A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

Back in October, we announced the limited beta release of Universal Analytics as a way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey. Today, we’re excited to welcome and invite all Google Analytics customers to try Universal Analytics.

The benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are: 

• Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points, 
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps, 
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

Testimonials from the initial beta release

Our initial beta customers using Universal Analytics and are pleased with their results. Rojeh Avanesian, VP of Marketing at PriceGrabber.com reports:

"At PriceGrabber, we know it’s important to understand consumer shopping behavior so we can provide a more customized experience to our users. Google’s Universal Analytics will solve this problem for us and many sites that are facing this challenge and help us serve our users better by providing them with more relevant content and shopping results. We can use Google Analytics’ metrics to segment our users in a way that improves and simplifies the shopping experience for consumers. That’s what we strive for at PriceGrabber, to make shopping and saving money as easy as possible."

How to get started using Universal Analytics

If you’re new to Google Analytics, you can choose Universal Analytics when you setup your account. Already using Google Analytics? Create a new web property in your Google Analytics account to set up Universal Analytics and explore the new features. 

Here’s what you’ll see when you create a new web property. Select the Universal Analytics column to get the new analytics.js code snippet you can implement on your website:

You can implement Universal Analytics with the new analytics.js JavaScript for websites, our iOS and Android SDKs for apps, and the new Measurement Protocol for all other platforms. 

Find more details on how to set up using our help center or developer guide. (Migration guides for properties using ga.js coming soon. Until then, set up a new property in your account for Universal Analytics).

To tag in the most flexible way possible, you can also take advantage of the Universal Analytics template available in Google Tag Manager, which allows you to make additional changes and enable new features to your analytics setup without changing the hard-coded tags on your website. Learn more about how to implement Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager. 

For more information on Universal Analytics, visit our help center and developer guides. 

Happy analyzing - in the new and innovative ways you can with Universal Analytics!

Posted by: JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Cross posted from the Google Analytics Blog

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of hashed data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

Measurement today is evolving from technology that counts site traffic into a broader system that measures your effectiveness in advertising, sales, product usage, support, and retention. Ultimately, this sort of integrated measurement can help you deliver the best service, products, and experiences for your customers.

We’ve been developing solutions, like Google Analytics Premium and Mobile App Analytics to advance this vision. For large enterprises, such as Premium customers and those who want to work with APIs, we're now starting to offer “Universal Analytics.” This will help these customers tailor Google Analytics to their needs, integrate their own datasets and ultimately get a more complete vision of the entire marketing funnel.

The new tools offered by Universal Analytics via the new Measurement Protocol (an API that enables you to send your data to Google Analytics) can help you measure the how people actually become and remain loyal customers:

• Consumers use multiple devices.

Mastering data on your website is no longer sufficient - larger clients are increasingly asking for a cross platform view of their data in Analytics. The tools from the Measurement Protocol allow you to seamlessly send your own data about your customers  and business (from any digital device that you are measuring) to your Analytics account. This can help you see how users interact with your brand from multiple touchpoints - phones, tablets, laptops or more - in one place. 

• The world is mobile.

We announced Mobile App Analytics at I/O in 2012 as a beta. It’s been delivering great results for clients. Universal Analytics now enables you to measure your marketing more holistically by integrating this data with your Google Analytics account. 

• Cross-channel measurement is essential.

Cross-channel information is more important and more diverse than ever before. Universal Analytics, via the Measurement Protocol, lets you sync your own data from across various marketing channels, so you can discover relationships between the channels that drive conversions.

• Your business is unique. 

Not every campaign (or app, or website!) is the same, and sometimes, depending on your business and goals, you want to learn more about a particular aspect of the way visitors interact with your business. With Universal Analytics, you can integrate your own data and can customize the metrics that matter to you - beyond website visits.  Google Analytics can deliver the custom metrics you want, in the same report you’re used to, based on the customized data you provide.

As a Google Analytics user, Universal Analytics won’t mean any changes in your account. But if you’re a large enterprise that is interested in exploring the integration options, you can request access to the Universal Analytics beta. You can also learn more in our help center.

Posted by Manav Mishra, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you measure value across all the steps a user takes between app download and your ultimate goal. Whether you’re hoping users will purchase in-app, level up in your game or register for your service, Mobile App Analytics points out what’s impeding and aiding users along their paths to your ultimate goal. On Tuesday, we presented a webinar, “Understanding your App Users with Google Analytics” about ways to promote your mobile app with AdWords. Led by Jessica Sapick, Mobile Ads Product Marketer, and Chrix Finne, Mobile Ads Product Manager, the webinar explained how to use Mobile App Analytics to iterate on app development and marketing.

Attendees learned:

1. How to set up a Mobile App Analytics account
2. The benefits of the new software development kit
3. How to use the new app overview, engagement, Google Play sources, device and network, engagement flow, loyalty, and crash and exception reports
4. How to use analytics data to assess and iterate on advertising strategies

To learn more, download the webinar slides or watch the recording on the Google Business YouTube Channel.

Posted by Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager

Apps are a powerful way to keep your most loyal users engaged, and can also be a real driver of revenue for marketers big and small. When advertising apps, the key is to know what’s working and what’s not. While advertisers have already been able to measure their Android app downloads within AdWords, we’ve now launched the ability to track iOS downloads that were driven by in-app display ad campaigns.

To set up iOS conversion tracking, advertisers need to create a single code snippet in their AdWords account and install it in their app. This snippet is accessible in the AdWords interface in the same place where advertisers have been able to codelessly track Android downloads. With iOS conversion tracking, marketers can better understand which campaigns are most effective at driving app downloads. These enhanced insights help marketers iterate on app promotion strategies to reach their return on investment goals, with the help of features like the Conversion Optimizer for apps.   

Figuring out what ads are working is key for marketers like Sho Masuda, Vice President of Player Marketing for GREE, a leading mobile social game app developer. GREE has used click to download and in-app advertising solutions with AdWords to promote their app, and Masuda says, "Google’s host of tracking and optimization tools help us quickly iterate and maximize ROI across our app promotion campaigns. iOS conversion tracking will help us gain even deeper insights into our Google app promotion efforts for our iOS apps."

If you’d like to learn more about how to track value beyond the app download, you can watch a recording of our Learn with Google webinar “Understanding your App Users with Google Analytics” here.

Posted by Morgan Hallmon, Product Manager

With more than one million apps available across the Google Play and Apple App stores, and users spending nearly half a day each month using apps, the message is clear: users like apps, especially when what they want is right at their fingertips.  Google Analytics for mobile apps equips marketers and app developers with tools to help users find what they’re after, cultivate loyalty and convert more app downloads into purchases, sign-ups and other desired user actions.

Join Google on Tuesday, October 23rd (10am PT/1pm ET) for a webinar about how you can use Google Analytics to measure in-app user activity.

The webinar will walk you through setting up a Google Analytics for mobile apps account, explain how to use the new reports to translate data into insights and give you a chance to ask your burning app analytics questions.  

Sign up for our webinar today by registering here.

We look forward to seeing you on October 23rd!

Posted by Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile Ads

The Corcoran Group, Manhattan’s largest residential real estate firm, experienced success in mobile advertising when they ran a campaign for their iPhone app in 2009. As Android phones rapidly populated the smartphone market in 2010, Corcoran launched an Android app to take advantage of the new platform. To provide the Android user with content on the Corcoran app that they wanted to engage with, Corcoran took advantage of Google Analytics for their mobile search advertising campaign on the Android OS.

Two months after its release, Corcoran’s Android app was responsible for 15% of their total app usage across all mobile platforms, making it their fastest-growing mobile platform. To better educate themselves on what users wanted, Corcoran integrated Google Analytics with their mobile app while running a mobile search advertising campaign on Android OS mobile phones. Now, Corcoran could accurately manage their campaign’s conversion funnel and understand the difference in usage between different platforms.

With Google Analytics, Corcoran now had the ability to successfully upgrade their user experience based on actual in-depth usage data they didn’t have before. For example, Corcoran learned that Android users tend to engage more deeply with the app versus other smartphone users and most of them use the “near me now” function available on Android. With this type of new-found knowledge about their customer base, Corcoran provided better navigation and new formats (see image below). As a result the company not only delivered exactly what users wanted, but also experienced click-through rates 7 to 8 times higher than their desktop campaigns.

As the first client to use Google Analytics with their Android mobile campaign, Corcoran continues to see success, and uses data from Google Analytics to further perfect their mobile experience on Android.

To learn more about this campaign, please download the full case study here.

To get started using Google Analytics for your Android or iPhone mobile app, check out the SDK & technical documentation.

Posted by Dalia Mitra, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

This post was written by Avinash Kaushik, Google Digital Marketing Evangelist, and cross-posted from his Occam's Razor blog. 

Just when you thought you were finally getting more comfortable with website analytics and the metrics you report, here comes the massive explosion of mobile data!

At one level it is the normal impressions and clicks data, but on another level we are getting new data and metrics we normally don't use. We are going to have fun doing cool stuff, learning new things.

I have been spending some time with the Mobile Ads team at Google to try and understand what is innovative about mobile (oh my god so much!) and what implications are on measurement (loads!).

In this blog post I want to talk about just one specific ad unit, the Search / Display click-to-call ad, and how it is cool, useful, and immensely measureable in sexy ways.

Couple of quick caveats:

1. Click-to-Call ads are available in 223 countries, but Call Metrics (more on this below) is still in limited release, in the US only, so some of you might not have access to it. This will change over time.

2. Some of the screens and setup stuff might change as the product evolves, from what you see below. It should only get better.

3. My blog has a very finite width. so in many places I've cropped the reports to make them more clear for you. Please don't worry if when you use the tool you don't see exactly what you see below. On any tab in AdWords just click on the button called Columns and then click on Customize Columns. You can now add and remove metrics and prettify things!

Read more »

This post has been cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog.

Back in December, we brought you custom variables for your Android applications. Today,
we’re doing the same for our iOS SDK by releasing version 1.1 of the Google Analytics SDK for iPhone with Custom Variable support. We are also offering a NoThumb version of this SDK.

Custom variables can be used to segment your users and provide actionable context. Some great use cases are:

• Free vs. paid: What percentage of users prefer a paid app vs. a free app that delivers ads? Are you making more money on the free version or the paid version?
• Installs by version: What version of your app gained the most users? What version lost users? How quickly are users upgrading?
• Portrait vs. landscape: Do your users prefer to use your application in portrait mode or landscape mode?

For more great ways to use Custom variables in mobile applications, check out Alex Lucas’ great blog post for the Andriod SDK.

In addition, we are providing support for NoThumb with our SDK. We have a NoThumb version of the library as well as the standard, Thumb version. This NoThumb version is available for developers that need the Thumb instruction set disabled in their applications.

Posted by Jim Cotugno, Google Analytics Tracking Team