Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising.

Thanks to our integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting.

GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that we cannot guarantee access, but we will do our best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see our help center article.

Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature.

How does Display fit on the conversion path?
By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions.


In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen.

With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing.

• Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them.
• Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal.
• If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads.

How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path?
In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad.

Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping.



Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints
You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model.

We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your TrueView video ads fully? Just create a custom segment using one of our new dimensions, TrueView. The full list of new dimensions is:

• Above the Fold: This dimension uses the Google Active View measurement solution. The value is “Yes” if the ad was in the visible area of the screen when the page was loaded.
• Video Played Percent: The value can be “>=25%”, “>=50%”, “>=75%”, and “100%”, allowing you to see how much of a video ad was watched.
• TrueView: If a user has watched more than 30 seconds of an ad, or watched the ad completely, this will have a value of “Yes.” This is a payable event.

Enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics
Once we have whitelisted your account, please ensure you have successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. Linking accounts takes just a few moments. Under ‘Data Sources’ > ‘AdWords’ you can then see an entry for each linked AdWords account. In the row there is a toggle switch named ‘GDN Impression Reports’, which turns the display impression data from the Google Display Network On and Off. Data is recorded from the time the switch is turned On.


We hope these new tools will help you understand the full impact of your display campaigns through Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution. Sign up today for GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics.

Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics

We’re proud to announce the launch of a dramatically streamlined user experience for managing Google Analytics administrative settings! When visiting the Analytics Admin tab, you will now find all major settings readily accessible from this new landing page. As we launch over the coming weeks, here’s what you’ll see:

Google Store admin shown as a sample (click above image for full-size)

Settings are organized into columns corresponding to the most prominent objects in Analytics: accounts, properties, and views (formerly called profiles). A single account, property, and view will be selected, and you may change these via the drop downs atop each column. We are also renaming profiles to views to most closely match the present and future meaning of what this object represents: a view of the data Analytics collected for your property.

We’ve made a number of additional enhancements. To create a new account, property, or view, click the appropriate menu in the column heading and you’ll see an option to create a new object. You can load any settings page by clicking the appropriate name or icon. You'll notice animations that simplify the display of information, and you'll see new headers along with new navigational links on the left.

Help content has moved to the “Help” tab near the top right corner of the page. We’ve also refreshed the help content to make account administration easy to understand.

This is a large change over the old administrative user experience. For example, getting to property settings now takes just one click but used to take three. Simply compare the new look and feel above to the old:

Experience simplified navigation, faster account configuration, and the power of having all settings at your fingertips.

Posted by Scott Bailey and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Register for next week’s webinar: Register here

In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.


Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 101 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

Last Thursday, we held a webinar discussing how to effectively measure the customer’s journey in a multi-device world. We focused on high-level best practices and strategies, as well as how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.

Watch the webinar video here to learn more about:

• Holistic, full-credit, and active measurement
• Everyday strategies to improve your measurement and marketing performance
• Basic techniques for marketing attribution
• Google Analytics features and tools for measuring the full customer journey

During the webinar, we received dozens of great questions from viewers. Read on below for responses to some of the most common questions we received.

Questions and Answers

What other blogs would you recommend for advice on measurement best practices?

Avinash Kaushik is the author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An hour a day. On his blog, he discusses how to use digital marketing and measurement to focus on the customer while maintaining your ROI.

Justin Cutroni is the author of Google Analytics, Performancing Remarketing with Google Analytics, and Google Analytics Shortcut. He uses his experience as a consultant to guide his blog topics. His blog provides readers with techniques for using Google Analytics to maximize their marketing strategies.

Where can I find the “Think Insights” website referenced during the webinar?

Visit www.google.com/think for access to all sorts of statistics and articles about the latest trends in customer behavior. To learn more about the customer journey to online purchase, view the interactive benchmarking tool here.

How does marketing attribution help with intra-channel optimization?

Marketing attribution can help you to optimize intra-channel campaigns by allowing you to see value for each of the specific moments in the customer journey that you may be addressing within that single channel. For example, if you are running a search campaign, you may think about the role that different types of keywords play at different moments to help generate awareness for your brand, move the customer to consider your product, or to help close the deal. Using tools such as AdWords Search Funnels, you can determine where in the customer path those keywords had an impact, and this can help you optimize your keyword mix.

What are first-click and last-click attribution models?

The first and last clicks are important parts of two  commonly used attribution models, the “first interaction” attribution model and the “last interaction” attribution model. Depending on which model you use, all credit for the sale (or conversion) is attributed to either the first or last click. In the “first interaction” model, the first touch point would receive 100% of the credit for the sale. In the “last interaction” model, the last touch point receives 100% of the credit. Historically, many businesses have relied on the last-click model alone, but since this model (like the first-click model) only addresses a single touch-point along the customer journey, it may miss other important marketing interactions.

There is no one specific model that will work for every business or every program within your business. Rather, you should explore different models and experiment to see which model or combination of models best fits your needs. Check out Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling to get started.

What are some tips for measuring the customer journey with Universal Analytics?

Consider integrating Universal Analytics with all of your digital touchpoints (see some examples in this post). Here are a few use cases that our Certified Partners are already implementing to measure the customer journey beyond web:

• Integrated measurement and analysis of in-store POS systems along with desktop and mobile e-commerce platforms.
• Measuring offline macro and micro conversions through physical buttons or integration with CRMs.
• Measuring physical interactions -- for example at display booths at conventions or artworks at major exhibitions -- through to online engagement with associated websites.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked & Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team

Our Analytics API enables marketers and developers to experiment and build new tools powered by Google Analytics. Over the past year, we’ve listened to your feedback and made improvements to the API such as expanding data points available and integrating with Apps Script. Our goal is to provide the most flexible and useful Analytics API on the web enabling you to do everything from build great apps to automate / expedite busywork. 

Today, we’re excited to share the launch of an API for Content Experiments — our tool for easily testing site content with programmatic optimization to achieve Analytics objectives. This API makes Google Analytics a full-blown A/B testing platform where developers of all types can leverage the power of Google Analytics to run their experiments. By utilizing our multi-armed bandit approach, you can maximize results by efficiently determining which assets on your site perform best to offer an improved experience for users. Multi-armed bandit experiments are powerful and efficient tools and with the new Content Experiments API, you can get even more from them.

The Content Experiments API allows you to pick and choose from all the testing functionality Google Analytics has to offer and to combine it into powerful solutions that best fit your particular needs:

Testing changes to content without redirects. 

The original Content Experiments JavaScript snippet made testing a breeze. To keep things simple and consistent for all publishers, the snippet causes a page redirect which may take away from the end user experience in certain cases. Now, with the new Content Experiments API, testing changes to content without redirects is both possible and easy to implement.

Testing items server-side such as the result set of a database query.

Major testing platforms typically offer changes on the client-side but not server side. With Content Experiments API you can now run tests on the server side and try things like implementing different recommendation or search algorithms to determine what works best for your site.

Testing with your own variation selection logic and use Google Analytics for reporting.

While the multi-armed bandit approach to experimentation is one of Content Experiments most powerful features, there are times where publishers and developers would prefer to decide for themselves how to serve variations - be it evenly or using proprietary logic. The Content Experiments API makes it possible for you to bypass our programmatic optimization while allowing you to continue to enjoy the powerful experiment reporting Google Analytics provides.  

Testing in non-web environments using measurement protocol.

For example, if you have a kiosk in your physical location (such as airline terminal or retail store) you can test different layout variations of content and features and determine what users can complete quickest or at highest value.

Developers are already putting the Content Experiments API to work and we’ve been hearing great feedback. Paras Chopra, Founder & CEO of  Visual Website Optimizer reports:

"We're thrilled about the possibilities opening up with the new Content Experiments API. This new API is specially designed to infuse the powers of Google Analytics into testing and experimentation domain. We're very proud to be one of the beta-testers with Google and soon we will start rolling out the integration of Visual Website Optimizer with Google Content Experiments across our joint customer base. When Google releases an API, it's a big move for the A/B testing industry and we're excited to be their launch partners."

Learn how to get started with our Content Experiments API on our developer site or if you’re still new to the platform, get an overview of Content Experiments in our help center.

Happy testing & experimentation! 

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Google Analytics Team

We’re happy to announce you can soon share and collaborate on Google Analytics dashboards!

Dashboards give an overview on how your properties are performing, and are even more powerful as you can create dashboards that you and your teammates can see and edit. Dashboard sharing is a nice complement to dashboard template creation: templates enable creating copies of dashboard configurations, and dashboard sharing enables you to collaborate with your team on a single shared dashboard.

You’ll be able to use this new feature as we roll this out in the coming weeks. At that time, start by creating a dashboard or viewing an existing one and then clicking on the “Share” menu. Look for the new “Share Dashboard” option:

This will make a copy of your dashboard that is available to everyone on the profile.  Private dashboards will be grouped together, and shared dashboards will be as can be seen in the report navigation on the left side of Google Analytics: 

Learn more about dashboard sharing.

Asset Sharing

This marks another enhancement in Google Analytics asset sharing, complementing the sharing capabilities of assets like annotations, advanced segments and custom reports. Google Analytics offers two forms of asset sharing today: creating asset templates, and collaborating on a single asset like we’re launching soon with dashboards. We are listening closely to user feedback on sharing, and planning more sharing features that you will see in the future.

Use dashboard sharing today to work more effectively with your team, and to enable richer reporting and data analysis.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

As users discover, download, and use your apps, understanding your customers and what they're doing is incredibly important and has a direct impact on monetization. Leveraging smart analytics and analyzing key metrics can drive future monetization and new app discovery efforts, empowering you to become a smarter and more effective app developer or marketer. In short, your ability to drive maximum value from your app only starts after the download. 

Sign up for our upcoming Webinar and join Google Analytics team members Andrew Wales and Adam Singer as they explore the key metrics to measure for the mobile app ecosystem, as well as learn about the benefits of using Google Analytics for mobile app measurement, such as:

A more powerful mobile SDK

We are providing a new mobile app analytics solution, solving the problem that there is currently no single repository to understand end-to-end value of mobile app users. This is supported by a more powerful mobile SDK (v2.0) that is easy to implement.

“One stop shop” for app measurement

Understanding app performance holistically through acquisition, engagement and outcome is critical to improve mobile app results, optimize user engagement and increase revenue generated. Our new reports show the entire lifecycle and in our Webinar, we’ll explore each section.

Improve ROI and engagement

App developers and brands can make better, more comprehensive data-driven decisions for mobile investments with better reports. For example, marketers can optimize their mobile programs to improve ROI and app developers can improve in-app engagement.

Webinar information:

Title: Metrics for the Mobile App Ecosystem

Date: Wednesday, 6/12/2013 @ 1:00pm EST / 10am PST

Level: 101 - Beginner

Duration: 1 hour

Sign up link: Register here.

Posted by the Google Analytics team