling out Change History to our customers over the coming weeks. Once it’s enabled on your account, you’ll be able to see it by clicking the “Admin” button in the upper right corner of the Analytics interface, selecting the appropriate account, and clicking the tab labeled “Change History.” In this new section, you will see a list of changes on your account, when the change took place, and who made the change.

Conclusion

The new Change History helps you better understand how your accounts evolve over time, improves account collaboration, and provides an additional tool for optimal configuration.

Be sure and view our help center article for additional information. 

Posted by Scott Ellsworth and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics team

Multi-Currency E-Commerce Support In Google Analytics

We’ve listened to your feedback and have heard the requests loud and clear: E-Commerce should support multiple currencies. We’re pleased to announce the launch of this feature which will be rolling out to all users over the next few weeks. 

Multi-Currency support for eCommerce provides Google Analytics users with the ability to track transaction metrics (total revenue, tax, and shipping & handling) in multiple local currencies within a single web property. And Google Analytics will convert them into the one currency based on your profile setting. This provides key benefits for e-commerce brands looking to conduct analysis across an international customer base and helps make some previously complex reporting easier.

New metrics supported in multi-currency

Multi-Currency tracking code implementation:

Multi-currency is supported by web tracking and Android SDK (iOS SDK support is coming soon).

The ‘currency code’ is a global setting that can be set via tracker ‘_set()’. It only need to be set once, unless the page is sending multiple transactions in separate currencies.

Here are a few other things we think you’ll want to know:

How the conversion rate is decided?
The conversion rate is pulled from currency server which is serving Google Billing. The value is the daily exchange rate of the day before hit date. See a technical overview for additional information.

Which currency does GA support?

We support currencies which are available in GA profile currency dropdown menu. Right now, 31 currencies altogether are supported.

Currency dropdown menu

Which currency code shall I use?

A full version of currency codes shared across Google products is available on the Google Developers site.

Can I retro-process my history transaction data?

Only from the day you started using multi-currency support, you can get both local and global value. 

Several companies have already started using Multi-Currency in Google Analytics and are seeing great results. One of our Certified Partners, Blast Analytics & Marketing, helped their client AllPosters.com implement this feature. David Tjen, Director of Analytics at AllPosters.com reports:

"Google Analytics' new multi-currency feature increases sales metric accuracy for AllPosters.com. As an international brand, the AllPosters family of sites supports 20 currencies across 25 countries. Previously, manual adjustments were required before we could read sales metrics in Google Analytics when we had transactions with large currency conversion ratios to the US dollar, such as the Mexican Peso and Japanese Yen. The simple code update solves the issue by automatically converting all transactions to the primary currency on each site, providing sales metrics that allow us to make faster decisions with our web analytics data.”

To get started today, view our help center page with detailed instructions on how to begin.

Posted by Wayne Xu, Google Analytics team

Enhancing AdWords for a constantly connected world

Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.

Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.



Key features
Here’s an overview of some key features.

1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
   People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in — their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more — all from a single campaign.
   
   Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for "coffee" or "breakfast" on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.
   
   
2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
   People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.
   
   Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign.
   
   
3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
   Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.
   
   Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.
   

Upgrading to enhanced campaigns
Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.

Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:

• Website
  
• Help Center
  
• Upgrade videos and guides
  
• AdWords Community forum
  

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our Google+ page. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

Increasing Your Analytics Productivity With UI Improvements

We’re always working on making Analytics easier for you to use. Since launching the latest version of Google Analytics (v5), we’ve been collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback from our users in order to improve the experience. Below is a summary of the latest updates. Some you may already be using, but all will be available shortly if you’re not seeing them yet. 

Make your dashboards better with new widgets and layout options

Use maps, devices and bar chart widgets in order to create a perfectly tailored dashboard for your audience. Get creative with these and produce, share and export custom dashboards that look exactly how you want with the metrics that matter to you. We have also introduced improvements to customize the layout of your dashboards to better suit individual needs. In addition dashboards now support advanced segments!

Get to your most frequently used reports quicker

You’ll notice we’ve made the sidebar of Google Analytics even more user-friendly, including quick access to your all-important shortcuts:

If you’re not already creating Shortcuts, read more about them and get started today. We have also enabled shortcuts for real-time reports, which allows you to set up a specific region to see its traffic in real-time, for example.

Navigate to recently used reports and profiles quicker with Recent History

Ever browse around Analytics and want to go back to a previous report? Instead of digging for the report, we’ve made it even simpler when you use Recent History.

Improving search functionality

Better Search allows you to search across all reports, shortcuts and dashboards all at once to find what you need.

Keyboard shortcuts

In case you've never seen them, Google Analytics does have some keyboard shortcuts. Be sure you’re using them to move around faster. Here are a few useful ones:

Search: s , / (Access to the quick search list)

Account List: Shift + a (access to the quick account list)

Set date range: d + t (set the date range to today)

On screen guide: Shift + ? (view the complete list of shortcuts)

Easier YoY Date Comparison

The new quick selection option lets you select previous year to prefill date range improving your productivity to conduct year over year analysis.

Export to Excel & Google Docs 

Exporting keeps getting better, and now includes native Excel XSLX support and Google Docs:

We hope you find these improvements useful and always feel free to let us know how we can make Analytics even more usable for you to get the information you need to take action faster.

Posted by Nikhil Roy, Google Analytics Team

Tagging just got easier: Built-in templates for popular tags in Google Tag Manager

One of our favorite features of Google Tag Manager is the ability to add new tags to your site using a tag template instead of copying-and-pasting code — and we’ve just made tagging even easier with several new built-in tag templates. Just add a few key details to the template, and Google Tag Manager will automatically generate the correct code.

We’ve teamed up with a variety of companies to provide our first wave of Tag Vendor templates, including:

• comScore Unified Digital Measurement tag
• Turn Conversion Tracking and Data Collection tags
• Media6Degrees Universal tag
• Bizo Business Data Insight Tag
• Neustar AdAdvisor tag

This is just the first wave of supported tags, and you can look forward to many more coming soon. If you have specific requests, we’d love to hear them in our Google Tag Manager Forum in the Feature Requests section.

If you’re a tag vendor, and you’d like to get your tag supported in Google Tag Manager through the Tag Vendor Program, follow the instructions here to get started. And thanks to all of our partners for your support and involvement with Google Tag Manager!

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Mark Your Calendars For These Upcoming Analytics Events

Next week Google Analytics team members will be presenting on automating reporting and mobile marketing measurement, both in-person and online.  Be sure to mark your calendars and join us as we share ideas and best practices about everything analytics.

Google Developers Live Event (Online)

Session: Automate Your Google Analytics Reporting with Apps Script

Do you rely on Google Analytics reporting to make sure you’re making the most of your web traffic? Does your current process for exporting and analyzing your Analytics data feel clunky?  Join Nick Mihailovski and Ikai Lan from the Analytics and App Scripts teams to learn how to integrate Google Analytics with App Scripts and save your sanity in the process.

Date: Thursday, November 15 at 2:00pm PST

How to watch: visit the Google Developers Live page at the above time or add this event to your calendar.

Get Involved: Ask your burning questions about the Google Analytics + Apps Script Integration for a chance to have them answered live.

Search Engine Strategies (Chicago)

Session: Analyze. Streamline. Engage: Transform Your Business by Embracing Digital
2012 has had it all in the digital space - Google's SEO updates, Big Data, the explosion of social media awesomeness, and lots more. With so many new platforms and updates, it's not easy to keep on top of it all and ensure you do everything right! In this opening keynote, Avinash Kaushik will share his unique perspective on balancing multiple media channels and leveraging the right analytics to deliver relevance and economic value to your customers. Avinash will take you through the Clear Line of Sight model to ensure you are spending your days delivering true value to your business. You will walk away from this keynote with a thorough understanding of what it takes to really win online!

Keynote Speaker:
Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google

Date: Tuesday, November 13 from 9:00-10:00am CST

Session: Metrics for Success in the Mobile and Apps Ecosystem

The staggering growth of mobile platforms, devices, apps - and of course, users - has inspired an entire generation of marketers and entrepreneurs to take notice. But with such rapid change, execution and adoption are all over the board. Mobile marketing and measurement are all still very much works in progress.

This session will explore the joint research between Google Analytics and ClickZ to understand the current state of mobile, where it's going next and share actionable next steps for marketers, app developers and entrepreneurs better measure their efforts in mobile. It is our hope that together, we can help you succeed in this fast-growing space and make mobile apps work for you.

Panel participants

• Melanie White, Special Projects Editor, ClickZ
• Jonathan Allen, Director, Search Engine Watch

• Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics
• Diran Hafiz, Director of Mobile, Comscore

Date: Tuesday, November 13 from 1:45-2:15pm CST

How to attend: SES runs from Tuesday, November 13 through Thursday, November 15.  If you’re in Chicago, check out the agenda page for the full details of our sessions and come out and say hi.

Posted by John Milinovich, Google Analytics Team

Announcing Enhanced Link Attribution for In-Page Analytics

In-Page Analytics provides click-through data in the context of your actual site, and is a highly effective tool to analyze your site pages and come up with actionable information that can be used to optimize your site content.

Before now, In-Page Analytics was limited to showing clickthrough information by URL and not by the actual link on the page, and was limited to showing information only on links, and not on other elements like buttons. The most common complaint about In-Page Analytics is that if a page has two or more links to the same destination page, we show the same statistics for both links, since there was no telling which link the user actually clicked.

We are now introducing a new feature that solves these issues. To use Enhanced Link Attribution, you’ll need to add two lines to your tracking snippet and enable the feature in the web property settings. In-Page Analytics will then use a combination of element IDs and destination URL to provide the following new capabilities:

• Distinguish between multiple links to the same destination page, attributing the right number of clicks to each link.
• Provide click-through information even when redirects are being used.
• Provide click-through information for other elements such as buttons or navigations that were triggered by JavaScript code.

Here’s an example of how Enhanced Link Attribution can improve In-Page Analytics:

Before (without Enhanced Link Attribution):

After (With enhanced link attribution):

Notice the following differences:

• There’s a very prominent red ‘Add Subtitles’ link (that’s styled to look like a button) that didn’t show any click information before Enhanced Link Attribution, but now shows 20%. This is because clicking this link results in a server redirect to one of multiple pages, none of which is the URL specified in the link itself.
• Clicks on the link “Aquarium of Genoa (Italy)” were reported as 5.1%, but this is actually shared with clicks on the thumbnail to the left of that link. With Enhanced Link Attribution the thumbnail shows 2.3% and the text link 2.8%.
• With Enhanced Link Attribution clicks on the search button got 10%. This button results in a form submission to multiple URLs (that include the search string). We also see 0.1% clicks on the language filter, which actually causes some JavaScript code to run.

To find out more about Enhanced Link Attribution, and how to use it on your site, please read our help center article.

We are rolling out this feature gradually over the next few weeks so please be patient if you don’t have the option to enable it in the web property settings. In any case, you can tag your pages now and start collecting Enhanced Link Attribution data today.

Posted by Barak Ori, Google Analytics Team