AtDoubleClick Search we know that search marketing has expanded dramatically in scale and complexity over the years, and today, large search campaigns may be difficult to manage using manual methods alone. As such, marketers are relying more and more on automated bid optimization platforms to run larger campaigns -- enabling them to scale up and streamline their operations at the same time.
Using the 7 factors as a guideline, you can choose the platform that’s best for your business, to help you save time, get the best results, and make better decisions in your digital marketing efforts.
Stay tuned to theDoubleClick Search blog to learn more about enhancements, updates, and launches around the Performance Bidding Suite. To learn more about the 7 factors to consider when choosing a bid optimization tool, download ourwhite paper here.
Posted by Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
Last Tuesday, we held a webinar on the technical implementation of Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags, freeing up webmaster time while providing users with more reliable data and insights. This technical session includes a more in-depth look than our introductory webinar, illustrating how the product operates in a live environment and showing how flexible Google Tag Manager is for enterprise systems.
Watch the webinar video here for:
Step-by-step implementation process + live product demo
Advanced use cases, including the Data Layer API
Best practices and common pitfalls
And don’t forget to download our handy implementation Cheat-Sheet, which outlines each of the steps involved in migrating onto Google Tag Manager.
And as usual, we like to provide a recap of some of the top questions we received during the webinar. Please note that this webinar is intended for technical audiences, so some of the Q&A below gets into the nitty-gritty technical details. If you’re less experienced technically, we invite you to check out our forum or reach out to one of our certified partners for implementation assistance.
Questions and Answers
Where can I find more detailed information about all of this stuff? In addition to the walkthrough we provide in the webinar and our Cheat-Sheet, you can find a detailed description of the implementation process in the Google Developer docs, and helpful articles about how to use the Google Tag Manager user interface in our Help Center, including some notes about what to think about before you begin implementing. And as noted above, if you still have questions, check out our forum or reach out to one of our certified partners for implementation assistance.
Where can I place the GTM snippet? Can I put it in <head>? Does placing it in the footer have any adverse effects? Can I place the data layer in <head>? The recommended location for the GTM snippet is just after the opening <body> tag. The only exception to this would be in the case where you want to declare page-level metadata by declaring the data layer immediately above the GTM snippet.
The GTM snippet can be deployed later in the page, like the footer, but doing so increases the time before the snippet loads. This can cause incremental amounts of data loss, since the user could navigate away before all your tags finish loading.
We do not recommend placing the GTM snippet in head, because the GTM snippet contains an <iframe> for the <noscript> case. Iframes are not officially supported by any browsers in <head> and might cause unexpected behavior.
What should I do about collecting macros and tagging events if I don’t have access to my client’s site or if IT is too busy? If you can’t access values on the page via the data layer, there are several different Macro types to help you capture data without needing a code change. These include DOM element, DOM attribute, and JS variable macros. Simply input the ID or variable names, and the macro will pull out the data for you. NOTE: If you go this route, you may want to accompany the tag being fired with an “{{event}} equals gtm.dom” rule. This makes sure the element has loaded in the page before you request it, so you don’t get an undefined macro value.
If you're trying to add events to the page, currently this requires code changes. We're working on a solution that doesn't need code changes, but in the meantime we've heard of a couple of folks using the Custom HTML template to inject the dataLayer.push() API into relevant parts of the page. We can’t guarantee this as a solution due to the asynchronous nature of tag loading in Google Tag Manager, but we have heard some success stories.
How do I do cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager? It's now possible to do cross-domain tracking in GA using the custom HTML template and a new track type within the Google Analytics tag template. We've got some exciting things in the works here to make cross-domain tracking even easier; stay tuned for more soon.
Do you have any account and container setup best practices? What if I’m an agency? What if I have separate sites for mobile and desktop? In general, an account should be owned by a single advertiser or publisher. Within each account, there can be multiple containers, and containers should be split according to how the site or sites are managed. For instance, if there’s a separate marketing team managing different countries and therefore probably different tag vendors, then there should be a separate container per country. If you have a mobile site and a desktop site that use the same tags across both subdomains, then you should probably only use a single container. We have found that one container per domain is pretty standard, but there are always different situations that call for a different setup.
If you’re an agency, we strongly recommend that your client creates the initial Google Tag Manager account and container, and then have your client add you to the container. Google Tag Manager includes user permissions controls as well as multi-account access to make it easier for agencies and clients to work together.
Are all tags with document.write off limits? Are there any workarounds? Most tags that utilize document.write are just trying to construct an image pixel with dynamic parameters using JavaScript. Luckily, our Custom Image Tag allows you to construct an image pixel with dynamic parameters. Look at the tag you’re trying to add, pick out the URL, paste it into the Image URL field, and then add any dynamic variables by using the {{macro}} syntax. See the live demo in the webinar video above for an example of how to do this.
Do not add tags that contain document.write in either the initial snippet or in any linked JavaScript. Doing so will cause undesirable effects.
How do Google Analytics events differ from Google Tag Manager events? Events in Google Tag Manager are basically an indication that this is an event where other tags could fire. It does not collect any data. GTM events are used in tag firing rules to initiate the placement of other tags.
Google Analytics events are actually data events, and can be set up in Google Tag Manager via the Google Analytics template, tracking type “Event”. This tag sends data to Google Analytics to be reported on within the Google Analytics interface.
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We hope the webinar and Q&A will help you implement Google Tag Manager smoothly and easily -- many business, including GoPro, are already enjoying easier tagging. Keep watching this blog for more tips and tricks! Posted by the Google Tag Manager team
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.
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.
-- 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
One of our favorite features of Google Tag Manager is the ability to add new tags to your site using a tag template instead of copying-and-pasting code — and we’ve just made tagging even easier with several new built-in tag templates. Just add a few key details to the template, and Google Tag Manager will automatically generate the correct code.
We’ve teamed up with a variety of companies to provide our first wave of Tag Vendor templates, including:
This is just the first wave of supported tags, and you can look forward to many more coming soon. If you have specific requests, we’d love to hear them in our Google Tag Manager Forum in the Feature Requests section.
If you’re a tag vendor, and you’d like to get your tag supported in Google Tag Manager through the Tag Vendor Program, follow the instructions here to get started. And thanks to all of our partners for your support and involvement with Google Tag Manager!
Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager
Guest author Ashraf Chohan works at the Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the UK Cabinet Office. Originally posted on the Google Apps Developer Blog by Arun Nagarajan.
Recently, when we were preparing the launch of GOV.UK, my team was tasked with creating a series of high-level metrics reports which could be quickly compiled and presented to managers without technical or analytical backgrounds. These reports would be sent daily to ministers and senior civil servants of several government departments, with the data customised for each department.
We decided to use Adobe InDesign to manage the visual appearance of the reports. InDesign’s data-merge functionality, which can automatically import external data into the layout, made it easy to create custom departmental reports. The challenge was to automate the data collection using the Google Analytics API, then organize the data in an appropriate format for InDesign’s importer.
In a previous post on this blog, Nick Mihailovski introduced a tool which allows automation of Google Analytics Reporting using Google Apps Script. This seemed an ideal solution because the team only had basic developer knowledge, much of the data we needed was not accessible from the Google Analytics UI, and some of the data required specific formatting prior to being exported.
We started by building the core reports in a Google spreadsheet that pulls in all of the required raw data. Because we wanted to create daily reports, the start and end dates for our queries referenced a cell which defaulted to yesterday’s date [=(TODAY())-1].
These queries were dynamically fed into the Google Analytics API through Apps Script:
// All variables read from each of the “query” cells var optArgs ={ 'dimensions': dimensions, 'sort': sort 'segment': segment 'filters': filters, 'start-index':'1', 'max-results':'250' };
// Make a request to the API. var results =Analytics.Data.Ga.get( tableId,// Table id (format ga:xxxxxx). startDate,// Start-date (format yyyy-MM-dd). endDate,// End-date (format yyyy-MM-dd). endDate,// Comma seperated list of metrics. optArgs);
Next, we created additional worksheets that referenced the raw data so that we could apply the first stage of formatting. This is where storing the data in a spreadsheet really helps, as data formatting is not really possible in the Google Analytics UI.
For example, the final report had a 47-character limit for page titles, so we restricted the cells in the spreadsheet to 44 characters and automatically truncated long URLs by appending “...”.
Once the initial formatting was complete, we used formulas to copy the data into a summary sheet specially laid out so it could be exported as a CSV file that merges seamlessly into InDesign.
Below is an example of how a report looks on publication. Nearly everything on the page was extracted from the API tool, including the department name and the day number. Because most of the data was automated, it required minimal effort on our part to assemble these reports each morning.
We discovered that an added bonus of pulling data into a Google spreadsheet was that it also allowed us to publish the data to a Google site. This helped us display data to stakeholders without adding lots of users to our Google Analytics account.
The tools let us present Google Analytics data in deeper, more creative ways. That’s really important as we share information with more and more non-technical people, whether they’re inside GDS or beyond.
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
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
Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this yearwe introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with any social plugin installed on your site - after all, what can be measured can also be improved and optimized!
MilkADeal started using Google Analytics earlier this year. It is a company in Malaysia that has benefited greatly from using Social Plugin Analytics. By using these new reports, they are able to uncover insights and create significant business process improvements. As reported in the New Straits Times, "In particular, the newly introduced social interaction tracking tool...We've been using it only in the last couple of weeks but we have seen an increase of almost 60% in social interaction visitors to our site," said Wilson Quah, founder of MilkADeal."
By optimizing the instrumentation of a few buttons on their site, MilkADeal is able to achieve better engagement, a big boost in number of high quality referrals, and better outcomes! Today, we are happy to announce that our partners, AddThis and ShareThis, are making this social plugin analysis even easier. Just as the +1 button isautomatically instrumented for you by the Google+ team, publishers using AddThis and ShareThis will now have first class integrations with Social Plugin Analytics!
“Providing real-time analytics to 10 million domains each month, we see what big data can do every day. Integrating AddThis social signals into Google Analytics is a big win for publishers. We’re excited to contribute social sharing insight where it can be viewed in context of the GA interface.”
Will Meyer, VP of Publisher Products, Clearspring
“At ShareThis, we work to provide our publisher network of one million+ websites with actionable analytics on their social activity. It's great to see Google paving the way for the entire industry to derive meaningful insights from the social Web and we're incredibly pleased to be a launch partner."
Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis
To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are nowjust one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!
Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team
Update: AddToAny users will also be happy to know that their social buttons are automatically instrumented to work with event tracking and social plugin analytics!
Back in June, we announced a pilot program to allow users to surface Google Search data in Google Analytics by linking their Webmaster Tools accounts. We’ve been busy making some improvements and tweaks based on user feedback, and today we’re excited to make this set of reports available to all users.
The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results. We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section. The reports you’ll find there are:
Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country
Queries report
To start using the reports you first need to link your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts. You can get step by step instructions and additional information on the reports in this Help Center article. If you’re not already using Webmaster Tools, we highly recommend you start. It’s a free tool that helps you understand how Google sees your site. Sign up on the Google Webmaster Tools homepage. Enjoy the new reports, and let us know how they’re helping your analysis.
Posted by Kate Cushing, Associate Product Manager, Google Analytics team
Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it. You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation. In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging, but we’re happy to announce that now we’ve made it easy to setup Site Search tracking directly from your Custom Search Engine.
If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu. We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.
Once you save your changes, we’ll generate a new code snippet. Copy it from the Get Code page, paste it into your site and setup is complete!
You can then access Site Search reports from the Content section of Google Analytics.
Happy analyzing! If needed, you can find help with setup here and an explanation of the differences between Google Analytics and Custom Search statistics here. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.
The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.
But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.
First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:
The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.
Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.
Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.
The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
The Social Actions report lets you analyse the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.
Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.
Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!
UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.
