Ourconstantly connected world presents a great opportunity for marketers to be more effective and relevant to customers by optimizing for context -- device, location and time. Earlier this year, we launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take advantage of these new opportunities and manage their ad campaigns more effectively. Bid adjustments make it easy to raise or lower your bids based on user context.
To help you optimize your bid adjustments, we're introducing bid adjustment reporting in Google Analytics, allowing you to analyze performance for each of your bid adjustments across devices, locations, and time of day. You can access the new report by going to Traffic Sources > Advertising >AdWords and clicking the Bid Adjustments link.
With the new Bid Adjustments report, you can take advantage of the full range of visitor metrics available in Google Analytics to optimize your bid adjustments. This provides a window into your users’ behavior, allowing you to optimize bid adjustments based on behavior & goal conversion data like bounce rate and time-on-site.
In addition, with Ecommerce tracking enabled in GA, you can now use this data to fine-tune your bid adjustments in AdWords based on the actual revenue generated, instead of conversions. This means you can optimize for ROI instead of CPA goals.
A quick example illustrates this (illustrated in the above screenshot). Imagine a hotel chain has set Time bid adjustments of +20% on Saturday and Sunday after observing a better ROI on those days. Using this new report in GA, the hotel chain now observes that their ROI on Sundays is actually higher than on other days of the week. The hotel chain's analyst finds that customers book more expensive rooms and longer stays on Sundays. Using this information, the hotel chain increases its existing Time bid adjustment for Sundays.
This new bid adjustment report is available in all Analytics accounts that are linked to AdWords. We recently made it much easier to link your accounts, so now is a great time to do so if you haven’t already.
Posted by Nikhil Roy, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team
Last Tuesday, Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, shared tips for getting more out of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts by using them together. During the webinar, they showed why it’s important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts (which is now even easier to do) and how to see Google Analytics data in AdWords as well as AdWords data in Google Analytics. They also presented a live demo of the reports and how to use them.
If you missed the webinar, you can check it out here:
Read on below for answers to some of the top questions we received during the webinar:
Why should I link my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts? Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts is an important practice to ensure the two measurement tools can work together to help you get the most from your advertising. The bottom line is that linking Analytics and AdWords gives you powerful information that can tell you where you should be spending more or less based on real ROI data. When you link accounts, the data can flow both ways - from Google Analytics to AdWords (for example, engagement metrics or remarketing lists), and from AdWords to Google Analytics (for example your AdWords cost data). In particular, you can take advantage of powerful features such as:
The ability to dig into campaign/keyword performance by real revenue and cost in Google Analytics
What are the best practices around importing Google Analytics Goals? If i’m using AdWords Conversion Tracking should I also import goals? If you’re currently using AdWords Conversion Tracking, there are still benefits to also importing some of your goals from Google Analytics. In particular, some goals (such as engagement goals) can’t be tracked with AdWords Conversion Tracking, so importing these into AdWords can complement your Conversion Tracking data. However, it’s important not to import any goals that you are already tracking through AdWords Conversion Tracking as this can create double-counting and duplication, which would make your conversion data hard to interpret.
Is it possible to link a My Client Center (MCC) account to Google Analytics? At this time it’s not possible to link an MCC to Google Analytics. Each individual AdWords account within an MCC needs to be linked to the appropriate Google Analytics property. Learn more here.
How do I import Google Analytics engagement metrics into AdWords? The process for importing the metrics is straightforward, but it’s important to note that there are a couple of additional steps needed beyond linking the AdWords and Analytics account. The full set of instructions can be found here.
I have noticed discrepancies between the data in my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, do you know why? AdWords and Google Analytics differ in some very important ways regarding how they measure and report on data. It’s important to understand these key differences, which are outlined here. Additionally, there are key differences between AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics, which are covered in detail here.
Can someone help me get more support with AdWords and Google Analytics? Yes, Google partners with a global network of certified partners to help. For AdWords, you can get support directly from Google or you can work with a Google Certified Partner to help with your AdWords management. You can learn more about both of those options here. If you’re looking for help with Google Analytics, you can tap into our global network of Google Analytics Certified Partners, who offer paid services for anything from Google Analytics tag implementation to product training to more strategic support. Learn more here.
What is a tag? Tags are tiny bits of website code that let you measure traffic and visitor behavior, understand the impact of online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audience-based marketing, test and improve your site, and more. The tags we mentioned in the webinar are AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics. These both help you understand the performance of your digital campaigns. While AdWords tracks the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns, Google Analytics tracks the performance of any traffic to your website -- such as from email marketing campaigns or social media. You can learn more about how they’re different here and through some of the content in the webinar.
What is a conversion? A conversion is an action that a customer takes on your website that has value to your business, such as a purchase, a sign-up, or a view of a key page. These actions are called conversions because a customer's click translated -- or converted -- to business. Think of it as the cha-ching! from your cash register. A conversion happens when someone clicks your ad and then does something that’s valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone. Conversions help you understand how much value your ads bring to your business. You can read more here.
Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics
Many businesses advertise to find new customers, and optimizing advertising campaigns to reach the right people will increase marketing effectiveness and ROI. Google Analytics helps marketers achieve this by offering insights into customer behavior on an advertiser’s websites, apps, and other properties. By linking AdWords and Analytics accounts together, these rich insights from Analytics can flow into AdWords.
Today, we’re happy to announce some useful improvements making it easier for Google Analytics and AdWords account owners to link their accounts.
Here are a few specific benefits of combining AdWords and Analytics data:
Importing AdWords data into Analytics lets marketers see data across many accounts in aggregate and combined with rich site metrics
All of these features depend on linking AdWords and Analytics accounts, and this process is now easier than ever before. Previously, linking accounts involved multiple steps on many pages spread out between two products, and this process has now been consolidated into just a couple steps all in one linking wizard.
Once the new linking process launches to all Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create additional links from the Admin section of your Analytics account. (If you’re logged in to your AdWords account, you can also link accounts by going to Tools and Analysis > Google Analytics and following these same instructions.) Just click AdWords Linking in the Account column, and then click the New link button to start the linking wizard.
To take advantage of simplified account linking, benefit from combining data in both products, and get more out of your marketing campaigns, follow the steps above to link your accounts or learn more in our help center.
Posted by Chris Morgan and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team
Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising.
Thanks to our integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting.
GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that we cannot guarantee access, but we will do our best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see our help center article.
Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature.
How does Display fit on the conversion path? By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions.
In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen.
With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing.
Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them.
Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal.
If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads.
How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path? In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad.
Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping.
Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model.
We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your TrueView video ads fully? Just create a custom segment using one of our new dimensions, TrueView. The full list of new dimensions is:
Above the Fold: This dimension uses the Google Active View measurement solution. The value is “Yes” if the ad was in the visible area of the screen when the page was loaded.
Video Played Percent: The value can be “>=25%”, “>=50%”, “>=75%”, and “100%”, allowing you to see how much of a video ad was watched.
TrueView: If a user has watched more than 30 seconds of an ad, or watched the ad completely, this will have a value of “Yes.” This is a payable event.
Enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics Once we have whitelisted your account, please ensure you have successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. Linking accounts takes just a few moments. Under ‘Data Sources’ > ‘AdWords’ you can then see an entry for each linked AdWords account. In the row there is a toggle switch named ‘GDN Impression Reports’, which turns the display impression data from the Google Display Network On and Off. Data is recorded from the time the switch is turned On.
We hope these new tools will help you understand the full impact of your display campaigns through Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution. Sign up today for GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics.
Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics
In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?
Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.
Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.
The digital journey has grown more complex, giving customers the option to move seamlessly across media and devices. This shift in technology can make it challenging to get a complete picture of customers’ interactions. As a marketer, your success depends on gaining visibility into your customers’ preferences and behaviors.
Next Thursday, join Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, for a detailed look at effective measurement for today's multi-device world. We will discuss strategies and best practices for measuring customer behavior, and we’ll look at how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.
The webinar will include live Q&A.
Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013 Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST/ 6PM GMT Duration: 1 hr Level: 100 / Beginner Register:Register here Posted by the Google Analytics team
We’ve heard you loud and clear that getting started on Google Analytics can be challenging. It’s such a robust tool with a variety of reports, filters, and customizations that for a new user it can be overwhelming to figure out where to look first for the data and insights that will enable you to make better decisions. For more advanced users it can be time consuming to build out different variations of reports and dashboards to get the clearest snapshot of your performance. That is why we’ve created the Google Analytics Solution Gallery.
The Google Analytics Solution Gallery hosts the top Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports which you can quickly and easily import into your own account to see how your website is performing on key metrics. It helps you to filter through the noise to see the metrics that matter for your type of business: Ecommerce, Brand, Content Publishers. If you're not familiar with Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports, check out these links to our help center for detailed descriptions on how they work and the insights they can help provide.
Examples
Here are a few examples of the solutions that can be downloaded into your Google Analytics account to see how the analysis works with your data.
Note: You should already have an Analytics account with data to have these solutions be effective for you.
AdWords (Google CPC) Performance - Use this segment to analyze the performance of AdWords traffic. You can also create segments to compare your CPC traffic from other sources and compare performance between them.
6+ Keywords - Learn which long-tail keywords with more than six words your visitors are using to find your site. Then refine your pay-per-click ads and SEO to drive more qualified visitors to your site.
Paid vs. Organic Search Performance - Do you know the behavioral differences between users who click on your paid ads and those who click on your organic search results? Use this report to understand the different ways they interact with your site and how to improve performance based on these findings.
How do I add these to my account? We’ve designed it so it’s easy to get started. Simply go to the Google Analytics Solution Gallery, pick from the drop drown menu the solutions that will be most helpful for your business. Select from Publisher, Ecommerce, Social, Mobile, Brand, etc.. . Hit “Download” for the solution you want to see in your account. If you are not already logged into Google Analytics we’ll ask you to sign in. Then you’ll be asked if you want to accept this solution into your account and what Web Profile do you want to apply it to. After you select that it will be in your account and your own data will populate the report.
We’re planning on expanding on this list of top solutions throughout the year so be sure to check back and see what we’ve added. A big thank you to Justin Cutroni & Avinash Kaushik for supplying many of the solutions currently available.
Ian Myszenski, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics Team
Have you ever struggled with implementing new marketing and measurement tools on your website? For many people, deploying data collection “tags” (like conversion tracking, remarketing, audience reporting and analytics) can take weeks or months. Worse, the tag implementation is often incorrect, meaning you’re missing out on valuable information about your site and its users.
It doesn’t need to be difficult. We recently held a webinar to introduce users to Google Tag Manager, a free tool that helps marketers and IT departments manage their marketing and measurement tags quickly and easily. Watch the video here to learn more about:
Overall benefits and features of using Google Tag Manager
A quick demonstration of how to deploy a new tracking tag
Tips for getting your company started with Google Tag Manager
In addition to this webinar, we’ll be hosting a technical webinar in January to help new users through the nuts and bolts of installing Google Tag Manager (with lots of concrete examples). Stay tuned -- we’ll share registration information in a future blog post, or you can check back on the Learn with Google webinar site.
Read on for responses to some of the top questions we received during the webinar.
Questions and Answers
Where can I find out more about the core concepts described in the webinar? To learn more about the Google Tag Manager management interface, please visit our Help Center -- you may want to start with our Before you Begin article. There you can find more information about key concepts like Tags, Rules, and Macros. For developers interested in how to implement Google Tag Manager, please visit our developer documentation. Or if you’d like help with implementation, you can contact one of our Partners. You can also ask questions (and find responses to questions from others) on the Google Tag Manager product forum.
What happens to historical data if we move to Google Tag Manager? All of your historical data should be preserved when you move to Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager only changes the way that tags are deployed and managed on your site, it does not change the way data is collected.
How would you migrate a tag? Follow these steps to migrate tags -- whether it’s a single tag or all the tags on your site. If you’re just getting started, take a look at our Before you Begin article.
Install that Container code snippet on every page of your website (so that it appears immediately after the opening <body> tag). The container should be empty.
Map your site - thinking about what data you want to collect, what events you want to track, and which tags you want to use to track that data. You should think about where your current tags are implemented, but now is a great time to rethink your overall data collection goals and start fresh.
(Optional) If you would like to make use of the Data Layer functionality, create a data layer on the pages where you wish to pass information or fire tags
Create Tags, Rules and Macros within the Google Tag Manager interface according to the map you just created. Make sure to apply the correct Rules to your Tags to make sure they fire in the right place.
Then push a version of your site live that has removed the hard-coded tags from within the page. At this time, also Publish your changes using the Publishing feature of Google Tag Manager, which pushes the changes live to the site.
Can you add tags to events or buttons? Definitely! In order to use Google Tag Manager to fire tags on events and buttons, follow these steps (for more detail, read our developer document on event handlers):
On your page, proactively add the dataLayer.push({ ‘event’: ‘myEventName’}) to the event handlers for all events and buttons you might want to track.
Create a new rule where “event equals myEventName”.
Associate this rule with any tag you’d like to fire when the specified event happens.
Can hard-coded tags and tag manager co-exist? Do I have to remove my other tracking tags? We strongly recommend that you completely migrate all your tags, so you can take advantage of the benefits of managing and updating those tags within Google Tag Manager. However, if a full migration seems too hard, you can use Google Tag Manager in parallel with hard-coded tags. Some of our users use Google Tag Manager to only manage adding new tags.
If you choose to do a partial migration to Google Tag Manager, you need to be very careful to make sure you don’t accidentally start double-counting your tags. If you decided to deploy a tag via Google Tag Manager, make sure that you don’t have a version of the same tag firing on the same page.
Can you build your own custom tag templates? And how do I become a recognized Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager? Custom Tag templates within Google Tag Manager allow you to copy/paste any HTML or Image tags directly into Google Tag Manager and fire it based on your predefined rules and macros. To turn it into a template, use the {{macro_name}} syntax to populate the tag code with dynamic values. We will also do a syntax check to ensure that when you copy your 3rd party tag, it will fire as intended.
If you’re interested in having your tag added to the list of predefined templates, apply to become a Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager by completing this interest form.
How does this work with Google Analytics? How do you do things like track pageview and track event within Google Analytics? Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to correctly deploy Google Analytics across your site. To use Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager, simply create a Tag with the Google Analytics tag template. You can select the “Track Type” as either a pageview, an event, or a transaction.
Make sure you have some version of the Google Analytics tag firing across all pages on your site. A good way to do this would be to have a basic tag firing on all pages, but blocking on pages where your more customized tags are firing (like the thank you page where you’d be firing a specialized transaction tag type). Can the Google Tag Manager snippet be placed in <head>? How about in my footer? The recommended best practice is to have the Google Tag Manager snippet at the top of the <body> to maximize data collection, but some clients may find it easier to implement the Container snippet elsewhere in the in the page, like the footer.
Do not place the Google Tag Manager snippet in <head> (for the IT folks: this is because there is an iframe in the <noscript> case, which can have unpredictable results in some browsers).
No matter where you install the container snippet, you will need to make sure that this snippet of code is on every page of their site. Google Tag Manager will still work if you only deploy it on part of your site, but Google Tag Manager’s rule based system will only work on pages where the snippet is deployed. For more details, read our developer documents. Does Google Tag Manager replace Doubleclick Floodlight? No, Google Tag Manager does not replace Floodlight -- they are complementary. Floodlight is a conversion pixel for DoubleClick products (Floodlight tags can now be deployed within Google Tag Manager), and Google Tag Manager is a tag management system or “container tag” for multiple tagging technologies. Floodlight has previously been used by some users as a container tag as well, but moving forward, Google Tag Manager is a way to deploy all tracking technology.
You also have the ability to pass custom floodlight variables through Google Tag Manager into Floodlight, through the Data Layer. For more information, please review the material in the Developers Guide.
We hope this webinar and this blog post will help you as you get started with Google Tag Manager, and we look forward to seeing you at our technical webinar in January. (Registration details coming soon). Cross posted from the Google Analytics blog, originally posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager
If you’re already using Google Analytics, you know how useful it can be to help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing. Now, we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration columns directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.
Using your Google Analytics data With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.
Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
Success in action Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.
Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge:
“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."
Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.
Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies
Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.
We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.
Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:
Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:
Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months
We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, pleasecontact us here to become a tag vendor.
Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:
“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”
“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”
Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.
What are the key steps to getting started with marketing attribution? Are you ready to move beyond the “last click” attribution model? How can you use Google’s tools to better understand your customer’s journey and calculate the impact of your digital marketing channels?
To help answer these questions, we’ve put together a series of webinars on attribution:
Attribution Insights from Google and Econsultancy (4/26/2012) – watch recording here
Next Steps with Attribution – registration details coming soon
If you didn’t have a chance to catch last week’s webinar on Building Blocks of Digital Attribution, it’s a great place to start your attribution journey -- you can watch the recording above. During the webinar, Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution and Multi-Channel Measurement, discussed how to lay the foundation for digital attribution. First and foremost, it’s important to get your organization ready. In our work with customers and our recent attribution research, we’ve discovered that many companies try to pursue attribution before their culture or their data is ready. In the webinar, Bill describes the steps and the potential pitfalls to make sure your company is heading in the right direction.
Second, even if the organization has taken the necessary steps culturally, it’s challenging to find the right technology, and to ensure that technology is properly implemented.
We know that finding the right technology is a challenge, which is why Google offers several great attribution tools – including AdWords Search Funnels, Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, and Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics Premium. In order to get the most out of these tools, it’s important to ensure that the basics are set up correctly. So, during the webinar, Bill also did a live demo of how to get started with AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics Goals. The setup is quick and easy – and once it’s in place, users can start accessing rich attribution data.
Naturally, we also received a lot of great questions from the webinar participants. We weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar, so here are some responses and more pointers on getting started with attribution.
How do you define “digital attribution”? Digital attribution is the process of assigning credit to the various online interactions your customer has before a “conversion” (conversion = making a purchase or performing some other valuable action on your site). These interactions could include display ads, paid or organic search results, email campaigns, affiliate coupon programs, social network posts, and other digital interactions. Today, many marketers by default use “last click” attribution, assigning all of the credit to the last interaction before a conversion. By understanding the full path to conversion – including early “upper funnel” touch points – and giving credit to all of those interactions, you’ll be able to budget more effectively and design better marketing campaigns.
What about attribution beyond digital channels? Attribution is about improving the measurement of how ad spend drives conversions. To address this challenging topic, it’s important to consider all the factors that might affect conversions. These factors include the digital channels mentioned above, as well as how users interact with your brand across multiple devices, and the influence of online advertising on offline sales. This webinar series is focused on how to get the most out of digital attribution.
How do I know which interaction is the trigger for the actual conversion, out of the entire funnel? The goal of attribution is to more accurately measure the impact of all your digital channels on sales, including how these channels interact in the path to conversion. This means acknowledging that, in most cases, there is no single “trigger” for the conversion, but rather a group of campaigns or touch points working together to help drive a conversion. So, a user might see a display ad which makes her start thinking about your product, then a few days later view an organic search result, then receive a targeted email, and finally buy your product. In this example the email was the last pre-conversion interaction, but all three interactions probably had an impact on your customer’s decision. Attribution is the process of deciding how much credit you want to give to each of those interactions.
How do I set up those tools you discussed during the webinar? Can you provide more detail for advanced setup needs? Our help center provides very detailed information about how to get your AdWords and Analytics set up correctly, and responses to frequently asked questions. Check out our pages on:
In addition, if you'd like more help, we recommend contacting one of our certified partners – they can assist you with all aspects of implementation, as well as with interpreting your results. You can also check out our AdWords user forum and our Google Analytics user forum to get answers to your questions.
Does adding all this code to my website affect the site speed at all? If the code is installed correctly by following the directions outlined on our help center pages (see above for links), it should not impact your site speed, or have only a very tiny impact. Setting up goals and conversion tracking will provide much richer data on how users arrive at your site and whether they’re doing what you want them to do once they get there. With that knowledge, you’ll be able to improve your marketing programs and your website.
What are some sample use cases for “event” goals? A goal or a conversion can be more than just a purchase. Indeed, you can define multiple “micro-conversions” that represent various actions that are important to your business. So, you might use event goals to keep track of when a PDF was downloaded, or when a user watched a video or played an audio clip. Each of these “events” could be tied to goals that are of value to you. You can find more detail about event tracking in this article on the Google Developers site.
Why do I need to set up conversion tracking and goals? Can’t Google Analytics track without conversions? It is possible to see some useful information without conversions, but defining conversions helps you measure what's important, rather than just general behavior. Plus, after you have these conversion tools set up in Analytics and AdWords, you’ll be able to access Multi-Channel Funnels, Flow Visualization, and Conversion Reporting in Google Analytics, as well as Search Funnels and Conversion Optimizer in AdWords. It’s quick and easy to get started, and it’s much more useful to look at a user’s path if you know that they’ve reached your desired end point and performed an action that’s valuable to your business.
Marketing attribution is a complex but very rewarding process – we hope that these tools and webinars will help you to get started.
Today, we’re sharing some research on marketing attribution that we conducted in partnership with Econsultancy, a leading digital market research firm. The insights -- Marketing Attribution: Valuing the Customer Journey -- provide a snapshot of how marketers and agencies are conducting attribution, the impact it has, and the barriers holding them back.
If you’re not familiar with digital attribution, it’s about distributing credit to all of the elements of your digital marketing program, so you can gauge the impact of customer marketing interactions on your sales results and make more accurate investment decisions. Here are a few snippets from the report that we found interesting:
It’s still a new craft, but early results show positive impact Although digital attribution is still relatively new -- 83% of practitioners we surveyed have been using it for less than 2 years -- it clearly has a positive impact on businesses that employ it. 72% agree that it leads to better budget allocations, 63% gained a better understanding of how digital channels work together, and 58% had clearer insights into their audience:
Attribution leads to improved ROI, better budgeting
Last click attribution dominates; agencies are leading the way in experimentation Most digital marketers run multiple campaigns, each with different strategies and objectives. For instance, display campaigns that are designed to generate awareness will have a different impact on sales than paid search campaigns designed to bring in buyers. Yet most marketers today still use attribution models that do not account for these differences in strategy. Although only 14% of respondents consider “last click” attribution to be “very effective,” it remains common; most likely because marketers haven't yet found or mastered the right attribution tools. Digital marketing agencies have done more with sophisticated attribution methods and technologies:
Robust attribution leads to confident digital decisions For organizations that use attribution, it often leads to greater confidence in marketing choices: if you know the impact of your programs, it’s easier to budget for them. As one online retailer commented, “Attribution was the missing piece to our campaign analysis. Now we don’t run a campaign without learning something about how our marketing affects the buying cycle, and then testing to see whether it applies in the long run.”
Performing marketing attribution with Google Here at Google we spend our time building intuitive tools to make measurement easier, so that you can really use your data to make smarter decisions. That’s why we provide several important tools for marketing attribution, including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. And check out our Attribution Modeling tool in Google Analytics Premium, which includes five standard attribution models plus a custom model builder, so you can create and customize attribution models in minutes, and see data instantly. Learn more in our Attribution Playbook.
Join us for an Attribution Hangout If you’re available this Friday, April 6, at 9:00am PDT, please join Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, and Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate, for a Google+ Hangout. Bill will talk about the research and give a demo of the Attribution tool in Google Analytics Premium, as well as discussing Multi-Channel Funnels and AdWords Search Funnels, two complementary features.
To watch the Hangout on Air, tune into Justin’s Google+ Page on Friday. If you have a question that you would like us to discuss, please enter it in this this form -- and we’ll invite five of you to join the Hangout live to ask your questions.
We look forward to seeing you at the Hangout on Friday!
Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution
More users. More screens. More content. Same time. Same customers. Same goals.
As marketers, it’s a challenge to stay up-to-date on the latest digital media innovations while continuing to manage effective, measurable campaigns. We at Google asked ourselves: how can we help you meet these challenges and move your customers from intent to action? How can we make the web work for you?
Next week at ad:tech SF we’ll answer these questions through a 4-part “Think with Google” series.
Tuesday, April 3rd
Come hear from John Nicoletti, Director of Agency Development, on winning the moments that matter, making better decisions and operating more efficiently as you grow.
Dive deep with Bill Kee, Analytics Product Manager, on ways to approach marketing attribution and what Google Analytics is doing to make attribution modeling more accessible.
Learn about free tools available to help you plan for performance with Jordan Rost, Agency Lead.
Close the day with Rikard Steiber, Global Marketing Director, Mobile & Social Advertising, on how to use Google+ Pages to maximize your business’ effectiveness and presence online.
Wednesday, April 4th
Global Google Analytics Lead Rachel Witalec will join the discussion on search tactics for making sure content gets found where and when you want it. If you’re investing time in digital marketing you won’t want to miss this.
The complete conference agenda is here. The sessions are open to ad:tech attendees.
Still haven’t registered? Sign up here with discount code GOOGLESF12TB and save 30% off a full conference pass.
