How Certain Affinity used Google’s Mobile App Analytics to improve game design

Certain Affinity, an experienced independent game developer has recently been working on their first mobile title, Age of Booty: Tactics. Age of Booty: Tactics is an asynchronous turn-based tactics game hybridized with a collectable card game. Certain Affinity wanted a solution enabling them to measure and analyze specific metrics to improve both the pre-release and post-release designs of the game. They researched a number of analytics solutions, but were frequently frustrated by the cost, size, and limited flexibility offered.

Ramping Up Reporting

Certain Affinity has used Google Analytics for website analytics since 2005, and began talking to mobile partners after becoming aware of Google Analytics’ (GA’s) application in mobile gaming. Given their existing experience, the relative cost of the platform, and the extensive feature set, Certain Affinity quickly and easily integrated GA into the game. The early inclusion of GA into the design process resulted in easy access to analytics to assist in influencing direction across design, art, and ultimately production.

UI Optimization

Google Analytics provides an intuitive way to understand engagement across multiple screens and events. By leveraging engagement flow and average screen time analytics, Certain Affinity understood when specific areas within the UI were either too complex or buried to drive the desired behavior. They identified that the storefront was overly complex and required significant streamlining to become easily accessible. Additionally,they found that a number of options within the menus were too complex and lead to users looping within the UI prior to engaging in an actual game. They also were able to reduce screens per session from 15.5 to 8, resulting in a cleaner UI as well as less back and forth in the game.

Gameplay Duration

Certain Affinity wanted to better understand the average duration of play to optimize the experience on mobile. Given that users tend to spend less time gaming on their mobile devices than in the console space, it was vital to ensure the game was consumable and enjoyable in the “bite sized” engagement window.

Certain Affinity leveraged session durations to understand the existing top-level behavior. In analyzing the data,they found that the typical session was over 25% longer in length than was ideal. They tracked events such as turn submission, undo, and return to main menu to identify any behavior that was artificially extending the average duration of play. Certain Affinity then specifically targeted optimization to the areas requiring the most work.

Custom Dimensions

By leveraging Google Analytics Custom Dimensions, Certain Affinity could measure analytics across a number of key metrics in the mobile gaming space including retention, virality, and monetization. While this data was not widely used until launch,the ability to verify collection was instrumental in ensuring a successful soft launch.“The flexibility GA provides is quite amazing. While no analytics provider will ever have everything you need out of the box, it is great to have a solution that allows us to implement our own requirements [through custom variables], so easily!” explains Certain Affinity’s Lead Server Engineer.

You can check out the full case study here.

Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics team

Obama for America uses Google Analytics to democratize rapid, data-driven decision making

For political campaigns large and small alike, time is of the essence when decisions need to be made. Having quick and easy access to actionable data was essential for President Obama’s data-driven re-election campaign in 2012.

“To keep our digital teams agile, we needed to make consistent and comprehensive reporting available to everyone on a near real-time basis,” says Nate Lubin, Director of Digital Marketing for Obama for America. “Throughout the campaign, Google Analytics helped us democratize our web data, and enabled all of our teams to make key decisions quickly.”

Winning big moments: responding to the debates in real time

The ability to do rapid, real-time optimization was especially important during the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates. Recent research shows that 64% of voters use the Internet to verify or “fact check” a claim made by a candidate, and the presidential debates were a prime opportunity for voters to research the issues being discussed in real time.

“We knew that we needed to speak to our supporters and persuadable voters who were researching online during the debates,” says Lubin. “While we could anticipate some of the issue-related search terms that we would need to target, we couldn’t be prepared for every possibility.” Real-Time reports in Google Analytics provided the campaign a window into voters’ questions and concerns, and allowed them to deliver answers directly from the campaign through search ads.

Real-Time reports in Google Analytics provide instant feedback on site and campaign performance

Using Real-Time reports, the campaign quickly saw which debate-related organic search terms brought the most viewers to the campaign website. They then designed and placed search ads on these terms on Google to direct users to facts about the President’s position on key issues.

For example, when Governor Mitt Romney used the term “binders full of women” during the second Presidential Debate, the campaign team began showing ads on the phrase that linked to a fact-sheet outlining the President’s views on women’s equality. “Real-Time proved that we had an immediate uptick in both traffic and engagement from users searching that term, which affirmed this as a key rapid response strategy,” says Lubin.

Supporting a culture of analysis, testing and optimization

Well before debate time, a culture of analytical rigor and the focus on continual improvement had already been established as an essential part of the Obama campaign team’s success. “Our campaign was effective because our teams had the discipline to relentlessly rely on data to assess performance, test changes and improve,” says Amelia Showalter, Director of Digital Analytics. 

The Digital Analytics group served as a center for driving analysis best practices across teams. Early on, they turned to Google Analytics to help the web, email, and ads teams understand what motivated new supporters to become more vocal advocates and regular donors over time. The team tested various secondary calls-to-action after a visitor’s initial signup or donation to encourage further involvement with the campaign. 

“We found it especially effective to follow an initial signup or donation with a secondary call-to-action to support the campaign in another way,” says Brian Wonch, Digital Analytics Associate. “The flexibility of Google Analytics Advanced Segments and Flow Visualization reports was valuable in guiding our testing efforts to choose the sequence of engagements that best resonated with our audience.”

Advanced segmentation in Google Analytics allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic.

Dozens of similar online experiments were happening with every web interaction, on every single day of the campaign. Whether it was testing various social sharing options, or testing which customized content to deliver to each supporter, the campaign depended on the measurement capabilities of Google Analytics and the deep integration of data systems across the organization to continuously drive performance improvement across the site.

Empowering decision-making when it mattered the most

The real crunch time for the campaign began in the final month, when it was time to activate supporters to get out and vote as early as possible. Early voting began on different dates for each state, and the campaign placed extra priority on outreach to certain swing states. To help voters easily find their state’s specific voter registration and polling location information, the Obama team developed an interactive, geo-targeted application, and drove users to it from all of their search, display, email and social channels.

Given the fast pace and complexity of the advertising campaigns they were running, the Digital Marketing team needed to use a reliable, consistent and centralized advertising and site reporting platform to collect and disseminate data on a daily basis. “Google Analytics stood out as a simple way to share understandable advertising and site performance data with an unlimited number of users for rapid decision-making,” says Lubin.

While every team member had direct access to the Google Analytics reports, the team’s reporting gurus also innovatively used the new Google Analytics API and Google Apps Script integration to automate, centralize and simplify reporting, provided an overview of all their marketing channels and geo-targeted efforts at a  glance. “This dashboard allowed us to spend less time collecting and cleaning data, and more time optimizing our ads to get supporters to the polls,” says Lubin.

Wonch adds, “As our Get Out the Vote operations launched, the Digital Analytics team needed to make sure that our voting lookup tools ran at as close to perfect efficiency as possible. The segmentation capabilities in Google Analytics helped us quickly identify any combinations of devices, traffic sources and geographic locations that were high priority, but had low rates of loading an accurate polling place.” These insights helped the team target their efforts to test and improve the technical performance of the voting lookup tools so that they could deliver the most accurate and up-to-date information to voters - right through the final moments of Election Day.

The Results

The results from Election Day speak for themselves: a resounding victory, with  nearly every battleground state falling into the President’s column. Numerous  publications, including Politico, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal,  have credited the campaigns’ Digital Marketing and Digital Analytics departments for providing much of the winning margin.

“Google Analytics was an essential tool that empowered our team to make informed decisions that influenced the course of our campaign strategy,” says Lubin. “Having the data to understand how supporters and swing voters were engaging online was instrumental for doing our part to get President Obama re-elected.

Check out the whole case study as a PDF here.

Posted by Christina Macholan and Evan Rowe, Google Analytics Team

How NRI Netcom uses Analytics to measure user engagement of responsive web design

The following was originally posted to the Analytics Japan blog.

Google recommends responsive web design as a way of optimizing for smartphones and tablets. Responsive web design is a method of identifying the device based on the screen size and adjusting the design using CSS, while sharing one block of HTML across all devices. The concept has also been discussed on the Webmaster Central Blog so head over there for more details.

This post will look at an example of using Google Analytics on a site enabled for responsive web design.

The case involves a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP), NRI Netcom, working on an overseas payment service website for their customer, Seven Bank. NRI Netcom installed Google Analytics for post-optimization data analysis to support Seven Bank's web publishing and marketing. The implementation enabled pages to be served to desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets using responsive web design, all from a single URL.

They used page-level custom variables in Google Analytics to enable NRI Netcom to access reports on each type of page sent out.

For example, page-level custom variables can be set up as follows to identify which CSS version is being displayed: PC, smartphone or tablet.

PC = 960 px or more  

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'fullsize', 3]);

Smartphone = 520 px or less

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'mobile', 3]);

Tablet = 520 px to 960 px 

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'PageVariation', 'tablet', 3]);

This enables metrics for each screen type to be compared at a glance, as shown below, using Google Analytics Reporting. (The figures on the report are not the actual figures.)

The actual setup was a little more complex. The three screen types (smartphone, tablet and PC) were added, and the display height and width selected for each user tracked. Then, Seven Bank deployed its website in ten languages, as this was to be an overseas payment service.

It was configured to handle three different types of devices, different screen heights and widths, and different languages, as well as to provide instant verification on the Google Analytics Reporting screen.

Several pieces of useful information began to emerge from the Google Analytics data. Firstly, as a result of optimizing for smartphones, there was a clear improvement in engagement and conversions amongst mobile users. Differences between tablet and smartphones were also observed. Engagement metrics such as average time on page and average page views differed widely. Metrics were also found to be clearly different depending on whether the same smartphone/tablet was held horizontally or vertically.

A number of other effects were seen which weren't particularly relevant to conversions. A clearer picture of referral paths for mobiles and their effect on conversions aided understanding of the efficacy of incoming traffic. Whereas organic search won out on pure referral numbers, the number of conversions from users clicking the Seven Bank inquiries link on smartphones to make a call (measured using event tracking) was clearly better at referrals routed through AdWords.

Interesting results were also seen for different languages. It was obvious, for example, that conversions on mobiles were much higher for specific languages.

All of this is actionable data which will continue to help Seven Bank develop marketing strategies and further optimize their mobile site  — read the full case study here (in Japanese).

Posted by Noriyuki Ouchi, Google Analytics Solution Consultant

Solving Tag Management Problems for Large Advertisers

Last year we launched Google Tag Manager to make it easier for marketers to use tools like analytics, conversion tracking and Remarketing without having to edit website code. Google Tag Manager lets marketers place a single tag (a tiny piece of javascript code) on their site, and then with our easy-to-use UI, they can add or update other measurement and marketing tags without bugging the IT folks.

We’ve been thrilled by the response. Google Tag Manager is now serving twice the amount of traffic it was in April 2013, as a significant number of large advertisers with complex tagging needs have signed on.

I’d like to share a few recent Google Tag Manager success stories with you. They range across industries, but all of the customers profiled had a few things in common:

• They needed to deploy a large number of marketing tags to enable their advertising campaigns, often with complex logic around what data to include from the page, and which tags to fire when.
• Marketers were dependent on IT to deploy these tags.
• Limited IT resources meant slow turnaround time, lost insights, and lost revenue.

Smarter Travel Media (an online travel portfolio company), retailer Dafiti, and trip planning company Rail Europe all implemented Google Tag Manager to put marketers back in charge of deploying their campaigns. I’ll let them speak to the results:

“With Google Tag Manager, we can literally deploy a tag in minutes and provide marketing partners with all the custom data they might need. Now, we’re better equipped to optimize our digital campaigns than ever.”

-- Lothaire Ruellan, Director of Online Marketing, Rail Europe

“Google Tag Manager has been very useful so far, cutting our time-to-market on launching new campaigns and media partners, and reducing overhead on IT.” 

- Anderson Kenji Mise, Marketing Intelligence Manager, Dafiti

 “With the Google Tag Manager solution in place, we can deploy tags much faster and with far fewer resources. Therefore, the revenue justification can be smaller and we’re able to test new channels more frequently and with greater speed.”

-- Brett Malone, Senior Manager of Search, Smarter Travel Media

Read the full case studies here:

• Smarter Travel Media Google Tag Manager case study
• Dafiti Google Tag Manager case study
• Rail Europe Google Tag Manager case study

Get started with Google Tag Manager now at the GTM site, watch our introductory webinar for an overview or view our technical implementation webinar to answer your in-depth questions.

Update: have Google Tag Manager questions? We'll be answering them in this thread on Google+.

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

How Rasmussen College Uses Analytics To Better Understand Prospective Students

Rasmussen College, founded in 1900, is a private, regionally accredited, career-focused college with 24 campuses in MN, ND, IL, WI, KS, and FL, and online throughout the nation. Rasmussen.edu provides prospective students with information about degrees and other credential programs offered at Rasmussen College, as well as associated tuition costs.

Goals: Understand the importance of tuition in higher education marketing

Rasmussen College wanted to know the importance of tuition costs to prospective students, and if that information was a factor in their higher education selection process. Although Rasmussen College had created a tuition cost estimator for prospective students to use on the site, there was no way to track engagement. This lack of knowledge regarding a prospective student’s use of the tuition estimator tool limited the ability of Rasmussen College to accurately position the value of an investment in a college education.

Approach: Events and offline analysis unlock significant insights

Rasmussen College integrated Google Analytics events and custom variables with the tuition estimator to capture geographic and programmatic information as prospective students interacted with the widget. Specific business questions Rasmussen College sought to answer included:

Business Question	GA Solution
What schools of study had the most price-interested students?	Custom events, custom reports, custom segments
Which regions of the U.S. contained the most price-interested students?	Map overlay with custom segments to show cities where tuition estimations occur
What is the relationship between tuition estimation and lead generation?	Custom events, custom variables to track tuition estimations over multiple visits, custom segments to show differences in lead generation rates for tuition estimators, and tracking days from tuition estimation to conversion
Are students able to find the information they want regarding tuition?	Third-party task completion software was used to assess usability of tuition estimator

Results: Price and ROI key drivers to new student inquiry conversion

Rasmussen College exported custom event and variable information from Google Analytics and analyzed the data. They developed price interest metrics across  program and geography using the Google Analytics data. For example, they determined students interested in some schools of study were more than twice as interested in price as students interested in other schools.

In addition, tuition estimator users were four times more likely to complete the website inquiry form. Those who went on to perform a separate ROI calculator were 7.3 times more likely to complete the website inquiry form.

As a result, Rasmussen College found a correlation between tuition information and a prospective student’s readiness to take the next steps.

Check out the whole case study as a PDF here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Full Credit Measurement: Attribution with Google Analytics

As we’ve discussed in many previous posts, the customer journey is evolving — most consumers will interact with many different marketing channels before a sale or conversion. And marketers are recognizing this shift in consumer behavior. Instead of “last click” measurement, a strategy that only gives credit to the final interaction, they’re turning to full credit measurement. To help you make sense of the full customer journey, we’ve been focused on bringing you the very best full credit measurement tools in Google Analytics.

Nearly two years ago, we announced our first Google Analytics attribution product, Multi-Channel Funnels. With its ability to measure customers’ different paths to conversion, it quickly became one of our most popular reports for advertisers and publishers alike. We’ve seen great results from our users, including online travel agency On the Beach, who used data from the Multi-Channel Funnels reports and AdWords Search Funnels to explore and adjust their strategy for generic keywords. These attribution adjustments helped On the Beach to drive a 25% uplift in ROI — see the full case study here.

Beyond Multi-Channel Funnels, we also wanted to provide our users with an advanced platform for testing entirely new, more robust attribution strategies, including the ability to test alternative models or understand how metrics, such as site engagement, could impact their existing investments. So last year we released our Attribution Modeling feature — the Model Comparison Tool.

After several months of testing on a public whitelist, we're now in the process of rolling out the Attribution Model Comparison Tool to make it generally available to Google Analytics users without whitelist.  To reflect the importance of attribution, we also created a new “Attribution” section under the “Conversions” reports, so the tool will be found there.

Be sure to check out a previously recorded webinar with Product Manager Bill Kee for a complete walkthrough of the Attribution Model Comparison Tool, or view our multi-part attribution webinar series covering our entire selection of full-credit measurement tools.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Ariat Uses Data to Improve Customer Experience and Drive Results

Ariat is the leading equestrian footwear and apparel brand in the United States. Their website - Ariat.com - is an ecommerce sales channel, a branding tool, and a medium to feature their channel partners. Its goal is to facilitate the entire buying cycle from awareness to loyalty. 

In 2010, Ariat invested heavily in digital by creating a powerful new website. In order to justify the cost and report a return on investment, the new website would require a comprehensive web analytics and reporting program. Beyond just evaluating key performance indicators (KPIs) for e-commerce, such as revenue and conversion rate, Ariat needed to measure the effectiveness of their new merchandising and promotional features, and also the effectiveness of various digital marketing channels. 

Ariat reached out to SwellPath to assist in the evaluation of analytics tools and general consultation on the measurement strategies for their new site. SwellPath determined that Google Analytics was the right tool for the job, based on its flexible measurement capabilities and advanced analysis tools. They then created a custom measurement strategy and analytics framework to align the data with Ariat’s business goals. This framework ensured that they could measure the effectiveness of their internal promotional campaigns, shopping tools and product page features, and all digital marketing channels. 

SwellPath also introduced Ariat to “micro-conversion” metrics. These are actions that may not be a straightforward goal completion, but rather support the conversion process or have  their own inherent value. For Ariat, this included email signups, sharing content with social media buttons, and outbound clicks to channel partners.

Ariat’s new website launch has been a huge success thanks to data-driven improvements  made from the very beginning. Being able to measure and optimize the many features of the shopping experience allowed them to identify improvements that decreased cart abandonment by 18% and increased conversion rate by 14%. Acting on these opportunities so soon after launch allowed them to save large amounts of potentially lost revenue, and avoid customer irritation through a simpler checkout experience. 

Merchandising promotions on the homepage were also optimized based on insights from custom analytics data. The ecommerce conversion rate for visitors interacting with these promotions rose over 80% from 2011 to 2012. Consistent digital campaign tracking and attribution analysis identified key success factors in email campaigns, social media marketing, and display campaigns. This allowed for optimal budget planning and campaign optimization resulting in a 14% year-over-year increase in the ecommerce conversion rate for those campaigns, and a 17% increase in per-visit value.

Using advanced analytics and measurement tactics with Google Analytics allowed Ariat to quantify the improvements to their website, revealing a fantastic ROI and providing many opportunities for future growth.

Check out the full case study here [PDF]

Posted by the Google Analytics team

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

Google Tag Manager grows nearly 300% since January, boosts enterprise performance

Since launching Google Tag Manager last October, we’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of great clients and help them to become more agile marketers, boost their website speeds, reduce IT infrastructure headaches, and improve ROI for tagging related projects. We’ve seen impressive growth since the beginning of the year, with nearly 300% growth in traffic and 120% growth in enterprise customers.

We’ve just added a new “Success Stories” page to our website to highlight some of our favorite customer stories. You’ll find case studies from Airbnb, a community marketplace for accommodations, GoPro, maker of wearable cameras, and Magazine Luiza, a large online retailer in Brazil. These are just a few of the many enterprise customers now using Google Tag Manager -- and check back soon, we’ll be adding more stories to the page.


Google Tag Manager is designed to be easy and self-service, but if you’d like extra help (for example, if you have a complex web property with lots of existing tags), many of our clients have worked closely with our Partners, including GoPro, who worked with partner Analytics Pros.

We hope you’ll find these stories inspiring and helpful as you get started with Google Tag Manager.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics

Universal Analytics Business Applications

The following is a guest post by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

Universal Analytics introduces a new set of Google Analytics features allowing businesses to gain a deeper and more strategic understanding of what’s capturing the attention of customers as they move from online to offline. So how can Universal Analytics help businesses turn customer data into sales? We at Loves Data designed a simple experiment to find out.

Who drinks coffee? Who drinks tea? How much? How often? When? The answer to these questions reveal the role our espresso coffee machine and tea kettle play in productivity - and any need to order more tea or coffee! Take a look at our video to see what we learned.

Our experiment at Loves Data also measured how often and how much time team members spent standing in front of a display screen in the office viewing our website analytics.

Montage: Loves Data’s Universal Analytics office experiment will benefit businesses:

Experiment creates a new path to customers

Our team designed an experiment to dive into Universal Analytics by creating interactive scenarios inside our office. We integrated sensors and RFID readers to capture data about coffee and tea making behaviour in our office. We also measured each time the fridge was opened, when one of our team updated a support ticket, client hours were logged, code was committed, administrative tasks, and viewing of our Google Analytics dashboard display.

New Business Opportunities

Measuring users across platforms opens up new business opportunities. The RFID keys we’ve used in our experiments can be used to measure loyalty card usage. We can use Universal Analytics to enable retailers with bricks and mortar stores to measure customer behaviour and to improve and integrate online and offline sales and marketing.

Here are a few Universal Analytics opportunities we have identified at Loves Data for our clients:

• Integrated measurement and analysis of in-store POS systems along with desktop and mobile e-commerce platforms
• Measuring offline macro and micro conversions through physical buttons or integration with CRMs
• Measuring physical interaction for example at display booths at conventions or artworks at major exhibitions through to online engagement on associated websites

Our office experiment provided ourselves and our clients with a range of valuable insights and showed that with Universal Analytics we can measure just about anything!

Posted by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Learn more about Loves Data on their website, Google+ or check out their digital analytics and online marketing blog.

lastminute.com finds that traditional conversion tracking significantly undervalues non-brand search

The following post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Understanding the true impact of advertising

Advertisers have a fundamental need to understand the effectiveness of their advertising. Unfortunately, determining the true impact of advertising on consumer behavior is deceptively difficult. This difficulty in measurement is especially applicable to advertising on non-brand (i.e. generic) search terms, where ROI may be driven indirectly over multiple interactions that include downstream brand search activities. Advertising effectiveness is often estimated using standard tracking processes that rely upon ‘Last Click’ attribution. However, ‘Last Click’ based tracking can significantly underestimate the true value of non-brand search advertising. This fact was recently demonstrated by lastminute.com, a leading travel brand, using a randomized experiment - the most rigorous method of measurement.

Experimental Approach

lastminute.com recently conducted an online geo-experiment to measure the effectiveness of their non-brand search advertising on Google AdWords.  The study included offline and online conversions.  The analysis used a mathematical model to account for seasonality and city-level differences in sales.  Cities were randomly assigned to either a test or a control group. The test group received non-brand search advertising during the 12 week test period, while the control group did not receive such advertising during the same period. The benefit of this approach is that it allows statements to be made regarding the causal relationship between non-brand search advertising and the volume of conversions - the real impact of the marketing spend.

Download the full lastminute.com case study here.

Findings

The results of the experiment indicate that the overall effectiveness of the non-brand search advertising is 43% greater¹ than the estimate generated by lastminute.com’s standard online tracking system.

The true impact of the non-brand search advertising is significantly larger than the ‘Last Click’ estimate because it accounts for

• upper funnel changes in user behavior that are not visible to a ‘Last Click’ tracking system, and
• the impact of non-brand search on sales from online and offline channels.

This improved understanding of the true value of non-brand search advertising has given lastminute.com the opportunity to revise their marketing strategy and make better budgeting decisions.

How can you benefit?

As proven by this study, ‘Last Click’ measurement can significantly understate the true effectiveness of search advertising. Advertisers should look to assess the performance of non-brand terms using additional metrics beyond ‘Last Click’ conversions. For example, advertisers should review the new first click conversions and assist metrics available in AdWords and Google Analytics. Ideally, advertisers will design and carry out experiments of their own to understand how non-brand search works to drive sales.

Read more about AdWords Search Funnels
Read more about Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

-- Anish Acharya, Industry Analyst, Google; Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google; Gabriel Hughes, Head of Attribution, Google; and Jon Vaver, Senior Quantitative Analyst, Google contributed to this report.

¹ This result has a 95% Bayesian confidence interval of [1.17, 1.66].

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics Team

Kapitall Uses Content Experiments To Drive A 44% Conversion Increase

Video game entrepreneur Gaspard de Dreuzy and financial technologist Serge Kreiker had a thought: why not use the gaming experience to break the traditional online investing mold? Their idea took hold and Wall Street firm Kapitall, Inc. was born in 2008. Based in New York, Kapitall now has 15 full-time employees providing a unique online investing platform and brokerage.

Kapitall has used Google Analytics Certified Partner Empirical Path since 2011 for analytics services on its JavaScript website. The complex implementation required custom JavaScript to allow for Google Analytics tracking within the trading interface as well as on landing pages. Empirical Path implemented Google Analytics tracking directly within the Kapitall interface so that decision makers could understand pivotal actions, such as how often brokerage accounts were being funded or where in the sign-up process potential investors were dropping out.

Challenge: Refining the landing page for maximum response 

Kapitall wanted to do more than simply capture data however; they also wanted to test the content of their landing page and then optimize it by targeting visitors with messages and options that would lead to conversions. Why was creating a truly effective landing page seen to be so critical? Kapitall’s gaming-style interface enlists traders to sign up for brokerage accounts and use the site to trade stocks or create practice portfolios. Every incremental sign-up is key to the company’s success.

Approach: Split testing to identify a winning landing page 

Kapitall understood that there was little point in making one-off ad hoc responses to analytics insights, or doing before-and-after comparisons that would inevitably be confounded by differences in the before and after audiences. Empirical Path recommended taking their analytics efforts to the next level with a closed-loop solution to eliminate complications and identify the best page version. 

The team proposed automated experiments to compare different versions of the landing page to see which performed best among a random sample of visitors. To accomplish this, Empirical Path first set Google Analytics’ Event Tracking and Custom Variables on brokerage accounts to distinguish current customers from traders. The team then designed Content Experiments in Google Analytics to understand which version of the landing page drove the greatest number of sign-ups.

Results: A new landing page with proven success

The outcomes from the test were illuminating, clearly identifying that the Angry Birds landing page was most effective. The winning version showed a dramatic increase in sign-ups of 44 percent and a 98 percent probability that this version would continue to beat the original. “Kapitall was impressed by how quickly Content Experiments was able to zero in on the Angry Birds version,” says Jim Snyder, principal at Empirical Path Consulting. “Having the ability  to quickly surface the best performing version directly resulted in attracting more investors at a faster rate, and that was a huge value-add to Kapitall.” Thanks to the split testing approach, Kapitall possesses valuable insights into the perfect blend of messaging and creative elements to optimize the page. With the strongest version now implemented, Kapitall is able to realize the true power of its online real estate. 

View the entire case study as a PDF here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Gilt embraces insights from Analytics at an enterprise level

A little over a year ago we launched Google Analytics Premium to help better meet the needs of our enterprise users. In that time we’ve been happily surprised by the warm reception and how companies have been using Google Analytics Premium to look at data in a new way. Below is a case study from Gilt, on how Google Analytics Premium has spread the love of data across their company, they leveraged the increased number of custom variables to power their predictive modeling, and used unsampled data to remove uncertainty from test results.

Gilt Groupe is an innovative online shopping destination offering its members special access to the most inspiring merchandise and experiences available. Gilt provides instant insider access to top designer brands at up to 60% off retail. Products span fashion, decor, artisanal ingredients, travel experiences, and unique activities in a growing list of cities. The bottom line for Gilt is that Google Analytics Premium has provided the ability to make better, faster data-driven decisions at every single level of the organization. Read the full case study.

“Google Analytics Premium has given everyone at Gilt quick, easy access to insights about our business. It has enabled true ‘self-service’ data across the company.”  

  - Ana Kravitz, Web Analytics Senior Manager

    Gilt Groupe

Google Analytics Premium provides enterprise level analytics with access to more data, flexibility and 24/7 support. The benefits of Premium are guaranteed SLA’s on data collection, reporting and processing times. Premium accounts also get an increase in the number of hits per month, an additional 50 custom variables, and access to unsampled data. Premium accounts also gain access to customer support including an implementation review, quality assurance, training, and a dedicated account manager.

Google Analytics Premium is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Looking towards 2013 Google Analytics Premium will continue to expand our product and services to meet the variety of Analytics enterprise customer needs. We’ll soon be popping up in 7 more countries: Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

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.

Clancy Childs
Google Analytics Premium Team

Google Tag Manager: Webinar, GoPro case study, and product updates

Just over a month ago, we launched Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags—including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing and more—with just a few clicks. Since then, we’ve released the product in 35 languages, we’ve added new tagging capabilities for Google Analytics, and we’ve been hard at work building more enhancements.

To help you get the most out of Google Tag Manager, we’ve scheduled a webinar next week with Product Manager Laura Holmes to walk through the tool and go over implementation basics:

Webinar: Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Register: goo.gl/YTulu

We’ve also been hearing great feedback from our users, including GoPro, the world’s leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras and digital devices. With the growing popularity of GoPro products and accompanying complexity of their digital marketing activities, GoPro found itself with dozens of tags measuring countless engagement activities across its web properties. It was critical to find a way to implement and maintain marketing tags that would scale with the marketing organization. Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Tag Manager specialist, led a comprehensive migration to Google Tag Manager -- and GoPro stakeholders were delighted with the results:

“Google Tag Manager centralizes our tags into a single location that gives our marketing and analytics teams the flexibility to make tagging updates within minutes without burdening IT.”
- Lee Topar, Director of Online Marketing, GoPro

Download the full case study.

We hope you’ll join us at the webinar next Tuesday the 13th. If you’re not able to attend, we’ll be posting a recording of the webinar about a week afterwards here on the blog and on YouTube, and you can also read more about Google Tag Manager on the website or the help center.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager

How Posadas uses Event Tracking to analyze conversion funnel abandonment

One of the most important features you have access to in Google Analytics is the conversion funnel, which is particularly useful for analyzing your website’s efficiency in converting visitors into customers. Using the conversion funnel, you can easily find optimization points that will help you generate more profit for your business, perhaps without even increasing your advertising budget.

However, conversion funnels show aggregated data of all traffic flowing through them. That is, it does not let you make a differential analysis by product.

Posadas, the largest hotel chain in Mexico, with hotels in Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., Argentina and Chile, decided to adapt their Google Analytics implementation to segment the traffic flowing through the conversion funnel and make a differentiated analysis for each of their more than 100 hotels. In addition to segmenting traffic flow by product, Posadas was able to enrich the abandonment analysis by uncovering the opportunity cost of letting people leave the process before completing a transaction.

The conversion process is simple, it starts with a search for room availability in one of Posadas’ travel destinations. The search results provide a list of rooms for which the visitor can request an instant quote. After selecting the preferred room, the visitor proceeds to make the payment and complete the reservation.

Conversion Funnel:

• Step 1: Check room availability
• Step 2: Request an instant quote
• Step 3: Reservation payment

To get more details about this process, Event Tracking was implemented for step 1 and 2 of the conversion funnel by calling the function _trackEvent() while loading both pages.

The _trackEvent function has 5 parameters:

_trackEvent (category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

However, in this case we decided to use only two parameters for step 1:

• Category:  "Availability"
• Action: The unique identifier for the hotel being searched

_trackEvent ('Availability ', Hotel_Id)

and three parameters in step 2:

• Category: "Quote"
• Action: The unique identifier for the hotel being quoted
• Value: the total amount of the quote

_trackEvent ('Quote ', Hotel_Id, '', Quote_Value)

Of course, in the final step of the funnel —the sale— the e-commerce tracking code is implemented, so there’s no need to use Event Tracking as the reserved hotel Id and the final reservation cost are already tracked.

With this customized implementation, Posadas was able to get a data matrix that shows the differences in traffic flow for each of the steps, for each hotel. They were also able to look at the differences between quoted prices and actual revenue. In this matrix, Posadas can look for significant fluctuations in traffic and money amounts and discover potential optimization points with more detail than they might find in the standard conversion funnel report.

Abandonment matrix showing percentage of dropouts and the difference between quoted prices and actual revenue for each hotel

To further improve their analytics, Posadas decided to implement a survey to get feedback from their visitors and find out why they abandon the process in each of the high fluctuation points. After identifying significant fluctuation points and receiving feedback directly from their customers, they are able to make sound decisions when optimizing for particular hotels, perhaps by experimenting with specific sales promotions or pricing policies.

Monica Herrero, eCommerce & Online Marketing Manager at Posadas says:

"Analyzing the behavior of our visitors at this level of detail has many benefits. The first is the ability to track the differences in traffic flow through the conversion process separately for each of our hotels. We realized that there are some hotels that consistently show excellent conversion rates, but these special cases were hiding behind the average showed in the standard funnel report. The second benefit is finding the exact points in the funnel that we must optimize, which are different for each hotel. And the third benefit is discovering the reasons why our visitors abandon the process. 

With these three pieces of information we were able to improve our site and our sales strategies, which led to an 18% increase of our conversion rate on average, and an increase of up to 88% for some specific hotels. 

Understanding why people leave your site before converting and trying to retain them can be a challenging endeavor, but the benefit of doing so is highly worthwhile.”

As always, we invite you to try new ways to use the features Google Analytics provides, and to share those experiences with us.

Published by Enrique Quevedo, Google Analytics Latin America