2013 Google Analytics Summit Highlights Theme of 2013 Google Analytics (GA) Summit: Access, Empower, Act Access Product/Feature: Google Tag Manager (GTM) Update: Auto-event tracking What this means: No more custom-code needed to track events within a page, such as a form submission or button click. This can now be done using the basic GTM and GA tracking codes Availability: Currently available for all GTM users Product/Feature: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Enterprises Update: New API geared at helping IT teams more easily set up GA accounts What this means: Ability to programmatically set up, configure, and manage GA properties, profiles, and goals to avoid the need for creating dozens of profile views and having to re-add each individual user to each view Availability: Open for whitelist sign-up Product/Feature: GA Premium Service-level Agreement (SLA) Expansion for GTM Update: Details still pending What this means: Details still pending Availability: Coming soon for GA Premium users
Empower Product/Feature: Audience Reporting Update: Age, gender, and interest categories have been added to audience reports within GA What this means: Updating GA tracking code across site pages will allow for the collection of user demographic and interest data. As a result, analysts can segment visit data using age, gender, and interests dimensions to learn more about your visitors and who are the highest converters, so you can more effectively target your highest converting prospects
Product/Feature: Acquisition Section, Channel Grouping & ABC information architecture Update: Redesigned Acquisition report and segmentation to make it easier to use, also added pivots, and the ability to do cohort analyses, sequence segmenting, and build custom channels and segments What this means: Newly redesigned groups and channels are more intuitive and customizable, making it easier to analyze how users are acquired, their behavior after acquisitions, and their conversion paths Availability: Rolling out to be available to all by end of 2013 Figure 1: Channels (left-hand column) & ABC Metric Groups
Product/Feature: GA Premium BigQuery Integration Update: More granular and complex querying of unsampled data in Google BigQuery What this means: Provides ability to view session-level data from GA within Google BigQuery, a web service that helps you perform interactive analyses of massive data sets Availability: Currently available for all GA Premium users Product/Feature: GA Universal Analytics Migration Support Update: Additional support provided by GA representatives, customer service, and within Admin section to assist in upgrading from GA Asynchronous tracking to GA Universal Analytics (UA) tracking What this means: The transition from asynchronous tracking code to UA tracking code will be easier and you won t lose historical data. The reason for making the switch is that the UA tracking brings with it additional features a more critical feature of UA being pushed is the ability to track multiple visits across multiple devices to a single unique visitor Product/Feature: Analytics Academy & In-Product Help Update: New online courses, learning platform, and expanded product support What this means: Quickly and easily learn about new features and the everchanging GA platform or take basic courses on measurement planning and analyses. Register online for courses or use the help section to view video tutorials Availability: Coming soon for all GA users Act Product/Feature: Google Play & Mobile App Analytics Integration Update: View Google Play Marketplace data for your app, such as impressions and downloads, in GA What this means: Get a holistic view of the Google Play acquisition funnel: how your users found your mobile app, download rates, and mobile app engagement data