WebProNews

Tag: analytics

  • Pinterest Tests Do-It-Yourself Promoted Pins, New Analytics

    Pinterest Tests Do-It-Yourself Promoted Pins, New Analytics

    Pinterest is beta testing do-it-yourself Promoted Pins and a new analytics offering. Last month, the company announced that it was rolling out Promoted Pins from a group of big partner brands, but with the new test, businesses of any size can promote their own pins.

    The do-it-yourself pins are available on a cost-per-cilck basis through ads.pinterest.com. For now, Pinterest is testing them with a few businesses including vineyard vines, Nicole Miller, and Shutterfly, but will make them available to everyone else in time. You can sign up to participate here.

    Promoted Pins appear in search and category feeds.

    The company is also refreshing its analytics offering with more detailed insights.

    “In addition to seeing what people are Pinning from your website, you’ll also be able to see how Pins from your Pinterest profile are performing,” says Pinterest’s Jason Costa. “We’ll tell you which of your Pins and boards are driving the most impressions, clicks and repins. We’ll also clue you in to Pins that drive engagement across different platforms.”

    They’re rolling this out slowly to “make sure everything works,” but if you have a business account, you should get access to it soon.

    A couple weeks ago, Pinterest announced that it is working with a small group of marketing technology companies, including Salesforce, Hootsuite, Spredfast, Percolate, Piqora, Curalate, and Tailwind, who are getting automated access to public dat through Pinterest’s Business Insights API. Partners were encouraged to add insights that aren’t available in Pinterest’s own offering.

    Both of Pinterest’s latest announcements may become quite significant to marketers as the company uses recent funding to expand its search offerings.

    Images via Pinterest

  • Microsoft Acquires App Analytics Company Capptain

    Microsoft Acquires App Analytics Company Capptain

    Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Capptain, a platform for app developers that combines analytics with push notifications and in-app messaging campaigns. Here it is in a nutshell:

    Microsoft will integrate Capptain with Azure.

    “With Capptain’s solution, organizations can analyze customer and employee behavior in real-time, and respond by pushing targeted messages, announcements, information or offers,” says Microsoft’s Omar Khan. “This information empowers organizations to provide personalized, specific content to their customers in order to maximize business opportunities.”

    “We are hard at work integrating Capptain’s solution with the wider Microsoft Azure suite of services so that enterprises can not only build mobile apps to engage customers and employees, but also analyze and optimize that engagement,” he adds. “In the interim, Capptain’s existing solutions will remain available to both new and current customers.”

    A note on the Capptain site says:

    Today we are excited to announce that Capptain has been acquired by Microsoft, a worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

    …

    We would like to extend a special thanks to every person that has contributed to our success—our employees, our friends, our families, our investors, and most importantly the greatest customers in the world: You.

    We appreciate everyone’s support over the past 6 years, and we look forward sharing our ideas with a larger audience.

    Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Analytics Premium Lets Companies View Performance Across Sites

    Google announced a big new feature for Google Analytics Premium on Tuesday. The company is launching roll-up reporting to help companies view performance across all of their apps and websites in one interface.

    “In today’s multi-touchpoint consumer world, this is a much greater priority,” says Google’s Yi Han, who refers to the feature as “The executive dashboard.”

    It gives businesses one place with aggregate data for all sites and app, with key summaries and real-time data.

    “Suppose you want to compare the performance of the sites and apps for your company’s various brands, franchises or regional subsidiaries,” says Han. “The new Source Properties Report has you covered, with at-a-glance views of business units that are outperforming or underperforming. To compare specific segments, try using the new Source Property Display Name dimension in advanced segments, in custom reports, or as a secondary dimension.”

    The feature can de-dupe unique visitors across sites and apps, which should be incredibly helpful in certain situations. Segments can be used to view the overlap and pathing of visitors who visit multiple sites and apps.

    Han notes that the feature also enables businesses to “tie together platform and device touchpoints.”

    To utilize roll-up reporting, you’ll have to have to speak with a Premium account manager.

    Image via Google

  • Pinterest Gives Marketing Tech Products New API Access

    Pinterest Gives Marketing Tech Products New API Access

    Pinterest announced that it is working with a small group of marketing technology companies to offer Pinterest business insights. These include Salesforce (Exact Target Marketing Cloud), Hootsuite, Spredfast, Percolate, Piqora, Curalate, and Tailwind.

    These companies are getting automated access to public data through Pinterest’s Business Insights API.

    “Many businesses use Pinterest to learn about their customers,” says Pinterest’s Steve Cohen. “You might want to learn which of your products are popular, what types of images work best or which Pins are driving the most engagement and sales. All of these insights can help your business use Pinterest better, which in turn means a better experience for Pinners.”

    “Insights help businesses engage better with Pinners,” he says. “This could be which boards and Pins are getting the most engagement, which downstream actions Pins are driving or what products are most popular with Pinners.”

    Pinterest is, of course, keeping its own Pinterest Analytics offering around. Its partners are encouraged to add additional insights and features that Pinterest itself doesn’t currently offer.

    Last month, Pinterest added support for Google Analytics UTM variables to give businesses a look at their performance in the Google Analytics dashboard.

    Last week, Pinterest secured a new $200 million round of funding, and the company apparently intends to use the money to make discovery better, and help people find things. Pinterest is moving in more and more of a search direction, and that could mean big things for businesses. Having better insights is only going to gain importance.

    Image via Pinterest

  • Adobe Announces A Bunch Of New Marketing Features

    Adobe Announces A Bunch Of New Marketing Features

    Adobe made a handful of announcements related to predictive marketing and real-time customer engagement to grow its digital marketing business, which it says surpassed $1 billion in revenue in 2013.

    First, Adobe announced Marketing Cloud Exchange, a new core service in Adobe Marketing Cloud. This is a new marketplace for pre-built integrations and apps between Adobe solutions and third-party technologies such as Google DDM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Tableau. It integrates additional data sources, and enhances the master marketing profile, Adobe says, adding that Exchange is moving from beta to general availability this week, and hosts more than 150 apps.

    More on Marketing Cloud Exchange here.

    Next, Adobe announced new capabilities for Adobe Analytics. These include a live stream of event data, including real-time data from Adobe Target, Adobe Social and Adobe Media Optimizer, as well as predictive analytics, a unified segment builder, mobile app analytics, and support for Apple iBeacon.

    “The Adobe Marketing Cloud is the most integrated set of marketing solutions, and it all centers on industry-leading analytics that is second to none,” said Bill Ingram, vice president of Adobe Social and Adobe Analytics, Adobe. “Today’s news takes the power of Adobe Analytics to a new level, with predictive capabilities and mobile functionality that ensure marketers can maximize both impact and revenue.”

    Then, Adobe announced a new release of Adobe Media Optimizer, which includes next-gen predictive modeling algorithms, unified campaign analysis, extended audience reach, real-time campaign management, and retail advertising optimization.

    Finally, the company announced Communities for Learning as part of Adobe Experience Manager. This is described as a new SaaS offering for creating social communities designed around social learning and field/channel enablement, “providing a simple way for marketers and subject matter experts to publish educational content to a community, facilitate knowledge exchange, and measure results.”

    More on this here.

    Adobe shared these stats about its digital marketing business: 460 billion dynamic campaign assets delivered annually; 18 trillion transaction annually; 2 trillion mobile analytics transactions annually; 27 Petabytes of data managed annually; 2/3 of Fortune 50 companies use the Adobe Marketing Cloud including: 17 of top 20 internet retailers; 5 of top 5 global auto manufacturers; 5 of top 5 media companies; 9 of top 10 commercial banks; 5 of top 5 North American airlines.

    Images via Adobe

  • Facebook Audience Insights Tool Gives You More Info About Those You’re Trying To Reach

    Facebook introduced a new tool for businesses called Audience Insights, which lets marketers learn more about their target audiences, such as aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, etc.

    This is completely separate from Page Insights. That shows you info about the people interacting with your page. This shows you information about the people you want to reach, in order to help you craft your marketing to better cater to them.

    “Say you want to raise awareness for your women’s luxury fashion brand, and you sell your products in-store,” the company explains. “You’d want to know how many people on Facebook live near your stores, as well as their interests, their past purchase behavior and how they tend to shop (online vs. in-store).”

    You can get info on: age, gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role, household size, top pages people like in different categories, location, language, how frequently people are logging onto Facebook, and with what devices, past purchase behavior, purchase methods.

    You can view info by people on Facebook, people connected to your Page or event, or People in Custom Audiences.

    You can watch a video about Audience Insights here.

    “We built Audience Insights with privacy in mind,” says Facebook. “It surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners — like Acxiom — through our partner categories targeting. Like Page Insights, Audience Insights shows information about groups of people without the need to share which individual people are in those groups. This allows marketers to view aggregate and anonymous insights while keeping people’s personal information private.”

    Audience Insights is rolling out to all U.S. marketers. It will be expanded to the rest of the world over the coming months.

    As far as Page Insights and Ads Reporting go, Facebook has added some new video metrics.

    Image via Facebook

  • Google Adds Adometry For New Analytics Tools

    Google announced that it has acquired Adometry, which will become part of its Analytics offerings. Adometry is an advanced marketing attribution and cross-channel optimization solutions provider. More on what it’s all about here.

    Google Analytics had this to say on Google+:

    Adometry is joining Google, where they will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings, which include Google Analytics Premium as well as other products. Available globally, Google Analytics Premium and its hundreds of customers, will now have an additional set of tools to accomplish their business and marketing goals.

    Attribution solutions, like Adometry’s, help businesses better understand the influence that different marketing tools — digital, offline, email, and more — have along their customers’ paths to purchase (http://goo.gl/tXTliw). This heightened understanding, in turn, enables businesses to measure marketing impact, allocate their resources more wisely, and provide people with ads and messages that they’re likely to care about.

    In the near term, it’s business-as-usual for Adometry — and nothing’s changing for their customers. But over time, we’re excited to bring our teams together and offer a great attribution service to Google and Adometry customers alike.

    Adometry discussed its acquisition on its blog as well, saying:

    We couldn’t be more excited to join Google — a company that shares our core values. Not only do they focus on innovation and solving big problems, but also like Adometry, they seek to provide brands and their agency partners with the analytics and insights to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns.

    We’re deeply committed to the customers and relationships we have cultivated over the years. Adometry will continue to offer the same excellent service our clients have come to expect, and there will be no immediate changes to our current offerings or contracts. We’ll be reaching out to all of our customers individually to discuss future plans in the coming weeks.

    Longer-term, we’re excited to begin working with our new colleagues at Google, including the Google Analytics Premium team, to offer great attribution solutions for both our customers and theirs. Stay tuned!

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Image via Adometry

  • YouTube Analytics Gets New Playlists Stats

    Google announced the addition of some new reports to YouTube Analytics, to help channel owners see how their playlists are helping with their overall channel performance.

    YouTube Analytics will now show the total number of video views from the channel’s playlists, how many times the viewers started watching a playlist, the average time they watched, and other data.

    The data will go back as far as February 1st.

    “Recently, we tweaked YouTube to give playlists more love, with new features like the ability for viewers to collect their favorite playlists and access them straight from the Guide,” says YouTube product manager Ted Hamilton. “Whether you create videos with different themes or you curate videos from other creators, keeping your videos organized with playlists helps viewers easily find what they went to your channel for, and can also encourage them to watch more of your videos.

    You can access the new stats by search for a playlist directly, or by selecting the “Playlists” view.

    More here.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Analytics Lets You Look At Web And App Data Together, Simplifies Language

    Google announced that it is adding the ability to see both web and app data in a single reporting view in Google Analytics. This should be quite helpful as consumers continue to access sites and apps through an increasing number of devices and formats.

    Users will able able to see all data sent to one Analytics property in one reporting view.

    “If you send data from the web and from a mobile app to one property, both data sets appear in your reports,” says product manager Nick Mihailovski. “If you want to isolate data from one source, like if you only want to see web data in your reports, you can set up a filter to customize what you see. You can also use other tools to isolate each data set, including customizations in standard reports, dashboards, custom reports, and secondary dimensions. If you don’t send web and app data to the same property, this change doesn’t affect your data or your account.”

    “We’ve also added some new app-specific fields to the analytics.js JavaScript web collection library, including screen name, app name, app version, and exception tracking,” he adds. “These changes allow the JavaScript tracking code to take advantage of the app tracking framework, so you can more accurately collect data on your web apps.”

    All metric, dimensions, and segments are now the same whether they’re used for web or app data. In the past, some have used different names depending on if you were in app or web views. This should make things much simpler.

    The Visitors web metric and Active Users app metric are now both simply referred to as Users. Visits is now reffered to as Sessions.

    The changes have already begun rolling out, and will continue to do so over the next week.

    Image via Google

  • Dell Acquires Analytics Company StatSoft

    Dell Acquires Analytics Company StatSoft

    Dell today announced that it has acquired StatSoft, an analytics solutions company that specialized in predictive analytics software, data mining, and data visualization.

    According to Dell’s announcement the acquisition will put StatSoft and its experts into Dell’s big data division, increasing the company’s data management and optimization solutions offerings. The terms of the acquisition agreement have not been made public.

    “We’re excited to join the Dell family and add our technology and expertise to Dell’s rapidly growing set of information management capabilities,” said Paul Lewicki, founder and CEO of StatSoft. “StatSoft’s advanced analytics software has a long track record of proven success across a wide variety of predictive analytics and data mining applications including agile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, risk management, fraud detection, and research. Together with Dell, we can create new opportunities for customers to better leverage the growing volumes of data that are quickly becoming the lifeblood of organizations of all sizes, and further advance StatSoft’s mission of making the world more productive.”

    The PC market is in decline, and has been now for years. The growth seen in the smart phone market over the past seven years first began to cut into PC manufacturers’ profits several years ago, and the recent explosive growth seen in the tablet market has fundamentally changed the traditional PC market for good.

    As sales of notebooks and desktop PCs continue to decline each quarter, PC manufacturers are now scrambling for a business model that can bring back the revenue growth seen in the early days of the computer revolution. Some companies are betting on new hardware iterations such as touchscreens or Ultra HD displays, but none of these features has yet proved necessary for a consumer market overcome with demand for tablets and other mobile devices.

    Other PC manufacturers are beginning to realize that the PC market may never be the same, even after the global market for mobile devices becomes saturated. These corporations are transitioning their business models to focus more on security and analytics offerings, putting their software talent to work on the problems businesses face in our ever-connected societies.

    Intel began this transition earlier than most and has gone on to thrive as a mainly business-to-business enterprise. More recently HP has begun its transition to a service role, overhauling its enterprise security division and acquiring big data companies such as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Autonomy.

    Dell’s acquisition of demonstrates just how important enterprise solutions have become for the former giants of the PC industry. Now that Dell has once again become a private entity, the company’s executives are using the lack of shareholder pressure to reorganize the organization for what appears to be a future founded in business-to-business offerings.

  • Google Analytics Gets A New Look

    Google Analytics Gets A New Look

    Google announced that it is pushing out some design tweaks to the navigation and sidebar in Google Analytics.

    “We think this is a simpler and more beautiful way to present your reports, dashboards and will make your analysis easier and faster,” the company says in a Google+ post.

    Google Analytics

    Google says the changes will be rolling out over the next few weeks, so sit tight if you’re not seeing them just yet.

    Based on the replies to Google’s announcement, it looks like most people like the new look.

    Image via Google

  • Twitter Launches Card Analytics Dashboard

    Twitter Launches Card Analytics Dashboard

    Twitter announced the launch of a new analytics offering for Twitter Cards today, aimed at helping publishers, marketers and developers understand how certain types of cards they’re using are performing.

    That includes tweets with pictures, videos, content previews, deep links for apps, and other rich media Tweets.

    Now for the first time you can gain insight into how your content is performing on Twitter, and find personalized tips to help make more strategic decisions about your use of Cards,” says analytics product manager Buster Benson. “Along the way, you’ll get insights on how to do even better. Small changes –– using a different Twitter Card, conversing more with the followers who love your content, or installing or changing the location of a Tweet button –– can make a big difference.”

    Twitter Card Analytics

    Twitter Cards

    Users will also be able to see how Twitter users engage with all of their tweets and get insight into their followers (including follower growth rate) in the Twitter Card analytics dashboard.

    Twitter tested the offering with a handful of partners including BuzzFeed, NBC News, Time, ESPN, MLB, Flipboard, Etsy, Foursquare and Path.

    All card users and advertisers should be getting the new dashboard over the next few days.

    Images via Twitter

  • Yahoo Search Is Now Encrypted By Default

    Yahoo Search Is Now Encrypted By Default

    Yahoo has switched to secure search by default, meaning that the search traffic your analytics program is painting for you is even less complete than it already was.

    As you may recall, Google made this move a couple years ago for signed in users, and expanded it to even those who aren’t signed in last year. While good for consumers in that it makes their searching habits more private, it’s not so good for marketers, as the bulk of their Google referrals started being displayed with keywords “not provided”. It is no longer clear what search terms your visitors are using to find your pages, at least through Analytics. Google has continued to provide this information to advertisers and through Webmaster Tools.

    According to Danny Sullivan at MarketingLand, Yahoo’s version, doesn’t only hide the actual keywords searchers are using, but it disguises the referrals you get from Yahoo searches as “direct” traffic. In other words, you don’t even know that you’re getting Yahoo traffic.

    CEO Marissa Mayer announced in November that Yahoo would encrypt all information that moves between its data centers by the end of Q1. It turned on SSL/HTTPS encryption for Yahoo Mail earlier this month.

    Bing has also been messing around with secure search, though not to the extent of Google or Yahoo. Last week, news came out that Bing has made the option available, but has not enabled it as the default.

    Yahoo’s default secure search is apparently still in the process of rolling out.

    Image via Yahoo

  • 3 Analytics Tips To Give Your Lead Generation Program A Facelift

    3 Analytics Tips To Give Your Lead Generation Program A Facelift

    Marketers and business owners continue to spend a lot of money driving traffic to their websites and yet many struggle with lead generation and optimizing the traffic and conversion from the campaigns that they are running. Read these three tips and take your lead generation program to the next level.

    1. Focus on Key Metrics

    What Key Performances Indicators (KPIs) lead generation marketers and business owners should pay attention to.

    2. Content Consumption and Optimization

    We spend a lot of money developing content, such as webinars, whitepapers and content for website(s). What content do our visitors consume and lead to more engagement? Is this content helping convert traffic to leads?

    3. Segment Your Campaigns

    Segmentation is a powerful concept in analytics. Learn how to segment your campaign and how to have full visibility for what’s driving leads your business.

    4. (Bonus) Advanced Optimization Techniques

    1. Focus on Key Metrics

    Metrics are abundant and everyone can have easy access to enterprise-level analytics solutions. As a matter of fact, millions of sites run Google Analytics and marketers leverage its user-friendly interface and robust reporting capabilities.

    In Google Analytics, you have the ability to see what channels and marketing initiatives bring you leads, see what pages are being viewed, and what interactions users are taking, and also measure task completions such as downloading whitepapers, registering for a webinar or lead capture.

    This is a blessing for us data geeks and could be a curse for those who just don’t have the time to dive in the ocean of data and metrics. But as the saying goes “No pain, No gain.” You must allocate some time to track your lead generation programs. The key is to focus on a few metrics that impact the bottom line. Here are some examples for specific engaging actions:

    • Form completion (Lead)
    • Downloads
    • Watch a video
    • Subscribe to newsletter
    • Become a member

    In addition, you should closely monitor your traffic sources, your paid search, your SEO and your email traffic. All of that is available to you. Any report that you want in Google Analytics, you can export into a pdf or have it emailed to you. You don’t have to log-in and find that report saving time to nurture your leads.

    Look at the visits: Am I getting new visitors? Or is it the old returning visitors? Am I nurturing my existing visitors to come back? Am I retaining enough? Segment your traffic by new vs. returning and see where things are heading.

    We also want to look at the engagements. It’s one thing to draw traffic to a site, but if visitors are leaving right away or they can’t find what they are looking for, there’s something wrong.

    Time on site: Are people spending more time on my site and doing something useful, like downloading, or viewing a video, or subscribing to an email newsletter? So look for those types of engagements. Examine the number of pages per visit, look at video views, and look at downloads. All these are very good indicators that your visitors are engaged with your website.

    And last but not least, look at your conversion rates. Basically, of all the traffic that I’m getting how much of that is converting into leads. For instance, if I have a hundred visits today and I capture 10 leads, then that’s 10% conversion rate. Track your conversion rate and keep an eye on it. This is where you can find issues or find underperforming campaigns.

    In addition to that and to make your job easier, you have the capabilities of building very nice dashboards in Google Analytics. Here is an example:

    You can easily add widgets to look at your traffic by source, monthly visits or visits by day. Since you can customize this very easily, you don’t have to be a JavaScript specialist or a rocket scientist to do this. There are a lot of help topics available on how to create your dashboard, if you need more help. The dashboard is set-up to be drag-and-drop, and you pick the metrics that are important to your business and the widgets show up. Every time you log-in to Google Analytics, you have all the metrics readily available for you! It’s very accessible; also you can have the dashboards emailed to your inbox and then share it with your boss. And at the beginning of the week, you can look at how your site and marketing initiatives have done the previous week.

    2. Content Consumption and Optimization

    Content is and has always been king, for as far as I remember. Having a plan to measure what your site users consume is essential in this content marketing age, where every business is a publisher.

    In Google Analytics, you can leverage a mechanism called Event tracking. You basically track user interactions with Events: If I click on a button, if I click on an expand icon, if I download an image or if I download a whitepaper, all that is trackable including Videos, Downloads, Outbound links, Outcomes. Let’s take a look at an example:

    We had a total of 7,095 Events: One Event category for Video and another Event category of Downloads. As you can see we have 6,361 interactions with the video, and 734 downloads.

    We can now assess the performance of this content, for example: are the download buttons/links prominent? For video analytics, we can dig deeper and see what percentage of viewers completed the entire video. And we can see in the above snapshot that out of the 6,361 video events, only 585 completed the video all the way to the end.

    We can even drill down and view which specific video people interacted with and which they didn’t and then produce more engaging videos for the types that your clients liked.

    3. Segment Your Campaigns

    One can’t emphasize segmentation enough, it is key to analytics and to marketing in general. With segmentation you’ll be able to separate the type of traffic that you’re getting. For example:

    a. segmenting paid-search traffic versus SEO traffic

    b. new vs. returning visitors

    c. fall campaign vs. fall campaign from last year

    d. traffic from Canada vs. traffic from US

    All of these are examples of the way data can be segmented so that it’s a bit more actionable and a bit easier to analyze.

    Take a look at this case study where the client had a high cost per conversion, but where do we start, how do we go about improving (lowering) the cost per conversion? Trend and segment!

    In the illustration below, we see, in August the cost per conversion was a bit over $80 and for October, it was about $100. But then if you look at the data further, you see that we significantly improved, down to $30 per conversion!

    The optimization did not happen overnight. It took a bit of time but we have 5-times the improvement in terms of cost savings. The way the client approached this optimization initiative is: they segmented their campaigns and asked where they were spending a lot of money with minimal or low return? So instead of showing all their August data aggregated, they reported on data by campaign, by channel. They saw that a whole lot of traffic and conversion from Google Display is coming at a very expensive rate, almost $260.

    The client immediately started to look at the landing pages for this channel, and also examined the campaign, ad-targeting, call-to-action and the offer to draw people to the landing pages. And it took them a bit of time, some ups-and-downs but eventually they were able to bring down the costs across all their channels to below $50 per conversion.

    The important part in this concept is to look at every channel that you have and not just at an aggregate and say I have this many visits. I have a link here to help you track those different channels or different campaigns so that you can report on them accordingly:

    Tracking Online and Offline Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

    As marketers, one of the challenges that we face is that we sometimes just look at one-data source. I look at Google Analytics and think that’s sufficient. Now, Google Analytics is amazing and I encourage you to use it. But I also want to highlight some of the missing data that you want to get from other systems, namely marketing automation platform (Marketo, Act-on, etc.) to attain meaningful reports after a lead is captured. Let’s take a look at this example from another organization that is capturing leads on this form:

    When you look at the data in the backend, CRM or the marketing automation system, 86% of those leads were unqualified, pure junk or spam leads or contacts that are not fit for what the company offers. On this form, I’m just reporting on my conversion rate, it’s not really meaningful. This single source reporting is actually misleading. The key here is to join the data from the two systems (Google Analytics and your CRM or Marketing Automation System) to make sure you are reporting on the qualified leads. That’s what really matters at the end of the day.

    Any time you start bringing data from multiple sources, it’ll take a bit more process and time. You might have couple of Excel spreadsheets, or join the data in Tableau or whatever system you are using. You have to pull that data from two different systems to start painting a better picture, a bit closer to the 360˚ view of your prospects!

    This type of tracking and type of investment, time and effort will give us a significant increase in the number of leads and a significant decrease in the cost of those leads.

    4. Bonus – Advanced Optimization Tips

    I want to conclude with a couple of advanced tips.

    It takes more than one visit to convert

    One is the Multi-channel Funnel (MCF) reports in GA, where you can see previous interactions that the visitors took on your site before they converted. So you see here, for example, on line 4, somebody came to the website through a paid-search campaign e.g. Google AdWords, and then they left. Then maybe a week later they visited the site again from an organic search and then they converted.

    So understanding that people, come to the website multiple times before they convert is important. This is the behavior that most of exhibit when we buy nowadays. Understanding this cycle and all these touch points is essential. You can leverage the Multi-channel Funnel reports in Google Analytics to get this kind of visibility.

    The Multi-Screen world

    The other significant aspect is understanding the Multi-Screen world that we live in. People come to our websites from mobiles devices, from desktops, from tablets, so recognizing that, for example, of the times that people are watching TV, 77% of them are watching TV while they actually have another device next to them, a laptop or maybe an iPhone.


    (source http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights)

    Thus, factor in that people come to your website from different channels. Using the Multi-channel Funnel, in this case, to report on that kind of activity holds relevance. And to help you with that and if you are thinking about your plans for next year, you can leverage what Google has announced and labeled as Universal Analytics. It’s a new generation of Google Analytics that is very user-centric. It allows you to track user behavior across several devices and also across different touch-points described earlier.

  • Here’s How To Upgrade To Google’s Universal Analytics

    Earlier this year, Google launched universal analytics for everyone. At the time, it said the new tools would help businesses “measure how people actually become and remain loyal customers.” That’s great and all, but you may have found that universal analytics isn’t that easy to implement.

    In the latest episode of Behind the Code, Google’s Developer Programs Engineer Andrew Wales and Product Manager Nick Mihailovski discuss how you can go about upgrading to universal analytics. They also open the floor to any and all questions people have been having regarding the upgrade process. If you’re in the least bit interested in universal analytics, you’re going to want to watch this video.

    If you want to learn more about universal analytics, check out Google’s original announcement from last year.

    [Image: GoogleDevelopers/YouTube]

  • Google Talks Measurement Challenges In Analytics Presentation

    Google is sharing a recent presentation about universal analytics on the Google Analytics YouTube channel. The talk from Analytics Advocate Daniel Waisberg took place last month at Foundry Dublin.

    It will take about a half hour of your time as Waisberg talks about the challenges of “measuring the full customer journey,” which include holistic measurement, full credit measurement and active measurement.

    “Learn more about how Google Analytics is trying to help marketers understand better how their customers behave and how to provide them with a better experience,” says Google. “Among the solutions we are creating are: Universal Analytics, Measurement Protocol, Dimension Widening, and Cost Data Upload.”

    If you head over to the channel, you’ll find a plethora of videos Google has made for its Analytics Academy program, as well as an explanation of a recent developer update and a “sizzle reel” from the Google Anaytics Summit 2013.

    Last week, Google introduced new custom dimensions fro Google Analytics.

  • Google Analytics Gets New Custom Dimensions

    Google Analytics Gets New Custom Dimensions

    Google announced today that it has added “many” new dimensions to standard reports in Google Analytics. Included is Custom Dimensions, which Google says has been a highly requested feature.

    Here, you can see example custom dimensions “user tier,” “is logged in,” “friendly page name,” and “is internal”.

    Google Analytics

    “Custom Dimensions is a new Universal Analytics feature that allows you to bring custom business data into Google Analytics,” says Google Analytics API product manager Nick Mihailovski. “For example, a custom dimension can be used to collect friendly page names, whether the user is logged in, or a user tier (like Gold, Platinum, or Diamond).”

    “By using Custom Dimensions in secondary dimensions, you can now refine standard reports to obtain deeper insights,” he adds.

    Secondary dimensions

    The feedback on custom dimensions is quite positive so far, as would be expected.

    Image: Google

  • Socialbakers Launches Mobile Analytics App, Adds Instagram And LinkedIn Support

    Socialbakers Launches Mobile Analytics App, Adds Instagram And LinkedIn Support

    Socialbakers announced today at the Engage 2013 conference in New York that it is launching a mobile analytics app and support for Instagram and LinkedIn.

    The app, the company says, provides an “executive dashboard of key metrics for monitored Facebook profiles including top performing content, fans and followers, engagement rates and competitor analysis.”

    “The addition of Instagram and LinkedIn broadens its suite to help social marketers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns across a wide range of social channels,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.

    Users will no doubt appreciate the mobile app. Remember when Google Analytics launched on mobile?

    Socialbakers’ app is debuting on iOS, and Android will follow shortly, the company says.

    “I am excited to announce strong expansion of our analytic suite today,” said CEO and co-founder Jan Rezab. “Extending the scope of social media data provided to our clients is our number one priority. We also want to enable our users to check high-level data on the go by bringing the executive reports app to mobile users.”

    “Instagram is a very visual space where people like to engage with brands,’ added co-founder Lukas Maixner. “With this we are enabling marketers with the analytic data they need to understand which content resonates best with their communities and how they can benchmark themselves against competitors. Now we provide insight of both followers and following, interactions, engagement rate and also top interacting profiles, similar to Facebook’s key influencers.”

    Instagram itself is rapidly expanding. It just launched on Windows Phone, its fourth major platform after iOS, Android and the web. Before the Windows Phone launch, it had grown to 150 million users.

    Image: Socialbakers

  • Google Analytics Adds New ‘Speed Suggestions’ Report

    Google announced the launch of a new Speed Suggestions report in Google Analytics. This can be found under Site Speed along with Overview, Page Timings and User Timings.

    The report shows the average page load time for top visited pages on your site, and utilizes the PageSpeed Insights tool to surface suggestions for improving specific pages for speed.

    “The PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes the contents of a web page and generates a speed score and concrete suggestions,” says Chen Xiao from Google’s Analytics team. “The speed score indicates the amount of potential improvement on the page. The closer the score is to 100, the more optimized the page is for speed.”

    “In the report, you can click through a suggestions link to see a page with all of the suggestions sorted by their impact on site speed,” Xiao adds. “Example suggestions include reducing the amount of content that needs to load before your users can interact with the page, minifying JavaScript, and reducing redirects. Note that if you rewrite your urls before displaying the url in Analytics, or your pages requires a login (see the help article for more details), then the PageSpeed Insights tool may not be able to analyze the page and generate a score and suggestions”

    Speed Suggestions

    Google says it has seen from its own benchmarks that the web is getting faster in general, with mobile even being 30% faster year over year.

  • Amazon Mobile App Developers Now Have Access To Analytics, A/B Testing

    Despite building Fire OS on top of Android, Amazon wants developers to choose its platform over Android or iOS when building apps. Over the last year, it’s become easier to recommend the platform as Amazon has leveraged the power of AWS to offer a number of services to developers that are typically hard to implement on their own.

    Amazon announced today that it’s continuing to add value to its platform with the addition of analytics and A/B testing to all developers who make apps for the Amazon Appstore. As the retailer notes, developers “who build their own analytics and testing solutions are forced to spend time on building and scaling backend services.” By providing the services through AWS, Amazon says developers can get back to doing what they do best – building content.

    “Mobile developers really want to understand how customers are using their app,” said Mike George, Vice President of Amazon Appstore, Games and Cloud Drive. “We’ve spent years at Amazon using data, analytics, and A/B testing to continually improve the experience of customers who shop with us. We wanted to bring those same advanced tools to mobile app developers to help them improve their customers’ experience.”

    Here’s what both the analytics and A/B testing services will bring to your apps:

  • Analytics – the Analytics service provides usage metrics on daily and monthly active devices, sessions, retention, and in-app purchase revenue. These metrics are updated continually and are available within 60 minutes of the data being received. When using this service, developers can quickly assess how, for example, launch day is going or how a new feature might be affecting retention.
  • A/B Testing – the A/B Testing service allows mobile developers to simultaneously test up to five different in-app experiences to understand which experience is most successful based on conversion, clicks, or other criteria they define. A developer simply needs to integrate the SDK and the service handles all of the complex statistical calculations on behalf of the developer. The service then presents the results in a simple web dashboard that shows which experience is most effective and statistically significant.

    • If you want to know more about analytics, check out Amazon’s page for the service. It includes a download for the beta SDK. As for A/B testing, go here to learn more and to grab the beta SDK download. Both tools are available for Android, Fire OS and iOS apps.

    [Image: Amazon Developers]

  • Facebook Acquires Mobile Data Firm And Internet Ally Onavo

    Facebook has acquired Onavo, a mobile data compression and analytics company out of Israel.

    Onavo announced the news in a blog post on Sunday. In that, co-founders Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger write:

    As you know, Facebook and other mobile technology leaders recently launched Internet.org, formalizing Facebook’s commitment to improving access to the internet for the next 5 billion people — this is a challenge we’re also passionate about.

    We’re excited to join their team, and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share. When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.

    TechCrunch shares the following statement from Facebook:

    “Onavo will be an exciting addition to Facebook. We expect Onavo’s data compression technology to play a central role in our mission to connect more people to the internet, and their analytic tools will help us provide better, more efficient mobile products.”

    Onavo will keep its office in Tel-Aviv, and it will become Facebook’s new Israeli office, its first in the country.

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Internet.org was announced back in August aimed at making it easier for billions of people to gain access to the Internet. The company is working with others like MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung on the development of new ideas and business models to make Internet more affordable throughout the world.

    Last week, Google announced a similar, yet different initiative with the Alliance for Affordable Internet with 30 other organizations. This is aimed at influencing policy in various countries, also with the goal of making Internet more affordable.