Google Analytics Summit 2014 – Key Announcements

Last week Moneyspyder were at the Google Analytics Partner Summit in San Francisco. At the Summit Google announced some great new functionality that improves the quality of data collected by Analytics, as well as making the insights it provides more accessible and actionable.

• Enhanced Ecommerce
• Data Import
• Remarketing 

What This Means for You

1. Upgrade to Universal Analytics - Enhanced Ecommerce and Data Import are only available to Universal Analytics users. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you should consider doing it sooner rather than later. Google are going to start phasing out the old version of Analytics soon

2. Use Google Tag Manager – Google Tag Manager allows you to add and change tracking tags without having to deploy new code, and without involving your developer. This makes upgrading Analytics easier and cheaper.

3. Get a retargeting strategy – retargeting is becoming an ‘always on’ marketing solution. Review your analytics to define your most valuable segments and market to them with the remarketing tool. A good place to start is with Google’s ‘Smart List’, which creates a remarketing list of your most valuable visitors, based on their behaviour on your site.

Google’s main announcement was Enhanced Ecommerce, which is a dramatic redesign of the ecommerce functionality in Analytics. Enhanced Ecommerce automatically tracks and displays your checkout funnel. It also allows you to view more information about products. Whereas previously it has only been possible to see how many products you have sold. Enhanced Ecommerce shows how many times a product has been viewed and how many times it has been added to the basket and then purchased.

This makes Enhanced Ecommerce a powerful merchandising tool; allowing you to identify and promote your top performing products.

You can see a much more detailed summary here.

Google’s other announcements make Analytics a much more accurate reporting tool. With the existing Data Import functionality, businesses could automatically upload cost data such as the cost of your email, affiliate and display ads. This makes Google’s ROI calculations more accurate.

It is now possible to upload many more types of data into Analytics. You can import your refund figures so that your revenue number in Analytics starts to reflect your actual bottom line. You can also upload additional product data, such as what category or brand they belong to.

There’s more information here.

One final thing to emphasise is the improved remarketing capabilities. Businesses can now use advanced segments as remarketing lists meaning targeting has never been more accurate.

To take full advantage of these improvements, and to stay up to date with these Analytics changes, we recommend you do the following:

1. Upgrade to Enhanced Ecommerce and Universal Analytics.
2. Make your life simpler by using Google Tag Manager to manage your Analytics tags. 
3. Grow your Remarketing Campaigns - Make sure you don't miss out on easy revenue.

If you want any more information on what these changes mean, or for help configuring your Analytics call us on 0207 492 1929 or email us on info@moneyspyder.co.uk.

James Aston to Speak at Sheerluxe Ecommerce Conference

The Sheerluxe Ecommerce Conference is a great way to meet and learn from other luxury brands and their suppliers. This year James Aston, our MD, will be speaking on the role of common sense and discipline in increasing conversion rates.

Just think about how many things you know you should do but haven't - How many of these things are you avoiding doing because you're unsure of the data? Or because you simply haven't got around to it yet? What is on that list? Abandoned checkout emails, customer reviews, mobile templates, Google Product feeds are all things that can easily slip off the agenda but are guaranteed to increase conversion rates.

We believe that one of the biggest ways we add value to our clients is by helping to instil discipline and by making sure that common sense solutions don't fall by the wayside.

Here's what James is speaking on:

• Five things you should have done last year, but haven't.
• Why discipline will make you more money than technology.
• Optimising your advisers - Are agencies worth it?

You can see more about our ecommerce consulting here and read more about Sheerluxe here.

Universal Analytics For Multi-Channel & Ecommerce Businesses

Last week Moneyspyder were in Mountain View, California, for the annual Google Analytics Partner Summit to hear about what’s newest in Analytics.

The biggest announcement was about the move to ‘Universal Analytics’ – This is a giant step forward in how we look at data and makes what we see in Analytics much more relevant to what customers actually do on our sites.

The key takeaways for Universal Analytics are:

1. 1. Measure customers across multiple devices – Increasingly online shoppers are accessing ecommerce sites across multiple touchpoints. We browse on mobiles, tablets, social networks, laptops and work PCs. Universal Analytics is going to make it much easier to link these visits together to get a much better picture of the customer journey. This is a crucial move towards tracking people rather than visits.
2. 2. Improved Mobile Tracking – You can now use GA to track mobile apps and Universal Analytics will improve integration of mobile tracking.
3. 3. Upload data from your CRM and other databases – You can now sync valuable (but anonomised) data from your customer databases which will allow you to dig even deeper into your customer behaviour. It takes Google Analytics one step closer to being a one-stop shop for data analysis.
4. 4. Upload cost data – You can also upload cost data from CSV files which means you can get ROI figures for all your channels in one place.

Who Is It For?

While many of the Universal Analytics features are aimed at Enterprise size businesses, the savvy ecommerce manager of a multi-channel business will take full advantage of what Universal Analytics has to offer. 

At the moment UA is still in Beta Testing but will be rolled out to all users over the coming months. The great news is that existing Google Analytics users will not need to make any changes to their existing code.

MoneySpyder are Google Analytics Partners and experts at Ecommerce Consulting. We also have our own bespoke ecommerce platform.

For more information about our services email us at info@moneyspyder.co.uk.