Google Analytics users are part of a passionate community. Many of you go beyond using the product and actively seek a connection with Google team members and other GA users to stay at the edge of what’s next. For example, more than 80,000 readers subscribe to the Google Analytics blog through our RSS feed, our videos on YouTube have been viewed more than 3.5 million times and well over 100,000 people follow us on Twitter. 

So it isn’t surprising we’ve received requests from many of you to participate on Google+. We’re excited to fulfill that expectation with a brand new Google+ page for Google Analytics. 


Join us on Google+ today
Check out our Google+ page and add us to your analytics, marketing or related circle. We’ll be sharing the latest and greatest about Google Analytics and digital marketing overall to help you become a better practitioner and achieve more with your efforts. 
Expect everything from how-to’s/tips, technical advice, interesting stats, plus some fun mixed in for good measure. In addition to useful updates, we’re planning to give you the opportunity to hang out live with some of the team members behind Google Analytics. If there’s anything else you’d like to see, please add a comment to this thread on Google+ and we’ll be happy to consider it. 
Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team

Interested in learning how to use Analytics to make better decisions for your business? Here’s your chance; join us next week for two webinars.  We’re partnering with the Learn with Google team to present an introductory session on Getting started with Analytics, and a more advanced session covering one of the most requested topics - Digital Attribution & Conversion. Here’s a little more detail on what we’ll cover:

Getting Started with Google Analytics
Level of content: Beginner
Covers the basics you need to get started with Analytics. Highlights the most helpful reports for ecommerce, bloggers/publishers, and lead generation businesses. Learn how to tag your campaigns and set up goals to measure if your marketing is a success.

Presenter: Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate
Date: Wednesday May 23rd, 2012
Time: 12 pm PT / 3pm ET / 8pm GMT

Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
Level of content: Intermediate/Advanced
Learn what marketing attribution is and what it can do for your business. This webinar will cover the basics of how attribution works, and we’ll show you how to set up your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts to enable important attribution tools--Search Funnels and Multi-Channel Funnels.

Presenter: Bill Kee, Product Manager, Google Analytics
Date: Thursday May 24th, 2012
Time: 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT

These are free webinars, so be sure to register now and take a look here for more great webinars from other Google teams.

Posted by Ian Myszenski, Google Analytics team

Marketers today have no shortage of data. In fact, there are more than 40 million online touch points measured every minute by Google Analytics. Technology advancements are helping marketers understand their customers more across channels and devices, and better analysis tools are finally making that massive amount of data accessible and actionable. This is fueling what we see as next generation measurement. Today I spoke at the Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit about the most important trends that every CMO needs to know. Here's what I told them: 
Next generation brand measurement

In many ways, brand measurement thus far has been an article of faith - but it doesn’t have to be. I think that soon you’ll be able to optimize for brand like you do for performance today with concrete results, in real time. This will help brand marketers make smarter decisions while a campaign is still in flight, rather than serving as a static report card given after the fact. To do all of this, we need to bridge the online and offline gap with brand equivalency metrics that translate GRP and TRP into online reach and audience targeting.
Recently we announced our Brand Activate Initiative as a first step, which gives metrics like Active GRP to assess online brand impact using reach and frequency, in the same way marketers are all already measuring GRP for TV. Active GRP is being built into the ad serving tools that our publishers and marketers already use, with the goal of making these metrics immediately actionable. This digital brand equivalency metric for GRP is the first in a series of exciting steps we’re going to see to improve measurement for brand marketers. 
Next generation attribution

Over the last few years, we’ve made great leaps in the art of single channel measurement - identifying the right metrics in isolation for channels like TV, display, search and mobile. It’s time now to bring the channels together and figure out how they impact each other. In other words, we have to move from silo to portfolio.
At Google Analytics, we’re finding that on average, customers interact with a brand 4.3 times over a two day period before they finally make a purchase. We’re also seeing channels like mobile grow tremendously. For instance, mobile is now 8% of all conversions that we’re seeing in Google Analytics, and mobile conversions have grown by about 180% in just the last year. So you can’t afford not to know what paths customers are taking before they ultimately buy from you.


But in a recent study, more than 40% of marketers said that their main struggle with attribution is choosing the right model to even get started. We hear these struggles every day, and provide tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling to help marketers get started. Though there isn’t a one size fits all model, what we’ll begin to see in the industry is empirically-derived attribution models customized by industry and marketing objectives, which marketers can use as a base for experimentation. 
It’s an exciting time in measurement, where data and marketing are finally getting married. I’m genuinely excited about what’s in front of us, and I hope you are too!
Posted by Amy Chang, Global Head of Product, Google Analytics

This post originally appeared on the Google Analytics Japan blog.
Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking allows online merchants to measure items sold and tie those results back to their digital marketing activities. But did you know that it can also be used to track non e-commerce activity?
Nissan Motor Company does just this. Nissan operates in the automobile industry, and owns a network of websites designed to help consumers around the world decide which Nissan vehicle they would like to purchase.



Nissan uses e-commerce tracking whenever a visitor submits a request for a test drive or a brochure. They treat each request as if a car were sold, and record details such as the model, colour, transmission type, and location of the vehicles people inquire after. A traditional Google Analytics implementation for a non e-commerce site would simply use goals to measure conversions. So why did Nissan opt to use e-commerce tracking instead?
They wanted to be able to measure more information about each inquiry within their Google Analytics reports. By implementing e-commerce tracking they are now able to pass additional information to their Google Analytics account, such as the category, colour, and model of car the visitor was interested in. Nissan's Global Marketing Strategy Division then analyses this information to understand which vehicles are in hot demand in each market; it then feeds those insights to their manufacturing plants across the globe to ensure that there is enough supply to satisfy demand. 
One of the benefits of Google Analytics is that you can decide who should have access to your suite of reports. Nissan’s Global Division uses this feature to decentralise access to their different market operations, allowing each country manager to log into Google Analytics and quickly assess the popularity of different models for their market. Nissan employed a Google Analytics Certified Partner in Japan, Ayudante, to help set up their account profiles and custom reports that could then be accessed by each of the country managers.
Nissan’s Global Marketing Strategy division says there are 3 key benefits they gain from Google Analytics as a whole:

1. It is easy to assess product popularity globally and by market. The user experience is seamless and there was no complex setup necessary.
2. Custom reports allow you to easily view complex information in one view. It dramatically reduces the time to summarize multiple reports, document it, and share it within the organisation.
3. Google Analytics gives them access to timely information, which allows for better decision making.

Even if you are a non e-commerce site, you should explore e-commerce tracking as a means of measuring more information about the products or services your visitors are inquiring about. Then share that information with your wider marketing and product teams so that they can make effective decisions to maximise sales.
Posted by Noriyuki Ouchi, Google Analytics Solutions Consultant, Google Japan and Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

At the end of 2011 we announced the Google Analytics Core Reporting API as a replacement for the Data Export API. We also announced a 6 month deprecation period for the Data Export API version 2.3, after which all v2.3 queries will return a v2.4 response. Well, it's almost been 6 months since the announcement was made. If you haven't already moved to our shiny new APIs, and we know there are quite a few of you out there who haven't, we urge you to get movin' or risk your application not working come June.

The good news is that we published a new, easy to follow migration guide to help you make the transition and ensure your application continues to work after we shut down the Data Export API sometime in June.

If you are building a new application, we highly recommend using the Core Reporting API v3.0. For existing applications, we also recommend moving to v3.0 but it may be easier for you to migrate to v2.4 as an intermediary step, since it is backwards compatible with the Data Export API v2.3.

The great news is that if you make the move to v3.0, you'll be able to take advantage of any new features, and the compact JSON format that reduces response size by 10x!

To get started, check out the Migration Guide: Moving from v2.3 APIs to v2.4 & v3.0.

Additional details and support:

• Core Reporting API Forum - for any questions you may have
• Core Reporting API Changelog - for details on the change

Posted by Pete Frisella, Google Analytics API team

Many developers save time by using the Google Analytics API to automate Analytics reporting tasks. For example, you can use the API to create a dashboard to report data across multiple profiles. The Google Analytics App Gallery includes many 3rd party solutions that do this.

What if you want to build something quickly that’s custom-tailored  to your business? You would typically have to spend time learning the API, figuring out how to handle authorization, then deciding how to integrate this data with a visualization library. You could build a custom solution, but it took a lot of effort – until now, thanks to the Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library.

Four months ago we started a project with a team of University of California Irvine students to simplify all of these steps. As part of this project, together we built the Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library. This library makes it easy to use the Google Analytics API by distilling the process into three easy steps:

1. Register with Google APIs Console.
2. Copy and paste the JavaScript code.
3. Configure this code to query your data and choose a chart type to visualize it.

So now you can create custom Google Analytics dashboards very quickly, with minimal code.

Here’s a quick example. Say you want to create a line chart plotting visitors and visits for the last 30 days. Besides including the library, the only code required is:

<div id=”chart1”></div><script>var chart1 = new gadash.Chart({  'type': 'LineChart',  'divContainer': 'chart1',  'last-n-days':30,  'query': {    'ids': TABLE_ID,    'metrics': 'ga:visitors,ga:visits,ga:pageviews',    'dimensions': 'ga:date',    'sort': 'ga:date'  },  'chartOptions': {    hAxis: {title:'Date'},    vAxis: {title:'Visits'},  }}).render();</script>

Using the code above will create this chart.



It’s that easy! To find out more about using the Easy Dashboard Library, read our Getting Started guide.

While the current library is very useful, we think we can add more features and make it even easier to use. To reach this goal, we’ve started working with another group of UC Irvine students, this time for three academic quarters. This new project’s main goal will be to further simplify the library. We want the students we’re working with to engage with you and implement your feature requests, if possible. If you use this library, we'd love to hear how you think it can be improved. Feel free to send any feedback to through our new GA-easy-dash-feedback google group.

We hope this library saves you time and helps you get more out of Google Analytics.

Posted by,
Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience1? With about half of all Americans now owning a smartphone2, it’s time for businesses to meet user expectations by delivering a mobile experience as good as the desktop experience. In short, it’s time to step up to the plate and build a site optimized for the mobile web.

 
Google can help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder.  In three easy steps you’re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site’s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version.  It’s free and takes just a few minutes to complete!

Join us on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST and watch as Google showcases how two businesses, Top Mast Resort in Massachusetts and Sava’s Restaurant in Michigan, go mobile and build mobile-friendly sites--live on air.

You’ll see how Top Mast is preparing to take advantage of mobile travel purchase intent - which is five times higher than online travel purchase intent, according to InsightExpress.  You’ll also see Sava’s move ahead of 95% of restaurants that do not have mobile-friendly sites, according to a study by Restaurant Science.

Finally, you’ll hear from the CMO of Dudamobile, Dennis Mink; he’ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site.

Details on how to tune in
1. Sign into Google+ on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST
2. Go to the Think with Google Google+ page
3. Look for the stream post and click to enter the live stream

Be sure to set a reminder in your calendar! If you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them with the hashtag #GoMoSite as a comment on the Google+ page.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing
Source: (1) Gomez 2011 (2) Nielsen February 2012

Have you ever wondered which other pages on the web link to your own? Wouldn’t it be nice to know which sites are talking about your content, and in which context? Well, a problem no more: now you can see all the backlink URL’s, post titles, and more right within the new Social reports.

The concept of trackbacks, a protocol by which different sites could notify each other of referencing links, first emerged back in 2002. Since then, the blogosphere has grown in leaps and bounds, but the requirement for each site to explicitly implement this protocol has always stood in the way of adoption. If only you could crawl the web and build an accurate link graph. The good news is we already do that at Google, and are now providing this insight to Google Analytics users.

   

If you’re not familiar with Trackbacks, then think of it as automated Google Alerts for all of your pages: you publish new content, we scour the web for pages that link to it and build automated reports for you right within Google Analytics - simple as that.

These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media reports. When you know what your most linked content is, it is then also much easier to replicate the success and ensure that you are building relationships with those users who actively link to you the most.

To learn more about the new Social and ROI reporting, take a look at our announcement last month, and also take a look at in-depth example of how to use these new reports to measure your user’s engagement in Google+.

Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team

Last week, we hosted a webinar on marketing attribution. We had a lively discussion about our recent attribution whitepaper, and we looked at Google’s solutions for attribution -- including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, and the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium. During the webinar, many of you wrote in with great questions, and we’ve provided answers below to some of the top questions.

If you weren’t able to join us last week, you can view a recording of the webinar here.

Questions & Answers:
Q: How can I learn more about getting started with attribution using Google’s tools?
A:This webinar was the first in a series on attribution -- please watch the blog for updates and registration information for our next webinar, “Building Blocks of Digital Attribution.” In the meantime, read on for some more tips.

Q: Where can I learn more about setting up conversions?
A: Setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics is one of the most valuable things you can do to make your reports actionable and meaningful, and getting these set up properly will allow you to use Google’s attribution solutions. There are resources available in the help center to help you set up goals and ecommerce tracking. You can also view the recording of our recent “Reaching your goals with Google Analytics” webinar.

Q: When should I use AdWords Search Funnels compared to Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels? 
A: Both tools can give you insight into how your customers ultimately end up converting on your site. If you are using AdWords Conversion Tracking today, Search Funnels is available without any additional configuration. You can see the interactions your customers have with your search ads leading up to conversion, including both clicks and impressions. However, you can only see these interactions for paid search on Google AdWords.

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics allows you to analyze traffic sources beyond search, including display, social, email, referrals, affiliates and more - putting your conversion path data in a broader context. Using these reports requires installing Google Analytics tracking code on your site, and setting up goals and/or ecommerce tracking (see links above) -- once these are set up, Multi-Channel Funnels reports work automatically. Note that you  are not able to analyze search ad impressions in Multi-Channel Funnels.

Watch this blog for updates on future webinars in our attribution series that will provide more details on Search Funnels and Multi-Channel Funnels.

Q: How much of an impact does the use of multiple devices have in skewing the numbers we see in these reports? 
A: Mobile and other devices are becoming increasingly important. Multi-Channel Funnels will report on conversion paths that take place on a single device, but not across devices. For example, if a user visited your site on a mobile phone, and then completed a purchase in a desktop browser, those interactions would not be included in the same conversion path.

Q: Can I report on both AdWords Keyword and Matched Search Queries in Google Analytics?
A: You have the option to view either the AdWords Keyword or the Matched Search Query by choosing these dimensions in the data table. Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling support a wide range of AdWords and non-AdWords dimensions for reporting and creating attribution modeling rules.

Q: Can you add your own models to the Attribution Modeling Tool or they are all built in? 
A: You can create and save custom models in the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium. Custom models allow you to create rules that adjust credit based on attributes like the traffic source (e.g. search vs. direct), position (first, middle, last) the level of engagement driven (time on site and page depth), and timing (how much time prior to conversion).

Q: How do advertisers take action on attribution data?
A: Attribution data can help advertisers identify marketing efforts that may be undervalued or overvalued under models such as the last click, so they can adjust their marketing programs. For example, a general keyword like “shoes” may show fewer conversions compared to a more specific, branded term for a type of shoe on a last click basis. However, applying a model that gives some credit for searches prior to the last click may show that “shoes” is credited with more conversion value. When making optimization decisions around which keywords to invest in or cut, advertisers can look at multiple models, and then experiment with investing in keywords that show higher value under alternative models. Similar methods apply to channels like display, social, email, and affiliates. This can help identify areas of opportunity that are missed when using only the last click.

Happy Analyzing!


Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, Google Analytics team

We’re excited to announce 3 upcoming Google Analytics User Conferences in Europe. The first will be in Brussels on May 3rd, the second will be in Stockholm on May 8th and the third will be in Barcelona on May 10th.

You can find further information, such as the agenda and speakers, on the links below. In our experience these events quickly sell out. So act fast if you want to take part, otherwise it is possible that you have to wait another year for the next event!
Key benefits of attending a Google Analytics User Conference:

• Meet members of the Google Analytics team, experts, and other users like you
• Learn through tangible examples how to measurably impact your business
• Find out how others solve the challenges you are facing today
• Have your business questions addressed by Google and Google Analytics Certified Partners

Brussels:View the full agenda and register at www.gabc.be. 
This is the first Belgian User Conference! You will get to hear from some of our local Belgian Partners as well as Google speakers. Topics will range from learning how to take action using diverse data sets, creating tailor made dashboards, how to optimize your ROI with advanced campaign tracking, to measuring the value of social analytics.
Stockholm: View the full agenda and register at www.analyticsconference.se 
This is the second Google Analytics User Conference in Sweden. You’ll learn from national and international Google Analytics specialists to use the tool for maximum impact. You will meet speakers from Google as well as speakers from Google Analytics Certified Partners such as inUse Insights, Klikki, iProspect, Guava, and Relevant Traffic.
Barcelona:View the full agenda and register at www.googleanalyticsconference.es 
Building on the successful User Conference last year in Madrid, some of our Spanish partners have decided to do the same in Barcelona! Meet and share your experiences with other users of the tool, experts in the field of Analytics, and of course meet the Google speakers. Make sure not to miss the hands-on workshops that are being offered! 
User Conferences are part of a global series of events hosted by Google Analytics Certified Partners. This series brings together Partners from each region to present content that is relevant to local Google Analytics users.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Posted by Jon Day, Google Analytics team