Google has recently announced some changes and updates to their highly-effective Analytics toolset – changes that have slightly set the cat amongst the pigeons because of a new-look dashboard, but are nonetheless designed to help marketeers get more insights and specific data from their websites, and more.
The key underlying change is that there is a greater input from AI and machine-learning to help refine data into more customised reports and dashboards, rather than the digital marketing user having to engineer these data sets and dashboards themselves.
Let’s take a look at some of the newly-introduced features and functions…
User Level Standard Reports
Google’s standard reports have been refined to give you data that is far more granular, right down to the individual user level. You are now able to track user behaviour instead of getting only session data, which shifts the focus from sessions, where a single user could have multiple sessions a day, to a session-for-session report and dashboard.
User Explorer
This new feature uses data from a user’s lifetime cookie history to produce a lifetime profile of a user’s behaviour, making it far easier to see past, present and potential behaviour based on a full view of a single user’s data.
This means from a marketing and re-marketing perspective it will be far easier to target specific campaigns to subsets of users with a greater accuracy, and to scale the individual metrics to a large group so you can find patterns.
Audience Reports
Previous iterations of Google Analytics had no way to create audience reports – this could only be done via AdWords. But now you can create and publish audiences in Google Analytics which is especially useful for remarketing, allowing comparisons between various audiences and campaigns to build custom audience profiles across different segments.
As an example, you could create an audience of customers who purchased multiple times over a defined period of time, and then compare that with visitors who visit your site but do not make a purchase.
This then allows you to customise campaigns to each of these segments with a far greater degree of accuracy.
Future Conversion Probability
Google Analytics’ machine learning capability now extends to your website’s historical data to find patterns in defined variables around your high-value customers. It then identifies any recent site visitor who has a high probability of converting in the future. You’re then able to create an audience out of these high-value potential customers, and target specific messaging and campaigns to them.
As always, Google is evolving its tools to give marketeers the best opportunity to grow audiences and generate revenue, and whilst the new dashboard may take some getting used to, the immediate and long-term benefits of this latest iteration are well worth the effort!
Find out more about Google Anaytics and digital marketing by speaking to one of our experienced digital experts today! Call 01223 550800 or email info@realnet.co.uk for more information.