Improving Google Analytics Dashboard Sharing

We’re happy to announce you can soon share and collaborate on Google Analytics dashboards!

Dashboards give an overview on how your properties are performing, and are even more powerful as you can create dashboards that you and your teammates can see and edit. Dashboard sharing is a nice complement to dashboard template creation: templates enable creating copies of dashboard configurations, and dashboard sharing enables you to collaborate with your team on a single shared dashboard.

You’ll be able to use this new feature as we roll this out in the coming weeks. At that time, start by creating a dashboard or viewing an existing one and then clicking on the “Share” menu. Look for the new “Share Dashboard” option:

This will make a copy of your dashboard that is available to everyone on the profile.  Private dashboards will be grouped together, and shared dashboards will be as can be seen in the report navigation on the left side of Google Analytics: 

Learn more about dashboard sharing.

Asset Sharing

This marks another enhancement in Google Analytics asset sharing, complementing the sharing capabilities of assets like annotations, advanced segments and custom reports. Google Analytics offers two forms of asset sharing today: creating asset templates, and collaborating on a single asset like we’re launching soon with dashboards. We are listening closely to user feedback on sharing, and planning more sharing features that you will see in the future.

Use dashboard sharing today to work more effectively with your team, and to enable richer reporting and data analysis.

Posted by Shailen Pandya and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

I/O Announcement: Google Analytics Premium data in BigQuery is coming soon

The landscape in data analysis has changed rapidly in the past few years. Organizations and developers are analyzing larger data sets, from more data sources, to drive their decision-making. They are examining huge volumes of unsampled data to make informed business decisions--often mining information in business intelligence tools for strategic insights. For the data scientists that perform these analyses, having direct granular access to Google Analytics data is becoming increasingly important.

Today at I/O, we announced that we are giving Google Analytics Premium users the ability to glean new business insights by accessing session and hit level data and combining it with separate data sets. Organizations and developers can analyze in seconds without massive cost by leveraging Google BigQuery, a web service that lets developers and businesses conduct interactive analysis of big data sets and tap into powerful data analytics. 

Interactive data analysis and data ownership

The upcoming BigQuery integration, happening later this year, is a planned feature for Google Analytics Premium that allows clients to access their session and hit level data from Google Analytics within Google BigQuery for more granular and complex querying of unsampled data. For those unfamiliar with Google BigQuery, it’s a web service that lets you perform interactive analysis of massive data sets—up to trillions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand. Plus, your data is easily exportable; you own it.

Benefits of BigQuery

1. Leverage Google’s massive computing power to get business insights from big data in seconds rather than hours.
2. Analyze massive amounts of data in the cloud with no up-front investments (hardware provisioning or software licensing investments).
3. Share and collaborate quickly and securely using Access Control Lists. 
4. Store as much as you want, paying only for what you use.
5. Protect your data with multiple layers of security from Google.

Potential Uses of the Google Analytics Premium and BigQuery Integration

Having Google Analytics session and hit level data available in BigQuery opens several possibilities for developers and data scientists. Usage includes, but is not limited to, the following 

• Analyzing visitor behavior across very large date ranges. Answer the question: "From 2010 to 2013, which sections of my site had the most volatility in daily traffic volumes?"
• Joining against data from other sources. Make detailed, custom analyses, such as: "I have a database that contains all the metadata about each article posted on my site and would like to see the bounce rate, conversion rate and new visitors generated by author and topic."
• Understanding complex queries. Answer the question: "Of the visitors to my site that used a voucher code, how many originally discovered my brand from a voucher code site and how many left the checkout process and returned within 10 minutes with a voucher code? Which codes were used in each case?"
• Integrating with Data Warehouses. Make detailed, custom analyses, such as: "On a weekly basis, for each of my logged in customers, I want to see the top 5 products that they viewed but did not buy and add that information into their record in our CRM."

We are looking forward to getting this granular data access into the hands of developers and data scientists. To receive more information about this integration as it comes available, developers may register their interest here: http://goo.gl/QJR9Y.

Posted by: Clancy Childs, Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium 

The Future of Measurement Starts at I/O: What’s New and on the Horizon for Analytics

Last year at I/O we launched Mobile App Analytics, a re-imagining of app analytics from the ground up, speaking the language that matters to app developers and marketers. Since launch, the insights provided are already helping hundreds of thousands of app developers and marketers create more successful Android and iOS apps and experiences by measuring metrics at all stages: acquisition, engagement and outcomes like in-app purchases. 

This year at I/O, our team continues to improve mobile analysis with two announcements: Mobile App Analytics Play Integration and Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps. These updates, to be available for all users shortly (with links below to help you get on early whitelists) will let you better measure a mobile world and use your data in more ways to improve the customer experience. 

Better understand the total picture of your app users with Google Play Integration

We’re excited to announce a long-anticipated integration of Mobile App Analytics more deeply with Google Play. It’s especially exciting for app developers and marketers because it’s the first time we’re presenting a complete view of the Play acquisition funnel in one clear, easy to understand report.

The data sources you’ll be able to see include:

Google Play traffic sources: understand which traffic sources and Google search keywords account for most new users. Campaign sources will help you refine your app marketing mix in order to focus on those campaigns and programs that bring the highest quality traffic. 

Google Play views: at the very top of the app funnel, you’ll want to understand clearly how many views your app is receiving in Google Play from each campaign or source. 

Installs: installs simply shows the number of users who actually installed your application from Google Play. It’s useful here to determine which sources are successful at driving installation. 

New users: beyond installs, new users shows you how many users actually launch your application. This is a key metric to see even beyond installations and tracing the path up the funnel.

As this report is using flow visualization, you can also select any path you wish to analyze further which will highlight that path and present useful data points along the funnel such as drop off rate.

Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps

Ever want to make a small tweak to your mobile application but your users have already downloaded your app? Ever forget to add analytics to a key event until it’s too late? Shipping your app usually means you have one chance to get it right, and that’s not the best way to build a business.

With Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps launching in beta, you can dynamically configure your mobile applications on Android and iOS server-side. You can hone your app for various audiences, and you’ll never get caught by old versions or forgetfulness again.

Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps uses Google Tag Manager’s sophisticated rule-based serving engine  and easy-to-use management interface to make it a snap for developers to make changes to their applications, even after an app has been downloaded by users. Now changing the configuration of your application or rolling out a new feature is as easy as going to the Google Tag Manager web interface, changing a couple of values, and then pressing a Publish button. Changes go live in seconds.

You can configure virtually anything in your application: from ad values such as frequency and duration and UI settings like colors and layout, to time-based events such as in-app promotions and special events. Sign up for the whitelist to be among the first to try out GTM for Mobile (you’ll need to first visit the Google Tag Manager site and create an account if you haven’t already).

We’re excited to continue to push the envelope with what analytics can do across devices and platforms and cater to developers with tools they want.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team  

New Google Analytics Filter Fields

One powerful feature of Google Analytics is the ability to create filters to limit and modify the traffic data that is included in a profile. Custom filters can be made on specific fields of data; our users have long been asking for more data to filter, especially for mobile and social. We have listened, and are glad to announce an expanded fields list. Full descriptions of the new fields and values are documented here, and following is a summary:

Mobile

• Is a mobile device
• Is a tablet
• Mobile brand name
• Mobile model name
• Mobile marketing name
• Mobile pointing method
• Mobile has QWERTY keyboard?
• Mobile is NFC supported?
• Mobile has cellular radio?
• Mobile has wifi?

Social 

• Social network
• Social action
• Social action target

Content & Traffic

• Hit type: (page, social, transaction, etc.)
• Internal search term
• Internal search type

Audience / Users

• Browser size
• IP version

E-commerce

• Local currency code

Use these new filter fields for improved data analysis and for more refined and targeted reporting views.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

See Your Conversions In Real-Time

Over the past year, we’ve been making continued improvements to the Real-Time reports in Google Analytics. Significant updates include real-time now supporting profiles, 4 key analysis improvements as well real-time widgets available for dashboards.

But have you ever looked at your real time report and thought, “wow check out how many visitors I have today, I wonder if any of them are converting?” We had that same question and so we are happy to announce the beta launch of our new real-time goals report! Now you can monitor in real-time how many of your website visitors are converting and against what goals. 

Use this feature to track the live results of how your new email newsletter, ad campaign or TV commercial is performing. An important note, with this first launch we’re introducing URL based goals only. So computed goals such as Time on Site or Pages / Visit are not included yet. For ease of use, you will see all goals that are being tracked in the UI regardless of whether there have been any completions in the past 30 minutes.

As with the rest of the real time reports, clicking a specific goal will automatically segment that report. Basic filters also apply to goals so you can analyze goal completions from a specific location or other dimensions you care about.

So now, the next time content on your site goes viral, you get a hot mention in the media, or large social traffic spike be sure to check out your real-time goals report to see in real-time the bottom line impact.

Happy Analyzing,

Posted by Linus Chou, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Google Analytics Premium expands into Europe and drives insights for 3 Suisses, Rocket Internet, Privalia & LAN

Bonjour, guten Tag, & hola -- we’re expanding Google Analytics Premium to France, Germany and Spain. Google Analytics Premium is all the power and ease you expect from Google Analytics standard, plus extras that help larger businesses get the most from its robust capabilities. Google Analytics Premium provides access to a dedicated services and support team, service guarantees, and greater data processing power - all for one flat fee.

Now companies can purchase directly from our network of Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers in France, Germany, & Spain. Leading up to this launch, we worked with a select few European reseller partners and well known global companies to help us kick the tires and ensure that Google Analytics Premium has been regionally tested for success. Big thank you to our clients 3 Suisses, Rocket Internet, Privalia Group & LAN along with our first reseller partners fifty-five, Trakken, e-Wolff, WATT, Webanalytics.es & Metriplica for sharing with us their experience using Google Analytics Premium.

Here are a few ways that they’ve found Google Analytics Premium to be helpful:


Headquartered in Croix, France
With a presence in almost 20 countries throughout Europe, 3 Suisses is a major e-retailer and the 2nd largest fashion and home-decor site in France. In order to continually improve customer service and site performance in Europe, 3 Suisses chose Google Analytics Premium in part for the close collaboration with Google’s teams. The main objectives are:

• Improve the purchasing experience of millions of customer on their websites
• Optimize the performance of product merchandising for over a million visitors per day
• Enrich CRM programs with web analytics data in order to develop a 360-degree view of customers
• Boost the fast-paced development of 3 Suisses’ e-commerce activities

In order to quickly reach these business objectives, 3 Suisses is working with 55, a long-standing partner well known for its expertise in Business Analytics. 55 are helping to implement and leverage Analytics in all realms of their business organization. A major objective for 3 Suisses is to allow marketers and managers alike to make fast decisions that can help them to achieve their ambitious e-commerce growth targets. The Analytics interface is incredibly user-friendly and easy to use, which makes it an important asset to foster a broad user adoption across 3 Suisses’ teams.



Headquartered in Berlin, Germany
Rocket Internet is a leading international online venture firm & incubator, with over 100+ companies launched in over 25 countries since 1999. Rocket Internet decided to purchase Google Analytics Premium via Trakken Web Services in Germany to support their growing businesses. The additional product features helped them break through the limitations they had been experiencing with the standard version of Google Analytics. Google Analytics Premium’s dedicated account support and increased features helped them to truly scale and grow data driven decision-making across all of their businesses. Read the full case study



Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain
The Privalia Online Fashion Group was founded in Barcelona in 2006, as a private club that offers flash sales on fashion’s top brand at exceptional prices exclusively for its members. They selected Google Analytics Premium through authorized reseller WATT to gain insights on how their users respond to content tests, personalization, and on different types of devices (mobile, tablet, desktop). Read the full case study

“Google Analytics Premium meets the demanding digital analytical needs of Privalia. We find it to be a  comprehensive, flexible, easy to use solution, with a rich pool of professional users in Spain. We have confidence that we can scale with it being backed by Google and the support of its local partner network (Google Analytics Certified Partners). We’ve been impressed at the constant innovation, with new features and improvements released each year without losing usability.”
 - Andres Flores, Marketing Business Intelligence & Web Analytics Manager, Privalia.



Headquartered in Las Condes, Chile and operating in Spain
LAN Airlines is one of the top flight carriers in the world, flying to 96 destinations across Latin America, North America, Europe, and Oceania. Their website LAN.com is a key component of their sales path, they have selected Google Analytics Premium through authorized reseller Metriplica.com in Spain to help them find insights on their digital marketing. They want to find the right information to enable them to make decisions fast, and expand use of analytics throughout their company with the ease of use and robustness of the Analytics Premium platform. They also receive constant support and training from Metriplica to help them grow sales through data based insights.

Google Analytics Premium provides 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. For those with more than 1 billion hits, tiered pricing is available.  Google Analytics Premium helps power the analytics of world-class brands including Travelocity, Gilt, TransUnion, Zillow, Papa Johns & IGN.

We’re excited to see how analytical companies in France, Germany, and Spain take advantage of the data, flexibility and account support offered by Google Analytics Premium. 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

Real-Time Widgets Now Available in Dashboards

The Dashboards feature in Google-Analytics is a great way to arrange a set of related custom widgets into a report you look at frequently (for example, see dashboards for a variety of use cases in our Solutions Gallery). Today we’re expanding dashboards’ functionality with four new real-time widgets that you can and plug into any dashboard (new or existing) of your choosing!

1) Setting up a real-time widget

If you have set up a dashboard widget before, then this will be very familiar to you. Create a new dashboard or click on the +Add Widget menu option of an existing dashboard.

Pick any of the four widgets available in the Real-time: section and customize the widget. Below I have created a widget that shows me active visitors from Canada but split up by Traffic-Type:

Here is how I set up this widget:

I chose the ‘Counter’ real-time widget and gave it a custom name (“Canada Active Visitors”), then set up a ‘Group by’ on ‘Traffic type’. This is how I see the split between referral and organic in the widget. Finally, I set up a filter to only show visitors from Canada.

2. Combining with other dashboard widgets

By creating and combining widgets, you can perform many types of analysis at a glance.

Using filters you can compare different segments of your real-time traffic. For example you can create two separate widgets that have different filters for the Country dimension (say Country==USA for one and Country==Canada for another) and you can compare real-time USA traffic versus India traffic, side by side.

You can go further and set up real-time and non real-time widgets on the same dashboard. 

Here is how one of my dashboards looks like (I use it to monitor and understand how traffic from Canada behaves after a blog post):

I have 5 widgets and widget #4 is a non real-time widget that gives me context on where I get visits from across the globe over the last month.

We hope you will enjoy creating new dashboards with these widgets and sparkling some real-time magic on existing dashboards!

Posted by the Google Analytics Real-Time team

4 Improvements To Google Analytics Real-Time Reports

Real-time reports provide useful insights for businesses that help them understand how their systems are reacting, instantly, such as when you send out an email campaign or engage in marketing that has a temporal nature. It provides alerting / intelligence, giving insight into things that are new or different such as a sudden increase in site traffic. Real-time also lets you win social by capitalizing on trending topics. For example, if you noticed a blog post you published previously is suddenly gaining attention due to something happening in the news, you could highlight it on the front page of your site to draw additional attention and ‘pour fuel’ on the social fire. 

Today, we're announcing 4 improvements to real-time reports. You can now:

1. Analyze Events in real-time
2. Breakdown real-time by Desktop/Tablet/Mobile traffic
3. Create shortcuts to your favorite real-time segments
4. Compare real-time filtered data against overall real-time data

Let’s go through the changes in more detail:

1. Realtime Events Report

With the real-time events report, you can now not only see the top events as they occur but also filter on particular event categories (and actions). Additionally, you can see whether particular segments of visitors trigger different events and debug your events deployment in real time.

To access this report, navigate to the real-time section of Google Analytics and click on the Events section. You should see a report similar to this:

Clicking on any of the Event Category will drill down and show all the Event Actions and Event Labels for that particular category.

If you are trying to see what events a particular segment of visitors generate, that is easy as well. Any filters you set up in any part of real-time are preserved in the Events report. For example, in the above screengrab we have set up a filter here to see what events are triggered from visitors coming via organic search.

2. Content Breakdown by Desktop/Tablet/Mobile

We live in an increasingly multi-screen world, and now you can see in real-time the type of device that visitors are using to visit your web site (desktop, tablet and mobile). This is available in the content report as shown below:

As with real-time reports, you can easily see your visitors filtered by the device type (by clicking on either of “Desktop” “Tablet” “Mobile”).

3. Shortcuts for your important real-time segments

We’ve heard from users that you like to look at certain segments of visitors in real-time, but dislike setting up the filters each time. Now, you can use the “Create Shortcut” feature to store your favorite segments. 

Now all you need to do is open up Shortcuts from the left navigation menu and click to any of your shortcuts.

4. Comparison real-time to overall data

Finally, you can compare the pageviews of your segmented visitors to overall traffic as shown below. This is nifty if you want to see quick comparison trends. For example, many times, after a G+ post, I create a filter by device type of “Mobile” and can see that the mobile traffic picks up much faster and also contributes more to the initial increase in pageviews.

Stay tuned for continued improvements to real-time, a growing area of importance for your digital marketing.

Posted by the Google Analytics Real-Time team

Improving The Activity Stream In Social Reports

We’ve redesigned the Google Analytics Social Reports to make it easier to see the conversations and activity happening surrounding your content on our Social Data Hub Partners. We’re introducing 2 new reports that make it easier to consume this data:

• Data Hub Activity
• Trackbacks

The activity stream was previously available via drill down from the Network Referrals or Landing Pages reports. We have now made it a standalone report. By navigating to the Data Hub Activity report you’ll see a timeline of the number of activities that have occurred in the Social Data Hub and the raw activities in a list below. You can also filter this list by any specific networks you choose. 

We’re also excited to announce that Trackbacks are now available in a standalone report. Trackbacks are all of your inbound links across the web, so you’ll be informed if anyone from a small to blog to the New York Times posts a link to your site. Additionally, we are providing context for the significance of each of these trackbacks by displaying the number of visits that were driven by each endorsing URL during the reporting period. You’ll see this number presented alongside the trackback. 

Image via Google’s Analytics Advocate, Justin Cutroni 

Give them a try and happy analyzing!

Posted by Linus Chou, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Expanding Universal Analytics into Public Beta

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

Back in October, we announced the limited beta release of Universal Analytics as a way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey. Today, we’re excited to welcome and invite all Google Analytics customers to try Universal Analytics.

The benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are: 

• Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points, 
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps, 
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

Testimonials from the initial beta release

Our initial beta customers using Universal Analytics and are pleased with their results. Rojeh Avanesian, VP of Marketing at PriceGrabber.com reports:

"At PriceGrabber, we know it’s important to understand consumer shopping behavior so we can provide a more customized experience to our users. Google’s Universal Analytics will solve this problem for us and many sites that are facing this challenge and help us serve our users better by providing them with more relevant content and shopping results. We can use Google Analytics’ metrics to segment our users in a way that improves and simplifies the shopping experience for consumers. That’s what we strive for at PriceGrabber, to make shopping and saving money as easy as possible."

How to get started using Universal Analytics

If you’re new to Google Analytics, you can choose Universal Analytics when you setup your account. Already using Google Analytics? Create a new web property in your Google Analytics account to set up Universal Analytics and explore the new features. 

Here’s what you’ll see when you create a new web property. Select the Universal Analytics column to get the new analytics.js code snippet you can implement on your website:

You can implement Universal Analytics with the new analytics.js JavaScript for websites, our iOS and Android SDKs for apps, and the new Measurement Protocol for all other platforms. 

Find more details on how to set up using our help center or developer guide. (Migration guides for properties using ga.js coming soon. Until then, set up a new property in your account for Universal Analytics).

To tag in the most flexible way possible, you can also take advantage of the Universal Analytics template available in Google Tag Manager, which allows you to make additional changes and enable new features to your analytics setup without changing the hard-coded tags on your website. Learn more about how to implement Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager. 

For more information on Universal Analytics, visit our help center and developer guides. 

Happy analyzing - in the new and innovative ways you can with Universal Analytics!

Posted by JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics