How Google Analytics’ Upgrade Simplifies User Journey Tracking

Google’s web analytics service platform, Google Analytics (GA) introduced an upgrade for their App + Web property feature on Dec. 19, 2019. As a result of this upgrade, digital businesses and GA admin can analyze multiple websites, receive custom analyses, and get faster insights from their data.

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In this exclusive Martech Buzz conversation, Neha Bansal, Product Manager at Google Analytics, shares insights into how brands can better understand the customer journey across platforms with this new upgrade. She also explains how the new App + Web property delivers automated and custom insights.

Having built most of her career in analytics intelligence, Bansal leads Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) teams that convert data into actionable insights.

Here are some excerpts from this insightful conversation:

MarTech Advisor: Google Analytics recently announced the new App + Web property that enables brands to better understand the customer journey across platforms. What are the top 3 benefits that brands can experience from this upgrade?

Neha: There are numerous benefits from this new property, the top three being:

• Unified app and web analytics: You can get a more unified picture of engagement across your app and website users. Now you can answer questions like: Which marketing channel is responsible for acquiring the newest users across your different platforms? How many conversions have occurred on your app and website in the last week and which platform is driving most of these conversions?
• Flexible event model: Understanding how people engage with your app and website means that you need to measure a diverse range of user interactions like clicks, page views, app opens, and more. The new property type utilizes a more flexible event-based model for collecting the unique interactions that users have with your content, allowing you to measure any custom event that you set up. This event-based model also allows you to automate the manual work of tagging some of the events on your site with no additional coding required. For example, automatically measure page views, scrolls, downloads, video views and more with the flip of a toggle in the admin settings for your property.
• More actionable insights with Google’s machine learning: Finally, App + Web properties are highly focused on using machine learning to make the user experience seamless. E.g. App + Web properties offer automated and custom insights that help reduce the analysis workload for marketers and analysts. And we’ve already launched the search experience within App + Web properties, which is more powerful than ever before!
   

Learn More: How to Optimize Paid Search with Google Analytics

MarTech Advisor: How does the new App + Web property deliver automated insights and custom insights? Do users need to select the required metrics each time, or does machine learning play a role to remember and improve results?

Neha: Great question! There are two types of insights: automated and custom.

Automated insights are generated by Google Analytics without the customer making any effort at all. Automated insights use machine learning to identify key trends and anomalies in your data. For example, if there was an unusual spike in sales yesterday, the customer will get an alert of the change which she can then investigate. Automated insights do get smarter and more relevant to the business over time, thus improving the results.

Custom insights give users the control to tell Analytics what metrics they’d like to be alerted about. For example, if you are a retailer and you’ve just released a new product, you may want to track sales specifically for that SKU. You can set up a custom insight to alert you if the product’s sales increased by more than 10% week-over-week. These alerts can be set up to run at different frequencies including hourly, and you can receive email notifications within 5 minutes of a triggered alert.

MarTech Advisor: What’s in store for App + Web properties in Google Analytics in 2020 and beyond?

Neha: There is a lot that’s coming soon for App + Web properties. Last quarter we launched the functionality to enable multiple web streams, we added two new modules to Analysis (Cohort Analysis and User Lifetime Analysis), instant answers through the search bar, and custom and automated insights. Beyond those, in 2020, we’re focused on launching features that meet a lot of advertiser use-cases.

Learn More: Use the Google Analytics Search Bar for Complex Queries in 2020

About Google

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