Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool that millions of businesses use worldwide. As we begin to see more commerce move online the ability to track marketing success is now more than ever, making sure every pound counts.
To help drive better ROI from your marketing, Google have created a new more intelligent Analytics that uses machine learning to automatically surface helpful insights to provide users with a better understanding of their customers across all devices and platforms. The new design revolves around data privacy, future-proofing from the inevitable further restrictions on cookies and identifiers that are soon to come over the next few years.
The most noticeable new features that we have come across, include:
1. Smarter Insights
Google Analytics is now able to alert users about important data trends through the machine learning. For example, Google Analytics can use website data to identify products rising in demand because of new customer needs. These can help marketers plan future and optimise existing campaigns by predicting future actions customers may take.
Over time Google Analytics will add more predictive metrics, such as estimating the potential revenue a business can earn through a specific group of customers. These audiences can then be used by marketers to target through digital marketing to reach higher value customers.
2. Further Integration With Google Ads
As mentioned above, it is now possible to create custom audiences based on Google Analytics data within the Google Ads platform.
Google Analytics now also measures interactions across the web and apps, which means it can report on conversions such as YouTube engaged views that occur in-app and on the web providing a more holistic view with the ability to see conversions from YouTube video views and other sources such as paid and non-paid Google channels, Google search, Email and Social Media.
3. Customer Centric Data
Google Analytics now allows users to view where customers first discover a business and how they interact with a site. For example, when a customers visits the site first from an advert on the web and then later completes a purchase on an app. This provides marketers with a better understanding of the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to conversion and retention.
4. Manage How Data is Collected and Retained
Google Analytics now offers more granular data controls so that marketers can manage how data is collected and retained. This can also be used to select how data should be used for advertising.
Marketers can choose when to use customer data to optimise ads, and when to limit data use to measurement only. Google states that Analytics “Uses a flexible approach to measurement, and in the future, will include modelling to fill in the gaps where the data may be incomplete”. Therefore, Google is recognising that this may help users view data when further privacy restrictions come into effect.
Google recommends setting up a new property within Google Analytics that sits alongside your existing properties to get the most out of the new benefits. If you would like any assistance setting this up or with your online marketing then please feel free to get in touch.