The first day of the Google Analytics Certified Partner summit was jammed full with more exciting announcements and riveting presentations than I could possibly have anticipated. I wanted to provide a snapshot for any readers (although I also tweeted a bit of this), so here we go! These are just my biggest takeaways, to really summarize the whole day I would need to write a small book.
New product announcements:
- Universal Analytics. Google is offering a beta that is essentially cleaning up the old Google Analytics library and protocols, simplifying our implementations and allowing for more customization. This opens up the world of analytics to “minor” things like cross-device analytics and data imports. Yeah, that’s right, imports.
- User ID: Google Analytics will now recognize a User ID that the analytics can set to be anything they want (while respecting user privacy of course). This is the piece of code in Universal Analytics that enables GA to track cookies across different browsers and devices. A User ID needs to be something unique to that user, like an ID that is generated by a specific username/password combination. This limits the applications of this to only users that log in, and only when they log in. But still, some cross-device data is better than no cross-device data!
- Custom Dimensions/Metrics. Sounds less exciting than the others, but this is actually really impressive. Imagine being able to capture information like gender when users fill out their profile and then making a report using gender as a dimension. Or think about being able to import external data like college applications and making an “Applications” metric to compare to your other data. I am super excited about this new feature!
- Attribution Modeling. This has already been available in Google Analytics Premium for a while, but the big announcement was that it will now be available on standard Google Analytics. Sign up for the beta!
Key thoughts for the day:
- Stop thinking about data as being about visits – instead, focus on users.
- Last year, the big quote was “Web analytics is not web site analytics!” This year, the quote has been updated to “It’s Google Analytics, not Google Web Analytics!” This is an interesting indicator of how analytics keeps stretching boundaries further and further.
- Attribution is important. (Duh.) And it’s going to keep getting bigger.
Today is Day 2, the final day of the summit. I will try to tweet anything that I can via @tara_dunn but keep in mind that all announcements today are private so there may not be much I can share. Anything you really want to know from the summit while I am here? Leave a comment or ask me on Twitter!
