Analytics Expert Blog

As part of our mission to make the web faster, Google Analytics provides Site Speed reports to analyze your site’s page load times. To help you measure and diagnose the speed of your pages in a finer grain, we’re happy to extend the collection of Site Speed reports in Google Analytics with User Timings.

With User Timings, you can track and visualize user defined custom timings about websites. The report shows the execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track. This can include measuring how quickly specific images and/or resources load, how long it takes for your site to respond to specific button clicks, timings for AJAX actions before and after onLoad event, etc. User timings will not alter your pageview count, hence,  makes it the preferred method for tracking a variety of timings for actions in your site.

To collect User Timings data, you’ll need to add JavaScript timing code to the interactions you want to track using the new _trackTiming API included in ga.js (version 5.2.6+) for reporting custom timings. This API allows you to track timings of visitor actions that don’t correspond directly to pageviews (like Event Tracking).  User timings are defined using a set of Categories, Variables, and optional Labels for better organization. You can create various categories and track several timings for each of these categories. Please refer to the developers guide for more details about the _trackTiming API.

Here are some sample use cases for User Timings

• To track timings for AJAX actions before and after onLoad event. 
• A site can have their own definition of “User Perceived Load Time”, which can be recorded and tracked with user timings.  As an example, news websites can record time for showing the above fold content as their main metric instead of onLoad time. 
• Detailed performance measurement and optimization of sub components on a page, such as time to load all images, CSS or Javascript, download PDF files and time it takes to upload a file.

Want to check out User Timings Report in your account?
Go to the content section and click the User Timings report under Content section. There are three tabs within the User Timings report for you to review: Explorer, Performance, & Map Overlay. Each provides a slightly different view of user timings reported.

The Explorer tab on the User Timings report shows the following metrics by Timing Category, Timing Variable, or Timing Label (all of which you define in your timing code).

• Avg. User Timing—the average amount of time (in seconds) it takes for the timed code to execute
• User Timing Sample—the number of samples taken

The Explorer tab also provides controls that you can use to change the tabular data. For example, you can choose a secondary dimension—such as browser— to get an idea of how speed changes by browser.

To learn more about which timings are most common for user timings, switch to the Performance tab. This tab shows timing buckets, providing you with more insight into how speed can vary for user reported timings for selected category, variable and label combinations. You may switch to Performance tab at any point of navigation in the Explorer tab, such as after drilling down on a specific category and variable, to visualize distribution of user reported timings.  The bucket boundaries for histograms in Performance Tab are chosen to be flexible so that users can analyze data at low values ranging from 10 milliseconds granularity to 1 minute granularity with addition of sub-bucketing for further analysis.

The Map Overlay tab provides a view of your site speed experienced by users in different geographical regions (cities, countries, continents).

-  Satish Kambala & Mustafa M. Tikir, Google Analytics team

The following is a guest post contributed by Daniel Waisberg, Owner of Conversion Journey, a Google Analytics Certified Partner, and Founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement and Optimization portal.


Google Analytics has recently launched a new set of reports called Social reports, which can be used to analyze on-site and off-site interactions with social networks in reference to your own website content. The reports’ ultimate goal is to enable brands to measure the return on investment for social media activities and make more accurate, data-driven decisions about social. 

1. Page Analytics: leads to more information regarding traffic that was resulted from the post.
2. View Ripple: leads to the post Ripple, an interactive visualization of the public shares of the post
3. View Page: leads to the website page that was shared
4. View Activity: leads to the actual publicly-shared post on Google+ 

Please join us next Thursday for a webinar on marketing attribution featuring Bill Kee, our Product Manager for Attribution, and Stefan Tornquist, VP for Research at Econsultancy.

Stefan will talk about insights from the recent Attribution whitepaper by Econsultancy and Google Analytics, and Bill will discuss Google’s approach to attribution and some of the tools we offer, including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. Plus, he’ll demo the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium.

We’ll also provide a few tips for how to get started with attribution. This webinar will be the first in a series on attribution — so please stay tuned for future installments!

Date: Thursday, April 26
Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET
Click here to register

We hope you’ll be able to join the live webinar, but for those who can’t make it, we’ll be sharing a recording after the event.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

The first step in optimizing any process is to establish and obtain an accurate set of measurement data. In the context of optimizing the user experience on the web, it means that we need to measure the speed of a page as seen by your real users: users network, device type and speed, geographic location, cache sizes, and a dozen other factors all come into play. 

Mobile internet is growing at an incredible rate and as we can see from the data above, mobile experience is about 1.5x slower than desktop experience. That’s a very big difference, and that is even taking into account that many popular sites are already optimizing for the mobile visitor: fewer resources, smaller resources, and smarter caching strategies.

The following interactive world map presents the page load times in seconds for the complete list of countries with enough samples for accurate measurement:

Finally, let’s take a look at relative page speeds across some of the popular verticals:




 

How does your site stack up?

Posted by Mustafa Tikir and Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team

Buenos dias analistas!

• What’s New & Fantastic in Google Analytics
• Web Analytics Measurement Planning
• Tag Management for Google Analytics
• Separate Tracks for Business & Strategy, Analysis & Optimization, and Technical Aspects
• Panels, Q&A sessions, and Help Desk breaks

Posted by Jesse Nichols, Google Analytics team

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics team

Today, we’re sharing some research on marketing attribution that we conducted in partnership with Econsultancy, a leading digital market research firm. The insights — Marketing Attribution: Valuing the Customer Journey — provide a snapshot of how marketers and agencies are conducting attribution, the impact it has, and the barriers holding them back.

If you’re not familiar with digital attribution, it’s about distributing credit to all of the elements of your digital marketing program, so you can gauge the impact of customer marketing interactions on your sales results and make more accurate investment decisions. Here are a few snippets from the report that we found interesting:

It’s still a new craft, but early results show positive impact
Although digital attribution is still relatively new — 83% of practitioners we surveyed have been using it for less than 2 years — it clearly has a positive impact on businesses that employ it. 72% agree that it leads to better budget allocations, 63% gained a better understanding of how digital channels work together, and 58% had clearer insights into their audience: 

Last click attribution dominates; agencies are leading the way in experimentation
Most digital marketers run multiple campaigns, each with different strategies and objectives. For instance, display campaigns that are designed to generate awareness will have a different impact on sales than paid search campaigns designed to bring in buyers. Yet most marketers today still use attribution models that do not account for these differences in strategy. Although only 14% of respondents consider “last click” attribution to be “very effective,” it remains common; most likely because marketers haven’t yet found or mastered the right attribution tools. Digital marketing agencies have done more with sophisticated attribution methods and technologies:

Robust attribution leads to confident digital decisions
For organizations that use attribution, it often leads to greater confidence in marketing choices: if you know the impact of your programs, it’s easier to budget for them. As one online retailer commented, “Attribution was the missing piece to our campaign analysis. Now we don’t run a campaign without learning something about how our marketing affects the buying cycle, and then testing to see whether it applies in the long run.”

Performing marketing attribution with Google
Here at Google we spend our time building intuitive tools to make measurement easier, so that you can really use your data to make smarter decisions. That’s why we provide several important tools for marketing attribution, including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. And check out our Attribution Modeling tool in Google Analytics Premium, which includes five standard attribution models plus a custom model builder, so you can create and customize attribution models in minutes, and see data instantly. Learn more in our Attribution Playbook.

Join us for an Attribution Hangout
If you’re available this Friday, April 6, at 9:00am PDT, please join Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, and Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate, for a Google+ Hangout. Bill will talk about the research and give a demo of the Attribution tool in Google Analytics Premium, as well as discussing Multi-Channel Funnels and AdWords Search Funnels, two complementary features.

To watch the Hangout on Air, tune into Justin’s Google+ Page on Friday. If you have a question that you would like us to discuss, please enter it in this this form — and we’ll invite five of you to join the Hangout live to ask your questions.

We look forward to seeing you at the Hangout on Friday!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

The new Google Analytics has come a long way since it was first unveiled last March. Between multi-channel funnels, real time, flow visualization, premium, and a whole host of other incredible features, it is hard to believe that only a year has gone by.

We are excited to announce that Analytics reports can now be automatically sent to yourself or other members of your team from within the new Google Analytics. These reports can be set up to email at a variety of regularly scheduled times, including daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Reports can also be exported to PDF allowing you to save or share the insights you’ve found using Google Analytics.

Where to find Email and PDF export
Look in the newly-redesigned Utility Bar located at the top of your favorite reports for Email and PDF Export options:

In order to provide maximum flexibility, this functionality is available on standard reports, custom reports, and dashboards. Clicking on the “Email” button on a dashboard pulls up the same email scheduling dialog as in standard reports and offers the same feature set:

Why “beta”?
For those who have used the email scheduler in the old interface, this new emailer system operates independently and has enhancements in reliability and ease of use. We are putting the finishing touches on the look and feel of exported reports, and anticipate that these will be finalized soon.

Part of the transition to the new emailing system is an opportunity to “reset” your scheduled emails. Consider which scheduled emails have been most helpful and be sure to recreate those in the new interface. The new Google Analytics has some reporting differences and additional metrics that you may want to take advantage of when drafting new scheduled emails. We will provide ample notice before scheduled emails from the old Google Analytics are sunset later this year.

We would love to hear how the release of these features helps you to be efficient and derive valuable insights. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Happy exporting!

- Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team

…and yes, this is our April Fools’ Day joke.

There are more ways now to consume your favorite television shows, movies, and on demand content than ever before. People are turning to their smartphones, tablets, and Internet connected TV’s to watch what they want, when they want it. For broadcasters, agencies, and advertisers the question is how are users engaging with this media and how can it be monetized?

This measurement opportunity is what drove TV App Agency to be founded in 2011. The London-based software company designed a software application that works across a variety of viewing devices to help deliver on-demand media. They turned to Google Analytics as the platform to help them measure and analyze their data.

Why turn to Google Analytics?
TV App Agency opted to use Google Analytics’ server side APIs, which were more easily compatible with the on-demand media environment than JavaScript APIs. They were able to use their own in-house knowledge from previous mobile development to come up with a tagging strategy that highlighted exactly the data that mattered most to their business model. Learn more by reading the full case study.

“We are now able to track which adverts are being played and get an idea of which functions in apps are being used. Plus, the real-time reports show when people are actually using these apps.”
                          Bruno Pereira, co-founder of TV App Agency

- The Google Analytics team