You've worked tirelessly to create a great website full of useful content. You've reached out across the Internet with Google, SupplyFrame, blogs and Facebook to pull the world's decision makers towards your site. The next step is understanding how that hard work is paying off. Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool used in the electronics industry. The free service is excellent at measuring how visitors got to your site, what they did once they landed, and how many are converting into design wins. Google recently introduced powerful updates to the Google Analytics platform. We love the new features and can help you understand what new capabilities you can now access. Plus, we've written a handy guide to set up Google Analytics to track the key conversions unique to the electronics industry.
Here are the highlights on some of the new features in Google Analytics:
Dashboards: Custom Views of Web Activity for Everyone in Your Organization
Your product team wants to see which demographic is bringing in the most online revenue for their product. Your search team is interested in keyword performance. And you want to see how your latest campaign is paying off. When it comes to website reporting, most marketers find that dashboards are not one-size-fits-all. Each user of an analytics profile has different needs when it comes to how they want to view their data. The new version of Google Analytics Dashboards is a great way to offer multiple users of an analytics profile the metrics that matter most to each of them.
Customizable features in Dashboards allow you to generate multiple dashboards — up to 20 per analytics profile. For those of you who love the ease-of-use of widget-based reports, you are in luck. Google Analytics Dashboards features four widgets, each providing a different visualization for your data. Widgets can be dragged and dropped inside the screen layout to customize your end result. Further, data can be refined with filters available in the widgets.
Here is a quick reference for the four widgets available in the Dashboards feature:
- Metric
Shows a number and a sparkline for a single metric you choose.
- Pie Chart
Shows a pie chart with slices reflecting metrics grouped by dimension.
- Timeline
Displays a timeline of one metric or one metric compared to another (optional).
- Table
Provides up to 3 columns of tabular data with up to 10 rows of a dimension and two metrics.
HOW TO CREATE A GOOGLE ANALYTICS DASHBOARD
Multi-Channel Funnels: Learn How Your Marketing Channels Work Together to Generate Conversions
Earlier this month, our industry insights underlined the significance of measuring your online marketing. Like many organizations though, your analytics platform may only be showing you a piece of the complete picture of your marketing ROI. So how do you move toward a more holistic view of your performance? Easy...just leverage the new "Multi-Channel Funnels" reports in Google Analytics. These reports show you how online marketing interactions leading up to the conversion come together to generate sales. Let us explain.
Until recently, it was common practice to attribute online marketing ROI to conversions (online purchases or related downloads/requests) that occur through the marketing channel (e.g., sources of traffic to your website) visited just prior to conversion. Recent thinking takes a new approach, measuring how prior channels contribute to conversions. This methodology considers that customers often make purchase decisions based on several marketing activities across multiple channels. For example, an engineer may be originally introduced to a product through a SupplyFrame IPO ad but make their actual purchase after arriving at your product folder from a search engine. Reports in Google's Multi-Channel Funnels paint this more complete landscape of the events that fueled a purchase.
Here are some of the key features of Multi-Channel Funnels:
- Data covers a 30-day period leading up to a conversion
- Complete conversion path for your conversions across multiple digital channels (e.g., Referrals, Display Advertising, Social, Paid Search)
- Out-of-the-box reporting
SEE GOOGLE'S MULTI-CHANNEL FUNNELS VIDEO
Google Analytics Real-Time: See Website Activity As It Happens
One of the common criticisms of Google Analytics was about its lack of real-time tracking. That's all changed with their Real-Time data reports. While Google will still display its current (time-delayed) reports, this new additional set of reports will show your sites' up-to-the-minute activity as it happens. Make sure to check these features out but, there's one catch. You won't be able to use Real-Time for filtered profiles. However, if you do have non-filtered profiles then the following is what you can expect to see. Get ready...Real-Time is positively addictive.
Once you are in the new version of Google Analytics you will be able to access your Real-Time data. You will see a dashboard that looks similar to the screen capture shown here. The Overview dashboard includes a snapshot of visitors on your site "right now" and additional stats related to your active visits. Further, there are reports that display stats for the active visitors by country, page currently being viewed, and traffic source.
Also of interest is the ability to tag campaign links to see how much traffic each channel is driving to the campaign (great for social campaigns where you'll see the real time impact of a something like a Twitter post).
Here's an informative article with ideas on how to leverage Google's new Real-Time feature:
5 WAYS TO USE THE NEW GOOGLE ANALYTICS REAL TIME FEATURES |
