At the annual GASummit, Google made a whole bunch of announcements about Google Analytics, following the release of a big upgrade to its mobile app.
For one, unified segments, revealed back in July, are now available to the majority of users, and will be available to all users by the end of the year.
Traffic Sources in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics will be replaced by new Acquisition reports.
“Acquisition in Google Analytics contains some of the most popular reports in our product and are accessed daily by active users,” Google explains in a blog post. “That’s why we’ve been thinking about how to evolve these reports to better present your key metrics in intuitive groups while improving channel flexibility. We know how important these reports are to you, and so we’re pleased to share a sneak preview of the new Acquisition reports in Google Analytics to provide a window on your users’ Acquisition-Behavior-Conversion (ABC) cycle: how you acquire users, their behavior on your site after acquisition, and their conversion patterns.”
Google Analytics will also allow you to understand more about your customers with Audience Reporting.
“One of the biggest challenges for online marketers is the lack of information about the people visiting their properties and buying their products,” the company says. “Unlike in physical stores where a manager can tell a lot about the sorts of people coming and going — What age are they? What’s their gender? What are they interested in? — online merchandisers and marketers are often flying blind. Audience Reporting solves this problem by providing age, gender, and interest categories as dimensions in Google Analytics. Find out who your site visitors are and gain a better understanding of who your most valuable (highest converting) audiences are so you can effectively reach your best prospects on the Google Display Network. Taking into account demographics and interests, you can efficiently target, bid, and optimize your creative to improve your campaign’s performance.”
Last year, Google announced a set of reports called Mobile App Analytics to better help marketers and developers measure mobile apps. Reports include metrics like downloads, new users, retention, crashes, conversions, app sales and in-app purchases. The addition obviously made Google Analytics a great deal more relevant to mobile app developers. Now, Google has announced that Google Play integration, first announced at Google I/O this year, is now available to all users.
Google says this is the only way to get a holistic view of the Play acquisition funnel in a single “easy to understand” report.
Google also announced Analytics Academy a new online learning platform, and that it is bolstering its help documentation, which is accessible via a new education window, which comes up when you click the education button in the menu bar. Here’s one of the videos from Analytics Academy:
There are new Google Analytics Enterprise APIs to make things easier for large companies with many websites and users, and there will soon be BigQuery integration with Google Analytics Premium.
Finally, Google had a couple of announcements related to Tag Manager, which it launched a year ago.
Google has now launched Auto-Event tracking for Tag Manager, which lets you “listen” for events on the page without adding any custom code, then send data to Google Analytics or other tags.
Additionally, Google will be rolling out a new service level agreement for Tag Manager to GA Premium customers in Q4.
Image: Google
