Linking all of your AdWords accounts to Google Analytics

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to use multiple AdWords accounts with Google Analytics more effectively.

Previously it was only possible to link a single AdWords account to a single Google Analytics account. This made it more challenging to use auto-tagging and the AdWords reports inside of Google Analytics.

Starting today, you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account. The new data sources section in the Google Analytics account settings area makes it easy to use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import your AdWords data into Google Analytics.

Let’s take a look at how to set this up:

Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account.

If you want to link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account, you need to set the new version of Analytics as your default:

1. Sign into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.

2. Click New Version at the top right of the page.

3. Click Make this version default.

If you skip this step, you won’t see the new linking interface when you sign into AdWords.

Linking your accounts

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. Click the Reporting and Tools tab, then click Google Analytics.

3. Click the gear icon at the top right.

4. Click All Accounts at the top left of the page.

5. Click the account to which you want to link the AdWords account.

6. Click the Data Sources tab.

7. Click the AdWords tab.

8. Click Link Accounts button.

If you are linking from a My Client Center child account the process is very similar. You can more in this article: Linking Analytics Accounts to My Client Center (MCC) Accounts.

Improvements to applying AdWords account data to multiple profiles

Now that you can link multiple AdWords accounts to Google Analytics, we’ve also made it easier import your AdWords data into multiple profiles in Google Analytics. We have put together a quick video demonstrating how to do this:

If you’re less of a visual learner, you can always find instructions on how to link accounts in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Happy linking!

Gavin Doolan

Google Analytics Team

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Introducing Multi-Channel Funnels: discover untapped opportunities in your conversion path

An ad is clicked, and a purchase is made. Marketers have long used Google Analytics and similar tools to see which marketing efforts drive sales and conversions. Measurement is fundamental to ROI-focused marketing. Now, we’re taking this measurability a few steps further.

When a customer buys or converts on your site, most conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked. In reality though, customers research, compare and make purchase decisions via multiple touch points across multiple channels. So marketers that measure return solely on the last channel that a customer touches before conversion are getting an incomplete picture, and potentially missing out on important opportunities to reach their customers.

That’s why we’re excited today to introduce Multi-Channel Funnels to all Google Analytics users. This set of five new reports in Google Analytics gives marketers insight into the full path to conversion over a 30 day period, not simply the last click.

By looking at interactions across most digital media channels, including clicks from paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads, you can understand how different channels work together to create sales and conversions.

We’ve been piloting Multi-Channel Funnels with several customers over the past few months, and we’ve seen our customers gain valuable insight into the buying-cycle and understand the often hidden contribution of channels like social and display to conversions.

One of our early partners in the pilot, HUGO BOSS, uncovered significant contributions from upper funnel efforts, helping to better inform marketing strategy. "Knowing more about how our customers find us is very important, and this data helps us make better decisions. We found out that nearly two out of every three conversions involves more than one touch point,” said Patrick Berresheim, Director E-Commerce/CRM for HUGO BOSS. “It's now possible to value the contributions of assisting channels, which had previously been hidden by looking only at the last click.”

If you use Google Analytics on your website, and have goals or e-commerce tracking enabled, you can begin using the reports today by clicking on the My Conversions tab, with no further setup required. If you are an AdWords customer, make sure to link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to get the most detail on your ads performance. Starting today, you’ll see complete data in the reports for the past two months, and we’ll be expanding to encompass data back through January 2011 in the coming days. Update: This data is now available in Multi-Channel Funnels reports.

To help you learn more about the type of analysis you can do using Multi-Channel Funnels, including advanced features such as conversion segments and custom channel groupings, we’ll be scheduling a free webinar - look out for the registration details on the blog in a couple of weeks or sign up here to be notified by email. We’ll be walking through the reports and common use cases and you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions - we hope you’ll be able to make it.

Update: September 1, 2011 10:30am PST - Conversions are now available in the Multi-Channel Funnel reports going back to January 2011

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Google Analytics

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Improvements in Custom Reports: Better builder, more metrics, and custom navigation

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gilles Roux, an Analytics engineer will discuss some recent improvements to custom reporting in Google Analytics.

Creating custom reports in Google Analytics is a great way to answer specific questions about how users interact with your website or keep track of the metrics that really matter to you.

Since releasing the new Analytics earlier this year you have sent us lots of great feedback. Thank You! We have been hard at work integrating some of your suggestions and adding new features that will make custom reports more useful and easier to use.

Simplified custom report builder

The custom report builder has an updated look and feel that simplifies the process of creating and editing custom reports. The sections are now clearly labeled, with optional settings at the end, and the metric groups are shown on a single page without the need to switch tabs. We have also added the ability to quickly reorder metrics and dimensions using drag and drop. We hope these improvements will help you create reports that look just the way you want, in just a few minutes.

More metrics and dimensions!

We know - when it comes to analyzing your website usage, the more metrics the better. That’s why we have enabled 45 additional metrics and dimensions inside custom reports. These cover a wide variety of areas such as mobile, social, goals, site search, e-commerce and advertising. All metrics and dimensions are now organized in categories to make the list more manageable.

When viewing a custom report that has an explorer tab, you will now be able to select a secondary dimensions, which can be useful to perform a deeper analysis of your data without having to make changes to the custom report.

Custom navigation

The custom reports overview page is the central place to view and manage all your custom reports. You will now notice a ‘New Category’ button to create your own categories, in which you can group related custom reports. You will also be able to reorder reports, for example to make sure that your most important ones are conveniently shown at the top of the navigation.

We hope these improvements will help you create powerful reports that are targeted to the specificities of your site. As always, please don't hesitate to send us feedback, and expect more features in the near future.

Posted by Gilles Roux, Google Analytics Team

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+1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Cross-posted from the AdSense and Google Webmaster blogs.

It’s been a busy week for us here at the Googleplex. First we released +1 buttons to Google search sites globally, then we announced the beginning of the Google+ project.

The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.

But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.

First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
• The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
• Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.

Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.

Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.

• The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
• The Social Actions report lets you analyse the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
• The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.

Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Posted by Dan Rodney, Software Engineer

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New Google Analytics: Improvements in Mobile Reporting

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, we’ll discuss some recent improvements to mobile reporting in Google Analytics.

Internet traffic from mobile devices is growing rapidly with smartphones and tablets expected to outsell computers this year. Google Analytics already provides a number of ways to track this growing mobile Internet usage from standard tracking on smartphones to SDKs for embedding Google Analytics into applications in iOS and Android. We’re hard at work at delivering more.

Today you'll see small first step along our path to improve mobile reporting inside Google Analytics: a new Mobile section in Visitors reporting.

Inside the Mobile section you’ll find two new reports. The first is a Mobile Overview report, which shows the simple breakdown between mobile traffic and non-mobile traffic.

The second report is the Devices report, which provides information about the various mobile devices that visit your site. As part of this report, we’ve added three new dimensions: Mobile Device Info, Mobile Device Branding, and Mobile Input Selector. Data for all these dimensions is available starting from June 6, 2011.

Mobile Device Info is the actual hardware that visited your site. One of the nice benefits of this report is you can quickly see a picture of any device. While you’ve probably seen an iPhone in person and have an idea about how your site will look on one, that might not be the case for less common devices like for example, the Nokia E63. Click the camera icon next to any device to see pictures of it.

Mobile Device Branding lets you see the brand associated with the phone. Depending on the device this might be the manufacturer or the carrier. Mobile Input Selector shows the primary input method for the device, whether it’s a touch screen, a clickwheel (like you’ll find on a Blackberry), or even a stylus.

And if you haven’t tried out the improvements to map overlay reports that we talked about last week, give them a try in the Mobile reports to visualize where your mobile traffic is coming from.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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New Google Analytics: Improvements in Map Overlay reports

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, a few engineers from our team are sharing improvements they’ve made to Map Overlay reports.

In GA, we're always looking for ways to improve existing reports. For example, we noticed that you can only see state (i.e. province/region) breakdowns if you're looking at the United States. Surely, this information ought to be available for other parts of the world?!

It seemed like something that could be done in a short amount of time and yield a big win for our users. So, we're glad to announce that as of this week's release, you can now see region level maps of over 170 countries!

To try it out, simply go to the Location report (under Visitors > Demographics) and click a country. We'll try France:

Voila! We can see at a glance that Ile-de-France sends the most visits to our site. To see cities, just click City in the Viewing: list immediately below the map. Once you're on the cities view, you can try out another feature we rolled out recently -- a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together.

Enjoy the new features in your maps. We hope they speed you on your way to gaining actionable insights and metrics. Happy analyzing!

P.S. Did you know you get map overlay in more places than just the Visitors > Demographics > Location report? Take a look at the tab on the Visitors > Technology > Mobile report

Posted by Eyal, Jerry, Yinnon, and Brian, Google Analytics Frontend Team

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Pilot the Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics integration

Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools, which tool should you use? For many webmasters and online marketers, the answer is both. Much of the data in Google Analytics is about what happens after a user chooses to visit your site; whereas, Webmaster Tools reports are more focused on data from before the user makes that choice.

We’ve heard from many of you that an integration between Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics is at the top of your wishlists. So, today we’re happy to announce that we’re starting a limited pilot of just such an integration.

The initial release will be a set of reports in Google Analytics using search data from Google Webmaster Tools. This includes query information, clicks, impressions, clickthrough rate, and average position. You’ll also be able to use Google Analytics advanced data filtering and visualizations with this data.

We hope this will be the first of many ways to surface Webmaster Tools data in Google Analytics to give you a more thorough picture of your site’s performance. We’re looking forward to working with members of the pilot to help us identify the best ways to make this happen. If you’re interested in using these reports, please sign up for the pilot (see below).

Update July 15th, 2011, 2:25pm PST: We've closed the sign up sheet for the pilot for now. We'll update you when we open up sign ups again.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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The Making of Google Analytics v5

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week we’re sharing a few new features in our Intelligence reports.

Since we launched the new Google Analytics, we've been talking to many of you about the new version, and getting your feedback. One question we got was about our goals for the new version and why we made the changes we did. So, we got a few members of the Google Analytics team together to share their stories of how the new version began, our approach, and our goals in building it. Along the way, they also share a bit about what you can expect in the future from Google Analytics.

The Making of Google Analytics v5

We also put together a second video where the team runs through a few of the many new features in Google Analytics v5:

What’s New in Google Analytics v5

You can find more information on many of these in the New Google Analytics blog series including a few that aren’t mentioned in the video like Site Speed and new overview reports. And like Sagnik says at the end of the video, there’s much more to come in Google Analytics. Stay tuned!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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What’s new about Analytics Intelligence?

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week we’re sharing a few new features in our Intelligence reports.

In 2009, we debuted the first iteration of our Intelligence reports. Since then, we have been enhancing these reports with more insightful information such as explanations, SMS alerts and improved alert quality.

In the past month, we have released a few enhancements to these reports. First, there is a new overview report that surface significant events for a given date range in a sortable table.

With this flexible table overview, users can perform full-text search, event sort, as well as drilling into details of each event. For example, clicking on the “Details” for row 2 above,

In this detail view, users can explore the event further, add an annotation, or drill in by clicking on Go to Report, which allows users to jump to a full report related to the dimension of interest.

Additional improvements include the ability to create and edit custom alerts without leaving the Intelligence reports:

We’ve also made significant improvements to the quality of automatic alerts by filtering similar alerts and more comprehensive measurements of importance.

As we continue to improve the Intelligence reports, we hope to surface more actionable insights to you. If you have suggestions for our effort here, we greatly appreciate your comments.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team

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New Google Analytics - Overview Reports Overview

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

This week we’re going a bit meta with an overview of the new Overview reports in the new Google Analytics. Overview reports were part of the old version of Analytics, of course, but we’ve made some changes to help your analysis.

Anatomy of the Overview Report
Each overview report consists of three sections. There's a timeline graph, some aggregate metrics, and a set of reports.

Whats inside of each of these sections depends on which report you’re looking at. For example, the Visitor Overview shows a graph of visits and metrics like New vs. Returning visitors, while Content Overview shows metrics like pageviews and average time on page.

The Graph
We’ve made a few changes to the graphs in the new Google Analytics, and we'll share them here. You can now make adjustments to the graphs you see in Google Analytics from the buttons on the top right of the graph:

• Switch a graph between Line Chart and Motion Chart
• Graph different metrics: Select from the dropdown or the scorecard

Metrics dropdown

Metrics Scorecard

• Compare two metrics: Graph an additional metric for comparison

• Graph By: Change graph from between Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and even Hourly for some reports

Reports
The bottom section of an overview reports lets you look through a subset of the reports available in that section. You can flip through these reports to see where you want to start your analysis. In the Traffic Sources Overview, we can start by looking at a report of Keywords.

From here we can go view the full report or look at another report, like Referral Sources:

Intelligence Overview
Google Analytics Intelligence automatically searches your website traffic to look for anomalies. When it finds something that's out of the ordinary it surfaces this as an alert. You can also setup your own alerts by defining custom alerts.

Now you can feel like the president of the principality of Analytica with your very own Intelligence Overview report.

The Intelligence Overview report shows you all of your automatic alerts (daily, weekly, and monthly) at a glance. From the Intelligence Overview, you can click on Details to see a graph of the alert and go directly into the GA report. You can also add or review an annotation right from the pop-up graph.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of Overview Reports. Please continue to send us feedback on the new Google Analytics. Stay tuned for next week’s installment in New Google Analytics series.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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