A common view of web marketers is that understanding user journeys across channels and devices is critical to marketing success. Since today’s customers have very high expectations for personalised and relevant experiences from brands, Google has introduced new reporting in Analytics to help measure the stages of a customer journey through a website.
The first new change in Analytics has been an update to the standard reports to focus more on users. The new user metrics help website marketers better understand engagement with their customers, especially those who may have multiple sessions across multiple days. The traditional ‘sessions’ data is still being collected and shown in the standard reports, but user data is now also more prominent to help review this level of information.
Another good report – which has also been updated – is User Explorer. This enables marketers to analyse visitors on an individual level, if required, and the report now includes lifetime metrics and dimensions for individual users (based on the lifetime of their cookie if they use the same device). These new metrics and dimensions will give Analytics users a much more detailed way to measure visitors and customers.
For example, Analytics users can look back and see the total amount of time an individual user has spent on the website, or the total number of transactions an individual user has made. There are new dimensions that show data such as when a user made their first visit to your site and which channel acquired them.
There is also a new option to publish any audience data to a new report in Google Analytics, that should help make every audience easier to understand. Users can now go to the new Audiences report and see a cross-channel view of the audiences that have been created in Analytics. For instance, marketers might decide to publish an audience to Analytics so that they can see all users who have purchased within the last 12 months but not during the last 2.
The fourth new development is a metric called Conversion Probability. This takes user-based metrics one step further to show the probability that a given user will convert in the future. These calculations are based on a machine learning model that learns from users who have made transactions in the past so that, for example, marketers can create remarketing lists that target users who have a high likelihood to purchase and then advertise to them using an AdWords campaign.
Added to this new data is a Conversion Probability report, which will show the Conversion Probability for all users of a website, including across important dimensions such as channel. This is a new feature from Analytics Intelligence and Google expects to introduce more forward-looking estimate reports on likely conversions by individual users.
Some of these new enhancements are still rolling out, or in beta for Analytics users, but aim to help marketers better understand their users and create more relevant experiences for them.
If you’d like more information about these new user focused metrics and reports in Analytics, please contact us now.