Google held their first ever Google Analytics Premium Summit in London on December 2nd. Demonstrating the increased popularity of GAP they managed to gather 100 Premium customer and 30 premium partners from across Europe. A half day event, Google had several topics on the agenda. – eCapacity were represented by James Muldoon from the London office and Mads Vangkilde from the Copenhagen office.
The agenda, in essence aimed at highlighting the benefits and strong suites of Google Analytics, actually Universal Analytics and Google Analytics Premium. To do so, keynotes and speakers covered the advancements in Universal Analytics, Doubleclick integration via Premium, attribution modelling and storytelling via data. Panel discussions debated enhanced ecommerce and Big Query integration. The encompassing headline for these topics was “Access, Analysis and Delivery”.
Universal Analytics
Deepak Aujla, from Google, covered Universal Analytics with great passion and enthusiasm. Having worked as an integration specialist, Deepak Aujla conveyed, with great confidence, some of the key benefits of Universal (not limited to Premium customers!) such as the newly released Bot & Spider filter, the possibility to treat and view organic traffic from brand search keywords as direct traffic and the addition of 200 views per property. Universal Analytics now allows 400 views per Property and 200 properties per account leveraging up to 80.000 views per account. More classic features of Universal Analytics such as custom data import (measurement protocols) and the opportunity to implement and use enhanced ecommerce were also highlighted. A number of new features that are still being tested (and therefore cannot be mentioned here) were listed. There is little doubt that Universal Analytics – compared to Google Analytics – marks a substantial change in the platform.
Targeting with Doubleclick integration
The Doubleclick integration (Doubleclick being Googles adserving platform) with Google Analytics Premium was presented by Oliver Marlow-Thomas. The emphasis here was less on the Doubleclick platform itself, rather on the benefits for the Premium platform via this integration. The notion of Mr. Grey was introduced. An analogy for the unknown (unrecognized) visitor to a given websites. The point being raised that by harnessing the Doubleclick integration with Google Analytics Premium, Mr. Grey could soon become Mr. Orange or Miss Red with different distinctions, behavioural patterns and thereby the target of differentiated marketing efforts – some to be left alone, some to be instilled trust in the brand and others to be invested in. Oliver also demonstrated nice practical use of this employed by Parlophone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqmfM5y7zB4) to advertise Gabrielle Aplin’s new album release.
Data driven attribution with Premium
Oliver Borm, also from Google, gave an insightful presentation on attribution modelling. Both covering the fundamentals and prerequisites of attribution modelling, but soon launching into the model inherent in the Google Analytics Premium platform. Advocating data driven attribution, Oliver Borm spoke on the conceptual model behind the Premium algorithm for attribution modelling. Moreover, the integration of cross device and cross-channel data for attribution modelling was also demonstrated – or rather performed. An intriguing and inspirational walk-through of attribution modelling.
Wiggle: Case and discussion
The panel discussion on enhanced ecommerce saw Anna Lewis from Wiggle take the stage. A long standing user and advocate of Google Analytics had little luck in concealing her enthusiasm for the enhancements provided by enhanced ecommerce. In essence, she dismissed the existing goal funnel report completely for the new conversion funnel. That enhanced ecommerce gave way for a whole new set of analytical application on cart additions, refunds, cart to conversion analysis etc. has been mentioned before, but Anna Lewis talked also on the value of applying these analysis and the difficulty of implementing this new feature set with no previous history of complex ecommerce tracking. A candid and exciting discussion.
Big data analysis with Big Query
On Big Query (BQ), the panel was comprised of both Simon Chapman from Thomas Cook and Duncan McKie from eBay. The panel quickly uncovered that BQ has a number of application opportunities. It also highlighted that both companies used BQ to leverage some of the analytical needs for easy and fast processing of enormous data sets. One company still applied their own clusters of Hadoob to crunch data. With basic SQL skills, BQ can be used by a large number of resources, thus making it widely accessible while providing unique capabilities for handling data set. And yes – it supports joints, while it is not ideal for this as it is not conceptually build for it.
The last Keynote was given by Daniel Waisberg on storytelling. More about intriguing audiences and conveying insights than analysis and reporting, Daniel managed to tell a compelling story on how to see beyond data and make data accessible for the entire organization.
Enterprise analytics with Premium
Listening to the summit contributions from a Google Analytics Premium Reseller perspective, it was confirmed that Google are serious about analytics. Looking at Forrester and other schematics of analytics platforms, Google are often depicted behind their enterprise competitors. Google are making the necessary investments to catch up however. Strikingly, Universal Analytics which is a free version of the platform entails a number of the features making it a competitive tool – apart from data sampling that is! Some would suggest that with data sampling, Universal cannot become competitive. The advancements with enhanced ecommerce and unique user ID tracking are vital steps in becoming a full-fledged competitor.
And for those, who cannot live with data sampling or live without the BQ integration, Google Analytics Premium is the tool that will remedy these shortcomings. Premium leverages all the benefits of the well-known interface of GA with the new features of Universal Analytics and the distinct features of an enterprise analytics platform via the Premium benefits.
If you want to learn more about Google Analytics Premium, Universal Analytics or any of the mentioned topics, please contact eCapacity on info@ecapacity.dk – Official Google Analytics Premium Reseller.
