Our team is at the Google Analytics Summit (exclusive to Google Analytics Certified Partners and Google Analytics Premium customers!) learning about the exciting new initiatives in store for the product. Most of it is top secret, but here are the things we can share.
Enhanced Ecommerce
Google will be revamping their Google Analytics Ecommerce capabilities to be more inclusive of the entire customer experience, shoppers behaviors and conversion path (rather than it’s traditional focus, which was strictly on purchases and product information). They’ve announced a beta release of their upgrade.
This will include detailed metrics out-of-box on:
- Product detail views
- ‘Add to cart’ actions
- Internal campaign clicks
- The success of internal merchandising tools
- The checkout process
- Purchase
Flexible and Scalable Reporting (including Unsampled Custom Tables)
Google has upgraded to some general enhanced reporting features, namely Unified Channel Groupings, traffic is now classified in-line with your unique channel definitions, and expanded Dimension Widening (now known as Data Import), which enables users to import more types of their own data and stitch it into the system.
But what really has us giggling like little children is the unsampled Custom Tables, available for Google Analytics Premium users only. For really high traffic sites, GA Standard will sample your data, which sometimes makes it hard to calculate accurate metrics. While Google Analytics Premium gives you access to unsampled data, the only way to access it was to export it.
But now, using Custom Tables you can have tables in your custom reports with pure unsampled data, which you can now crank the data through the powerful slicing and dicing of the GA UI.
There are some limits – some features like the user metrics, Flow Visualization, Search Engine Optimization, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Attribution are not available, and it takes 2 days from creation of those tables for the data to appear, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Enterprise-Class Features
For Google Analytics Premium users, you now have new integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, so advertisers can get deep insights into their robust DoubleClick paid ad campaigns by leveraging power of Google’s premium analysis tool (as well as being able to combine this data with their other organic metrics).
Finally, again, for enterprise customers that manage many accounts, Google is giving acces to 4 new APIs:
- (1) Provisioning API to create new GA accounts (invite only)
- (2) The AdWords and (3) Filters API to manage configurations
- (4) Embed API to surface key reports and dashboards
Roll-Up Reporting
Once again, a feature available only for enterprise customers using Google Analytics Premium. We happen to have a premium client on several domains and digital properties. They have a ton of verticals, several versions of each one, testing which has the best conversion, for example, 6 sites generating real-estate leads in different ways, 10 sites generating car leads, etc. You could even throw in some mobile apps.
Say they wanted to make an overall comparison on the performance of all their digital properties. Normally, they’d have to export then stitch everything together in an outside program.
Roll-Up Reporting is now built into Google Analytics premium – a single interface that aggregates all your site and app data into one place. A “master” Dashboard, Real-time, etc.
A huge benefit is truly holistic, universal analytics – a single view to really see your customers journey.
Coming Soon!
Most enhancements will be available immediately or within the coming weeks.
For more details, read the full Google Analytics blog announcement here.
For more details on Enterprise Roll-Up Reporting, click here.
