As a Google Analytics Partner, we have had the privilege of spending the last 2 days at the 2014 Google Analytics Summit in San Francisco. What a wonderful conference it was! Although I could write much, I wanted to summarise and highlight just 10 consistent themes of the conference.
1) Agility – Agility and speed is a weapon and some of the most important skills in business today. We must be smarter, faster, and more agile.
2) The Analytics Cycle – a) capture data, b) analyse data c) take action. Then rinse and repeat.
3) Universal Analytics – Migrating to Universal Analytics is an absolute necessity
4) GTM – Implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM) is critical to success (and efficiency)
5) Attribution – Attribution was a very strong theme throughout the whole conference and is only going to get more important. My key takeaway – if you are using ‘last click’ as your primary success metric, you are doing it wrong!
6) Enhanced eCommerce – Google launched Enhanced eCommerce publicly at this event. It is a complete rework of the ecommerce reports and now includes fantastic visualisation and more ways to take action from your data efficiently and effectively. I have played with this, and it is cool. More info and next stepshere
7) Lets get more technical – Google Analytics API use is strongly encouraged and perhaps necessary for more advanced insights
8) Upload offline/external data – There is an understanding that ‘web’ is only a portion of the story, to really understand your customers and their journey, you will need to upload external and offline data as well and combine.
9) Remarketing – Remarketing should be an ‘always-on’ tactic. Is it for you?
10) Segmentation – With all of the above, averages are pretty useless. Segmenting data is very powerful and is the best way to find gold and act according to the behaviour and needs of each segment.
Certainly there is something for all of us to work on, and I am very excited by the possibilities Google Analytics will bring as they continually roll out new features. You can view the official Google Analytics blog here
Always happy to talk through any of the above in more detail.