Tag: analytics

Google Analytics 360 Suite Aims to Make Life Easier for Enterprise Marketers

Google announced the Google Analytics 360 Suite, which is comprised of six products (four of which are brand new), and is aimed at enterprise-class marketers.

The tools combine to hep marketers see complete customer journeys, gain useful insights (making sense of the data provided), enable better sharing within their organizations, and and make their brands useful to customers.

The two previously existing products that are part of the suite are GA Premium, which has been renamed Google Analytics 360, and Adometry, which has been renamed Google Attribution 360. The remaining four products are Google Audience Center 360, Google Optimize 360, Google Data Studio 360, and Google Tag Manager 360. Here is how Google describes the new products:

Google Audience Center 360 (beta). This powerful data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it’s open to third party data providers, DSPs and more.

Google Optimize 360 (beta). This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.

Google Data Studio 360 (beta). A new data analysis and visualization product that integrates data across all suite products and other data sources ― turning it into beautiful, interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.

Google Tag Manager 360. Built from our industry-leading tag management product, it empowers enterprise marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code) and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows.

Audience Center 360, Optimize 360, Data Studio 360, and Tag Manager 360 are available today in limited beta. GA Premium and Adometry customers will see the products renamed in the coming months, and Google will let you know when you’re eligible to joint the new betas.

Image via Google

March 15, 2016
Yelp Gives Businesses Social Analytics Via Sprinklr

Yelp has entered a data partnership with social media monitoring platform Sprinklr to enable businesses to monitor Yelp reviews and analyze sentiment. This is the first such partnership Yelp has made and could prove quite beneficial for local businesses using the Sprinklr platform.

“Yelp data is the ultimate resource for local business intelligence and up-to-the-moment intel on consumer feedback, and this partnership gives a never-before-seen look at this data that is enormously helpful to brands trying to improve their customer service and product,” says Yelp SVP, Business and Corporate Development Chad Richard in a blog post. “Yelp data is already used to power local info in the auto industry, search engines, and hundreds of apps and services because we have better quality, more in depth intel than anybody in the business.”

“Sprinklr will use Yelp data, in addition to 20+ other social media channels like Facebook and Twitter to help large brands, like David’s Bridal and Outback Steakhouse, better understand what their customers are saying online,” he adds. “In addition, Sprinklr allows large brands to understand how conversations are trending over time, either positively or negatively, and exactly how customers feel about specific aspects of a businesses’ locations, such as service, decor, facilities, value, and more. They mine Yelp review text to create word clouds and sentiment scores, among other tools. Businesses around the world, both large brands and local, can now take advantage of this holistic monitoring ability through Sprinklr.”

AdAge shares some comments from Sprinkler:

“Yelp provides very deep content at a location specific level,” said Kristin Muhlner, exec VP, Sprinklr. “Yelp is an obviously interesting — and very unusual — source of both insight and engagement because it provides very deep content at a location specific level.”

“Brands want to directly engage with the customers and Yelp’s data is something most retailers do not have,” Ms. Muhlner added. “This data is a great way for brands to directly respond to them. So, the engagement aspect of this can be quite powerful; if you engage a disgruntled customer and turn them around they’ll then become your advocates. With that kind of engagement strategy it drives other people to talk about them.”

Yelp suggests that businesses who want to engage with customers directly claim their Yelp page and respond to reviews, and add photos and business info.

Another thing businesses might find useful is a recently improved revenue estimation tool from Yelp, which now includes personalized results and gives users more control over some aspects.

Image via Yelp (Flickr)

February 18, 2016
How Facebook Just Improved Video Performance Tracking

As has been discussed a great deal over the past year or so, Facebook Video is bigger than ever, and the company continues to make improvements to related tools it offers businesses.

Which tools have helped you with your video efforts? Let us know in the comments.

Just last week, for example, the company announced new features for video ads to help advertisers better communicate their messages and capture viewers’ attention with automated captioning for sound-off videos, new metrics, and Moat integration/in-view buying.

“The new tool generates captions for video ads and delivers them to the advertiser within the ad creation tool to review, edit and save to their video ad,” a Facebook spokesperson explained in an email. “Our research found that when feed-based mobile video ads play loudly when people aren’t expecting it, 80% react negatively, both toward the platform and the advertiser. By including captions, advertisers can increase video view time by an average of 12%.”

In the new metrics department, the spokesperson explained, “Advertisers are now able to see the percentage of people who have viewed their videos with sound in Page Insights and will soon be able to see this metric in Ads Insights too.”

Moat integration and in-view buying were announced last fall, but are now available globally. This means, according to Facebook, 100% in-view impression buying with verification from analytics provider Moat. You can read more about that here.

Even since all of this, Facebook announced that it is rolling out a new, redesigned video metrics interface in Page Insights, which adds new Minutes Viewed and 10-Second Views metrics as well as a new Sound-on vs. Sound-off feature.

The Minutes Viewed metric means the total minutes of watch time spent on the video. Facebook says this has been one of the most requested video metrics from publishers.

The 10-Second Views metric is the number of times the video was viewed to 10 seconds. For videos shorter than 10 seconds, the metric refers to the number of times people viewed at least 97% of the video.

Other available metrics include Unique Viewers, Views, and Average % Completion.

“The updated interface also makes it easy for publishers to access more granular video performance data by clicking through individual metrics on the updated Insights view,” says product manager Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza.

The breakdowns include the new Sound-on vs. Sound-off, which is available for both Views and 10-second Views, and Organic vs. Pai, which is available for Minutes Viewed, Views, 10-Second Views, and Unique Viewers.

“Video publishers have told us that they rely on Page Insights to track the performance of their posts and optimize their video content and programming strategies,” says Gomez-Ortigoza. “Today’s updated interface allows for flexibility as we continue to learn more from publishers about the video performance insights that help them grow their businesses on Facebook.”

The new interface is available in Page Insights, and will hit the Insights API in the near future.

In other recent Facebook video news, they added live video to the Pages Manager app earlier this month.

According to the company, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook on a daily basis, and they don’t even have their expected standalone video app out yet.

What recent additions has Facebook made that have helped you get more out of your video efforts? Discuss in the comments.

Image via Facebook

February 18, 2016
Marchex Integrates With DoubleClick Search To Connect Phone Calls to Keywords

Marchex announced a new integration with DoubleClick Search to deliver better return on ad spend for search marketers that rely on inbound phone calls to drive revenue. According to the mobile ad analytics company, the integration is the only one to provide 100% keyword attribution for calls placed directly from paid search ads for an unlimited number of keywords.

“Marketers rely on paid search campaigns to reach customers across multiple digital platforms,” a spokesperson for Marchex said in an email. “But when it comes to measuring the results of these campaigns, there’s a significant gap between online ad impressions and offline sales – especially in today’s mobile world when inbound calls are easier than ever.”

The integration seeks to change that.

They cite research from Google showing that 57% of smartphone users call a business after searching for info on their phone because they want to talk to a real person.

Marchex Search Analtyics delivers call intelligence data such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) inputs for each keyword directly into DoubleClick Search so markters can optimize their search marketing efforts accordingly.

“Our integration with DoubleClick search is designed for the largest search marketers with hundreds of thousands of keywords,” said Nilesh Dhawale, Senior Product Manager at Marchex. “We are thrilled to partner with DoubleClick Search to provide any client that uses click-to-call the ability to properly automate paid search bidding.”

The Marchex Analytics Platform is already being leveraged with DoubleClick Search for clients in a variety of industries. including Time Warner Cable, Liberty University, and Location3.

Image via DoubleClick

February 11, 2016
Google Adds Google Analytics Support for AMP

While this was always intended to be part of the whole thing, Google just announced Google Analytics support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which the search engine will start sending traffic to next month.

Earlier this week, Google said AMP will support most ad-serving scenarios you’re likely to use, so that’s helpful too.

In a post on the Google Analytics blog, Google writes:

“Today, the AMP team announced the launch of an analytics component that will enable measurement on AMP pages. The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users measure their content wherever it appears. So, for publishers looking to use AMP to provide an improved user experience, we’ve released Google Analytics measurement capabilities for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP support in Google Analytics makes it easy to identify your best content and optimize your user experience.”

“Analytics on AMP is handled by an open source, reusable component that the Google Analytics team helped build. The <amp-analytics> component can be configured with Google Analytics specific configuration parameters to record pageviews, events, and even custom dimensions. That configuration works hand in hand with a global event listener that automatically detects triggers like button presses. As a result, there’s no need to scatter custom JavaScript throughout your page to detect actions that should trigger events and hits. Instead, you can define which actions should trigger hits within the configuration section and let the magic of AMP do the rest.”

Google says you should use a separate Google Analytics property to measure your AMP pages, which could be a bit of an inconvenience (my words, not theirs), but as they note, AMP is still a new technology, so give it time.

You can read more about AMP and analytics in a new post on the AMP blog.

Image via Google

January 28, 2016
Twitter Brand Hub Aims To Help Advertisers Understand Their Brand’s Conversation

Twitter announced the launch of Twitter Brand Hub, a new suite of analytics tools aimed at helping advertisers better understand their brand’s “share of conversation, key audiences, and trends about their brand’s conversation.”

Twitter describes the offering as a “360-degree, real-time view” enabling the advertiser to learn, take action, and see the impact of their Twitter initiatives.

The offering has been in beta, but is now available to select large brand advertisers and medium-sized businesses in English-speaking countries. Those with access can find it when they log into analytics.twitter.com.

Brand Hub lets businesses see insights in a new metric called TrueVoice as well as Audience and Conversation details. The company describes TrueVoice in a blog post:

We’ve developed TrueVoice, a new metric only available within Brand Hub to help advertisers track their share of conversation in real time. Share of conversation empowers marketers to learn more about the conversation happening about their brand on Twitter – in fact, research has shown that Tweets that mention brands have been linked to a direct increase in sales.

We determine your brand’s TrueVoice by first analyzing Tweets about your brand and those about your competitors. Then, we identify what percentage of these impressions your brand owns. As consumers see ads about your brand and your competitors on TV, display, and social channels, they send Tweets which are then counted in real time through TrueVoice.

Audience shows insights about people actively talking about the brand on Twitter, while Conversation shows how people are discussing the brand, such as how many impressions a brand received over time, how many tweets mentioned the brand/product and the top phrases mentioned in conjunction with the brand.

Twitter says those who don’t have access to Brand Hub can request it by reaching out to their account team.

Images via Twitter

October 26, 2015
Square Launches Dashboard Analytics App For iOS

Square just released a new Dashboard app aimed at making it easier for businesses to make decisions from their mobile devices based on data. The app has been in beta, but is now available to all.

“During our beta program, sellers using the app opened it 12 times per day, on average; that’s more than once an hour during a regular business day,” a spokesperson for Square tells WebProNews.

According to the company, over 70% of larger businesses already use Square’s analytics on a daily basis. The app should go a long way in getting a lot more businesses to take advantage of the data it provides.

With the app, businesses can keep an eye on sales as they’re happening. They can look at the number of items sold, and the average sale amounts each day as well as sales comparisons (week-to-week, month-to-month or year-to-year) and which items are the best sellers.

“You can instantly spot which categories are doing well, and which might need some TLC with a sale or a promotion,” Square says. “You can also sort your items by what’s selling, or what’s not. If you’re serving tons of iced coffee and another heat wave is approaching, it might be time to make some more ice.”

You can also use the app to see sales data at one location, all locations, or at any group of locations.

The app is iOS-only for now, and is compatible with iOS 7 and iOS 8. It’s available for free in the App Store. No word on an Android version, though I’d imagine it’s only a matter of time.

Image via Square

July 21, 2015
App Annie Gives Developers Free In-App Analytics With Google Analytics

App Annie, an app data service, which is in use by a reported 700,000 apps, just launched In-App Analytics in open beta with Google Analytics integration.

The new offering can be used by developers to view usage metrics along with data from five major app stores and 34 ad platforms in one centralized dashboard.

“The new additional usage data from In-App Analytics joins key performance metrics from existing App Annie products (App Store and Advertising Analytics), providing a holistic view into the health of an app portfolio and enabling time-saving aggregation, analysis and optimization,” App Annie says in a blog post.

Once the user connects their Google Analytics account, they can see things like app retention, daily sessions, session rate, platform usage comparisons, usage in international markets, daily active users, etc.

The App Analytics dashboard will show total sessions, total time, average sessions per user (per day, week, or month), average session duration, and active users (DAU, WAU, or MAU).

More on connecting your account here.

Images via App Annie

July 9, 2015
Salesforce Unveils ‘Wave Analytics’ Application

Back in October, Salesforce announced Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, marking the company’s entry into the $38 billion analytics market. On Thursday, it unveiled its first Wave Analytics App, Sales Wave Analytics.

Sales Wave Analytics marks the inaugural app for the Wave Analytics Apps line of apps, more of which will come later. Sales Wave Analytics will provide sales teams with personalized templates, historical analysis, and the ability to take immediate actions.

“Until today, analytics were not built for everyone,” said Alex Dayon, president of products, Salesforce. “We are changing the game by combining intuitive analytics with business processes in Wave Analytics Apps, so every business user can not only see performance in real-time, but also take actions directly within the apps.”

The templates in Sales Wave Analytics are called Sales Wave Accelerator Templates, and let you browse all Salesforce sales data, including things like pipeline management, forecasting, quarterly business reviews, team performance, etc.

“For example, a sales operations executive will be able to instantly conduct a real-time pipeline analysis and cross reference it with product sales performance from their mobile phone to determine whether they need to reset forecasts or identify which deals need to be accelerated to hit key targets,” the company explains.

With the historical analysis feature, sales leaders will be able to surface historical metrics quickly from any device. Salesforce says they’ll be able to “organically explore every facet” of the team’s historical performance to discover trends and potential investment areas.

With Sales Waves Actions, teams can create new tasks, change close dates, and engage with people from within the app.

Sales Wave Analytics is in pilot mode for the time being. Only select customers can access it, but it’s expected to be generally available in English later this year. Additional language support will be added in time.

The app will be available on a per user per month subscription model, but the pricing won’t be announced until it becomes generally available.

The app will be available on iOS at first with additional device support (presumably Android) later.

Images via YouTube

June 18, 2015
‘Not Provided’ To Expand As Bing Encrypts Search Data

Microsoft announced that Bing will start encrypting search traffic by default meaning that like much of your Google traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll start seeing “not provided” for query data from Bing.

Google started doing this back in 2011. It’s a little surprising that Bing has taken this long to follow suit, but they’re doing so now nevertheless. Bing’s Duane Forrester says in a blog post:

At Microsoft, we’re committed to helping users keep their data safe and secure. That’s why we support the industry’s move to use of TLS protocols as part of our effort to expand encryption across our networks and services. Bing has already been offering users the option to encrypt search traffic for about a year and a half now. Beginning this summer, we will begin the process of encrypting search traffic by default. This means that traffic originating from Bing will increasingly come from https://www.bing.com as opposed to http://www.bing.com.

With the move to encrypted search by default we will continue to pass along a referrer string so that marketers and webmasters will be able to identify traffic as coming from Bing. However, to further protect our users’ privacy, we will not include the used query terms.

Unless you get the majority of your search traffic from Bing, this probably won’t affect you too badly as you’re probably already used to it from Google. If you do get most of your search traffic from Bing, have fun.

Microsoft says it will still provide some limited query term data through its Search Query Terms Report, Universal Event Tracking, and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Image via Bing

June 15, 2015
Pinterest Integration Just Got Easier For Squarespace Sites

Pinterest has teamed up with Squarespace to give websites using the latter some new tools to make it easier to integrate Pinterest. Those building sites with Squarespace will now more quickly be able to add the Pin It button, get rich pins, and access website analytics.

Typically, those building websites have to set up the code themselves to get all of this. Pinterest’s partnership with Squarespace removes the hassle of having to do that.

“The Pin It button is the best way for your business to get discovered on Pinterest, because it lets people save things they like from your site. Just add the button by going to the Squarespace marketing section,” explains Pinterest’s Jimmy Sopko. “Rich Pins are now automatically available for all Squarespace websites. These are Pins that include additional, real-time details like price, availability, ingredients and reviews. Across Pinterest, Rich Pins are clicked more often than non-Rich Pins.”

Rich Pins show up higher in Pinterest feeds and help to drive more traffic to websites. They’re also said to help in the search ranking department, so that’s an added bonus.

“Pinterest Analytics provides info about your audience and your Pinterest profile, but by connecting Squarespace and Pinterest, you’ll get access to your website analytics too,” says Sopko. “Website analytics gives you a more complete picture of how all your content is doing on Pinterest by showing data for all the Pins that people have saved from your website, not just the Pins you’ve added to your own profile.”

Squarespace is the first website platform to automatically enable Pinterest Domain Analytics and Rich Pins.

“We’ve also made it easy to automatically push all types of content directly to a selected Pinterest board via our social push feature,” notes Squarespace’s Natalie Gibralter in a blog post. “As soon as you add Pinterest as a Connected Account, you can begin pushing content from your posting interface the same way you do other social services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).”

Squarespace has a step-by-step guide to its PInterest integration here in case you have any trouble with it.

For more more on what works best for Pinterest when it comes to business, these videos Pinterest recently released.

Image via Squarespace

May 28, 2015
Google Search Console Gets App Indexing-Friendly

Earlier this week, Google announced that it has rebranded Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console. The company did not announce any new features to accompany the name change, but it didn’t take them long to unveil the first updates to the product under the new brand.

On Friday, Google announced the addition of new reports to show how Google understands and treats app content in search results. If you have an Android app, you can open Search Console, and enter your app name. You’ll have to use your Google Play account to let it know you have access to the app. If you don’t, you’ll need to ask the owner to verify it and add you. You’ll also have to associate your site with your app, which is required for App Indexing to work. Google notes that it also helps with understanding and ranking app content better.

There’s a new Search Analytics report, which shows detailed info on top queries, app pages, and traffic by country. It includes a “comprehensive” set of filters so you can narrow down to a specific query type or region, or sort by clicks, impressions, CTR, and positions.

“Use the Search Analytics report to compare which app content you consider most important with the content that actually shows up in search and gets the most clicks,” Google writes in a blog post. “If they match, you’re on the right track! Your users are finding and liking what you want them to see. If there’s little overlap, you may need to restructure your navigation, or make the most important content easier to find. Also worth checking in this case: have you provided deep links to all the app content you want your users to find?”

The Crawl Errors report will show the type and number of errors it detects with your app content. There’s also a new alpha version of the Fetch as Google tool for apps to let you see if an app URI works and how Google renders it.

“It can also be useful for comparing the app content with the webpage content to debug errors such as content mismatch,” says Google. “In many cases, the mismatch errors are caused by blocked resources within the app or by pop-ups asking users to sign in or register. Now you can see and resolve these issues.”

Google announced app indexing as a ranking signal earlier this year at the same time it announced its mobile-friendly update. It just went into effect earlier. At first it was only for signed in mobile users who had the apps installed on their devices. Google has since expanded the signal to include all Android users. It said in April it had indexed 30 billion links within apps.

READ: How To Set Up App Indexing For Ranking In Google

Images via Google

May 22, 2015
Google Is Replacing The Most Used Feature In Webmaster Tools

Google announced the release of the new Search Analytics report in Webmaster Tools, which it promises will deliver webmasters more precise data. It is replacing the Search Queries report, which the company says is the most used feature in Webmaster Tools.

“If you manage a website, you need a deep understanding of how users find your site and how your content appears on Google’s search results,” says Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji “Until now, this data was shown in the Search Queries report, probably the most used feature in Webmaster Tools. Over the years, we’ve been listening to your feedback and features requests. How many of you wished they could compare traffic on desktop and mobile? How many of you needed to compare metrics in different countries? or in two different time frames?”

The new report is designed to help you solve such problems. You can break down your site’s search data and filter it in “many different ways”. Google specifically suggests using it to compare your mobile traffic before and after the big Google Mobile-Friendly update (Mobilegeddon).

You can use it to find the countries where people search most for your brand by choosing impressions, filtering by your brand name, and grouping results by country.

These are just a couple examples Google gave, but you should be able to do a lot more with the report than that.

“There are some differences between Search Analytics and Search Queries,” Bahajji notes. “Data in the Search Analytics report is much more accurate than data in the older Search Queries report, and it is calculated differently. To learn more read out Search Analytics Help Center article’s section about data. Because we understand that some of you will still need to use the old report, we’ve decided to leave it available in Google Webmaster Tools for three additional months. To learn more about the new report, please read our Search Analytics Help Center article.”

The default view of the report shows your site’s click count coming from Google search results for the previous four weeks. Just select one or more metric checkboxes at the top to change what it shows. Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position are the available metrics.

Images via Google

May 6, 2015
Facebook And IBM Are Working Together On Personalized Ads

Facebook and IBM have teamed up on marketing solutions with IBM’s marketing cloud clients now being able to utilize Facebook’s ad capabilities starting today. This includes Custom Audiences, which can be used in conjunction with IBM’s analytics and design features.

IBM has a new feature called Journey Designer, which brands can use to create personalized customer experiences and then use Journey Analytics to get a better grip (in aggregate) on how customers responded. According to the company, combining this with Facebook’s ad technologies will enable brands to more accurately determine which customers are among Facebook’s active users and “establish correlations in aggregate between their interests and interactions across multiple channels.”

The partnership extends beyond this, however. The companies also announced that Facebook will be the first company to join the new IBM Commerce THINKLab, which is a “research and collaboration environment” in which companies work directly with brands to develop new technologies to personalize customer experiences. In this, IBM researchers, Facebook experts, domain experts, designers and other partners will work directly with partners to find areas of need and generate new solutions based on those.

“Our partnership with IBM will help top brands achieve personalization at scale by using IBM’s marketing cloud to find and engage their target audiences on Facebook, as well as solve their vexing challenges by consulting with IBM Commerce THINKLab, ” said Blake Chandlee, VP of Partnerships for Facebook. “We will also be working closely with IBM Commerce THINKLab to help deliver people-based marketing that’s optimized to achieve each brand’s business goals.”

“Brands understand the increasing need to provide customers with powerful and personalized experiences to nurture loyalty,” said Deepak Advani, General Manager at IBM Commerce. “Through this collaboration, consumer product companies and retailers will be able to quickly and easily gain deeper insight into what their customers expect and provide them with compelling experiences that bridge the physical and virtual divide.”

IBM says it will use deep analytics, on top of Facebook’s anonymized and aggregate audience insights with additional info from its own marketing cloud so marketers have a “clearer picture” of their target audiences. They’ll be able to replicate proven campaigns beyond Facebook to other brand channels including their own stores, sites, and apps, the company says.

It uses the example of a retailer launching a new line of running gear using Facebook’s Custom Audiences and targeting solutions to segment customer groups that are interested in long-distance running. They can gain insights into the audience’s running gear preferences, adn then offer deals based on those and location.

Wired says the partnership will “supercharge” personalized ads. You have to think that IBM’s analytics capabilities and Facebook personalized data capabilities will indeed make for a pretty powerful combo.

Image via IBM

May 6, 2015
Facebook Gives Developers Analytics For Apps

Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Analytics for Apps, which is exactly what it sounds like. Apps logging App Events, which according to the company, includes over 87% of the top-grossing apps in the U.S., can start using the service immediately.

The product includes insights to help you understand traffic across devices.

“if you’re an online clothing retailer and have both a native mobile app and a website, you can tell if your customers click an ad for your app on their phone, browse a pair of jeans on their laptop, and finally make a purchase on their tablet,” explains Facebook’s Aydin Ghajar. “You might discover that the majority of purchases happen on your website, but the majority of those people previously clicked ads that came from mobile, which could help you decide where to run more ads.”

It lets you look at demographic segments and metrics for them to see how they use your app differently from everyone else.

“You could build a segment of the top five percent of people who make the most purchases in your app and look at their demographic and device breakdown,” says Ghajar. “For instance, you might discover that people who make the most purchases are women between 25-34 who use Android. You could then decide to invest more in your Android app, or run more ads for women in that age group.”

You can look at cohorts (groups of people who took a set of actions in your app), and review metrics for them. You can look at things like what percentage of them launched your app, completed a registration, or made a purchase.

You can also create funnels to see how people move through a series of steps in the app (such as a purchase flow), and see where people drop off.

“If you’re a game developer and your game is only available in Spanish, you might want to know if translating your game into other languages would result in more purchases,” explains Ghajar. “You can build a funnel for your purchase flow, and then look at that funnel broken down by language. If non-Spanish speakers are dropping off at the purchase point more often, you might be able to increase your revenue by localizing your app into additional languages.”

As the company notes, app developers can use the product to improve their Facebook ads. Over time, it says, it can help measure the performance of mobile app ads on other ad networks. That’s launching in closed beta.

Images via Facebook

March 25, 2015
Adobe Aims To Improve ‘Internet of Things’ Marketing

Adobe held its digital marketing conference Adobe Summit, and made a slew of marketing-related announcements

“The product and partner announcements cover where marketing is going next: bringing digital experiences to the physical world, IoT and wearable devices, mobile marketing innovations for the entire app lifecycle, and the convergence of marketing and ad technologies,” a spokesperson for Adobe tells WebProNews.

Connecting Businesses and Consumers via the Internet of Things

First off, Adobe Marketing Cloud is getting an upgrade related to the Internet of things (IoT). The company says it’s enabling brands to bring “highly personalized experiences” to physical spaces like retail stores, hotel rooms, vending machines and other IoT devices. It’s doing so by offering a new IoT SDK to let brands measure and analyze consumer engagement across any of these devices.

“What’s driving this is the digital transformation of the enterprise, catalyzed by the marketing department. Previously siloed, marketing data is now being used in concert with data collected by other departments like sales and customer service, creating a richer view of the customer,” Adobe says.

“Marketing is moving beyond existing digital channels to include new physical experiences in the real world,” said Adobe SVP of DIgital Marketing Brad Rencher. “Adobe Marketing Cloud helps brands use their online marketing data to create unparalleled personalization in retail, entertainment, and travel and leisure experiences.”

In addition to the SDK, Adobe has new “Experience Manager Screens,” which it says enable marketers to extend interactive content to these physical spaces with one author user experience to ensure consistency across devices. It supports multi-touch so content can easily move among screen sizes. It’s all tied into Creative Cloud.

“Adobe Experience Manager Screens allows us to redefine the way clothing lines are designed and displayed,” comments Jody Giles, SVP of Product Integration at Under Armour. “Instead of physical samples, we are able to create rich digital designs and experiences in record time and extend them to our Catalog app. We can also see customers using the technology in our stores and engaging with our brand on life-size touch screens.”

Marketing Cloud also has new “intelligent location” capabilities, which let businesses tap into GPS and iBeacon data to optimize their physical brand presences.

“With the visualization of iBeacon data, brands are able to view traffic patterns and customer engagements within retail stores, sports stadiums, airports, hotels, museums and other points of interests,” the company explains. “Marketers can view and measure dwell times throughout the day, consumer interactions with push notifications and in-app messages triggered by iBeacons and more. The visualization of data enables them to reconfigure store layouts and optimize the display of merchandise to fully maximize ROI.”

As Marketing Cloud users can now reach IoT devices, Adobe Target now supports digital content testing, optimization, and personalization across them. Content can be served on ATMs, gas pumps, game consoles, car dashboards, appliances, etc. based on users’ personal interests. Adobe says it uses “predictive, yet anonymous” data including CRM and third-party sources to personalize content in real time. Businesses will be able to analyze engagement using Mobile Core Services and Adobe Analytics.

According to a consumer survey, the top IoT devices consumers want to interact with digitally are home electronics (61%), home appliances like thermostats, fridges, or ovens (54%), and cars (51%). 27% of those who don’t currently own a smartwatch say they are very likely to buy one in next 6 months, while 67% of those said they were very likely to buy Apple Watch (I wonder what percentage plan on buying a $17,000 model).

77% said it would be useful to receive promotions while inside a store (j84% for 18-34 year-olds), and 74% of marketers see great potential in impact of IoT and wearables.

Mobile Marketing and App Development

Also at the summit, Adobe introduced some new stuff for Adobe Mobile Services, including a new mobile app framework that brings together Adobe Experience Manager Apps, Adobe PhoneGap Enterprise, Adobe Analytics – Mobile Apps, and Adobe Target.

“Adobe Digital Index data shows a new record in the use of mobile devices and yet, building a successful mobile app experience today remains a mystery for many marketers,” said Matt Asay, vice president, Mobile Strategy at Adobe. “They struggle to synthesize a myriad of different mobile tools that address very specific needs. With Adobe Mobile Services, we will dramatically simplify this process, making it easy for marketers to build and optimize their apps.”

The framework includes tools to aid in development, user acquisition, app analytics, and user engagement. The spokesperson says it “delivers the complete, integrated solution in the industry for developing and managing apps, and is the first to eliminate marketers’ dependence on an array of disjointed point solutions.”

Adobe has added six new app tech providers to its partner ecosystem, including: Fiksu, Vibes, Kochava, Ionic, Crittercism, and appFigures. Each is integrating its tools into the framework.

“Adobe Analytics clients will be provided with mobile app store data including: app downloads, app and in-app revenue, returns, ranks and ratings,” a spokesperson for appFigures tells WebProNews. “Data provided by appFigures will be updated in near real-time. With app store data directly available in their dashboards, marketers and developers will have more insightful data to base their mobile decisions on.”

That particular integration is expected to be available in Q2.

Data-Driven Marketing and Ad Tech

Adobe also introduced a new algorithmic engine and updates to its Marketing Cloud Audience Core Services to “bring together the worlds of data-driven marketing and ad tech.”

This involves integrating programmatic buying natively to put the marketplace right in front of the marketer as they put it.

“New Audience Core Services enable brands to connect massive audience and behavioral data from a broad range of sources, including CRM systems, websites and apps while a new set of algorithms lets them reach those audiences with paid media through Adobe Media Optimizer,” the company says.

“We believe programmatic efforts to date are broken and focus simply on display ad bidding,” adds John Mellor, VP of Digital Marketing at Adobe. “Having a one-stop shop for all your targeting and data as well as transparency into technology pricing and media costs is a big step towards true programmatic. The ability to share audience segments across other Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions brings that data to life across channels and ensures that audiences are seeing the same message no matter where marketers connect with them.”

Partnership with IBM

Adobe has also partnered with IBM Interactive Experience, which is building specialized enterprise consulting capabilities for Marketing Cloud.

“A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study indicates that there is a disconnect between what consumers say they want from digital experiences and how they actually behave,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader, IBM Interactive Experience. “Today’s announcement will help marketers close the gap between expectations and experience using a combinations of Adobe Marketing Cloud and the services of IBM Interactive Experience, a unique digital agency that brings together experience design, systems integration and strategy consulting.”

Adobe is also expanding its alliance with Accenture with a new cloud-based managed service based on Marketing Cloud. More on that here.

According to Adobe, 76% of the Fortune 50 utilize Marketing Cloud, as do 9 of the top 10 internet retailers and all of the top 5 media companies and top 10 software companies.

March 10, 2015
Twitter ‘Answers’ Analytics Tool Available For Non-Developers

Twitter announced that its mobile app analytics tool Answers will be available separately from its Crashlytics suite, where it has resided since launching. It will still be available via Crashlytics, but for non-developers, it will also be available in standalone form.

Product manager Brian Swift said in a blog post, “This way, we’ll be able to innovate more rapidly and deliver features that serve the needs of everyone on the team. Our goal is always to create a dashboard that makes understanding your user base dead simple so you can spend your time building amazing experiences, not digging through data. In short: Answers is not just for developers anymore.”

Twitter first launched Answers as part of Crashlytics back in July to “intelligently” analyze and learn apps’ behavior and deliver live data.

“We’re really proud of what Answers does, and are thrilled with the response from the community so far,” says Swift. “Answers now processes over 5 billion sessions per day — over 1 million analytics events per second — and is used by some of the largest apps in the world…As we’ve ramped up to billions of Answers sessions per day, we’ve noticed that it’s not just the developers who are hungry for in-depth and real-time analytics – it’s everyone from app marketers to executives to app developers.”

At its Flight developer conference in October, Twitter launched its Fabric dev kits, which includes a Crashlytics kit featuring Answers. In December, the company made Answers available to those who want to track promoted and organic app installs driven by Twitter.

Images via Twitter

February 19, 2015
Microsoft Is Buying Revolution Analytics To Make Companies Smarter

Microsoft announced that it has agreed to acquire Revolution Analytics, which provides software and services for statistical computing and predictive analytics programming language “R”. Microsoft says it will use the acquisition to help companies take advantage of R and data science.

The company intends to help reduce the data science and analytics skills gap in organizations in the financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, and research spaces, and this acquisition will help them attempt to do that.

“Revolution Analytics provides an enterprise-class platform for the development and deployment of R-based analytic solutions that can scale across large data warehouses and Hadoop systems, and can integrate with enterprise systems,” says Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of Machine Learning at Microsoft. “Its Revolution R product line, combined with its expert advisory services and training, help people and companies realize the potential of big data using sound statistical, scientific methodologies. Top customers include some of the world’s largest banks and financial services organizations, pharmaceutical companies, consulting services organizations, manufacturing and technology companies. Revolution Analytics is also an important part of the vibrant R community of over 2 million users worldwide. The company regularly contributes to open source R projects such as ParallelR, and RHadoop, and helps support more than 150 R user groups across the world.”

Customers will be able to use analytics within Microsoft’s data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure, the company says.

“By leveraging Revolution Analytics technology and services, we will empower enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale,” says Sirosh. “Additionally, we are excited to help foster the open source evolution of R and, particularly, the community of people that drives that evolution.”

Microsoft will support and evolve open source and commercial distributions of Revolution R for various operating systems.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Revolution Chief Community Officer David Smith discusses the acquisition further here.

January 23, 2015
Pinterest Gives Businesses Analytics Tips

Last summer, Pinterest made its “new and improved” analytics offering generally available. The company described it as a “smarter tool to help businesses worldwide continue to improve how they work, with meaningful insights about what their customers are interested in.”

“Available in 31 different languages, Pinterest analytics helps businesses improve—whether it’s updating their product offerings after seeing what’s popular on Pinterest, or changing how they pin based on what’s trending with Pinners,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told us at the time. “Those with a business account can access the new tool immediately by visiting analytics.pinterest.com or their Pinterest profile.”

In case you haven’t started using it, this week, Pinterest released a new video primer for Pinterest Analytics.

“No matter what you’re trying to achieve with your business in 2015, Pinterest Analytics can give you a nudge in the right direction,” says Pinterest’s Vivian Chow.

“Brooks Custom, a countertop maker in New York, uses analytics to monitor shopping trends and inform their product lines. Looking at their most popular Pins helps them decide which types of material to use and which colors and textures to offer,” she says. “Grace Gordon, an accessories designer in the UK, uses analytics to drive sales. After noticing that the top Pins in her style-inspiration board often included black tote bags, she focused on promoting her own black tote––and it sold out!”

The video really only covers the basics. Pinterest also has an Analytics Guide, which has four parts: the basics, profile analytics, website analytics, and audience analytics. Since we’re dealing with the basics here, here’s a look at that section from PInterest’s guide:

You have to have a business account to use Pinterest Analytics. You can create one here or convert your existing account here.

Image via Pinterest

January 16, 2015
Getting Google Analytics Data Into Google Sheets Just Got A Lot Easier

About ten months ago, Google launched add-ons for Docs and Sheets, enabling users to get more functionality out of the products. Similar to how web browser extensions make browsers like Chrome more powerful, add-ons do the same for Google Docs and Sheets.

At launch, there were add-ons for things like printing address labels and name tags, creating a bibliography without leaving Docs, sending customized emails, getting approvals, etc. Now, Google has announced the launch of a Google Analytics add-on, which enables users to more easily get Analytics data into Google sheets for reporting purposes.

“It’s common for Google Analytics users to use spreadsheets to analyze their Google Analytics data or combine it with another data source,” Google’s Philip Walton says. “But exporting your data from Google Analytics to Google Sheets is a manual process, and it can be tedious if you run reports frequently or manage multiple accounts. With the release of Add-ons for Google Sheets, getting your Google Analytics data into Google Sheets has never been easier!”

If this applies to you, you’ll probably want to watch the following six-minute video on the subject to get yourself acquainted with the add-on.

You might also want to watch this longer one about building a dashboard with the add-on:

The add-on enables you to do things like: query and report data from multiple views, compute and display custom calculations, create visualizations and embed them on your site, schedule reports to run and update automatically, and control who can see your data and visualizations with the existing privacy features in Sheets.

To install the add-on, create a new spreadsheet (or open an existing one), then go to Add-ons from the menu bar. You’ll find the Google Analytics add-on in the gallery. Click the “+” to add it, and accept the dialogue that pops up. When it’s installed, a Google Analytics sub-menu will appear in the add-ons menu.

Once you’ve installed the add-on, you can create a report manually or with the report creation tool, which is in the new menu. The tool adds a sidebar to the right side of the screen that lets you look at Analytics account info, and choose dimensions and metrics to query. Then you can create the report and the info will appear in a sheet named “Report Configuration”. Any report you create after that will add a column to the right of the previous report.

“If you look at the values the report creation tool enters into the report configuration sheet, you’ll notice that many of the cells are left blank,” Google says in its documentation. “This is intentional. The tool is meant to help get you started and provide you with the information you might not know off the top of your head. The rest of the fields will need to be entered by you.”

You can also run reports from the new menu. It will run every report with a name by default, but you can exclude reports if you like. You can schedule them to run automatically by selecting the “Schedule Reports” option from the menu.

In addition to the new Google Analytics add-on, Google suggests checking out the Supermetrics and Analytics Canvas add-ons for more advanced business and data-integrated solutions. Both integrate with Google Analytics as well as other services like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Office, etc.

Image via Google

January 14, 2015
Twitter Gives Analytics Access To iPhone Users

Twitter opened up its analytics offering to all users back in the summer, giving people a better look at the engagement surrounding any given tweet. This was only for the desktop, however.

Now, some are starting to be able to access the feature on their phones. Specifically, some iPhone users now have it.

Twitter quietly made this official in a support document (via MacStories), saying:

On mobile (currently available on Twitter for iPhone), click on one of your Tweets to get to the Tweet detail page, then tap “View Tweet activity.” Make sure you have installed the latest version of Twitter for iPhone.

It’s unclear when this might be expanded to additional mobile platforms like Android. Apparently not all iPhone users are getting it, so it might still be rolling out.

Image via Twitter

December 23, 2014