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Google Analytics API Case Study: Dolby Laboratories automates analytics reporting with Shufflepoint

posted by GoogleAnalytics 4:05 PM
Friday, March 5, 2010
We’re really excited to see how companies can grow their businesses around the Google Analytics API. Today, we’re publishing a case study that illustrates how Shufflepoint, Inc. has used the Google Analytics API to build an innovative product offering which has helped Dolby Laboratories become more productive.
ShufflePoint uses the the API to provide enterprise integration tools, and they’ve developed a SQL-like query language for Google Analytics. Dolby Laboratories uses GAQL and other ShufflePoint tools to simplify their web analytics workflow, one that incorporates spreadsheets with complex rollups, filters, and intermediate table calculations as well as annotated presentations.
The Challenge:
“Our [analysis] process gives us a lot of flexibility between analysis and presentation,” explains Dolby’s web analyst. “But, manually consolidating site data into the spreadsheets was time and labor intensive.” To streamline the process, the team at Dolby turned to tools from ShufflePoint.
The Results:
“With GAQL and Excel Web Queries, we solved our immediate need for our reports to be updated dynamically” said Dolby. “Our team’s learning and decision making process has really sped up since engaging Shufflepoint. They improved our custom reports, which we used to do manually within Google Analytics, by combining it with the automation and flexibility of using Google Analytics’ Data API.”
A New Business Opportunity
“ShufflePoint has its roots in Excel and PowerPoint, and our capabilities here are a true differentiator in the marketplace,” says Chris Harrington, CTO at ShufflePoint. “It’s great to take something like the Google Analytics API and develop unique solutions that hit a home run for clients like Dolby. The Google Analytics Data API has opened up new possibilities for us — there are so many kinds of value-adds that you can create for companies out there. It’s a new business opportunity.
Read the whole story in our client case study site.
Here are some screenshots of the Shufflepoint product using the API.

We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it’s innovative and useful we’ll highlight it to our readers on this blog.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

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No-tags Google Analytics Integration: Pion Lite from Atomic Labs

posted by GoogleAnalytics 4:05 PM
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
We occasionally see a particularly inspiring integration with Google Analytics. Our latest source of inspiration comes from a product called Pion Lite by Atomic Labs. Pion Lite collects your traffic data and populates your Google Analytics reports — without using Google Analytics page tags. Atomic Labs offers Pion Lite free to Google Analytics users.
Pion Lite passively “listens” to all of the network traffic between web servers and visitors. This approach reduces the overhead traditionally required to capture visitor data with page tags, and also provides complete data about site visitors including those using mobile devices and RSS readers.
Pion collects analytics information within a website’s data center and removes all personally identifiable information (such as visitor cookies and IP addresses) before sending the data to Google Analytics. This new, privacy-friendly approach to web analytics data capture gives marketers the information they need without the risk of privacy violations.

Pion 3.0 includes a new setup wizard that makes it easy for new users to get up and running with Google Analytics by just answering a few questions. Pion talks directly with Google Analytics to populate your reports, offers customizable data capture, real-time data processing and integration, and supports advanced Google Analytics features such as custom variables and events, ecommerce and campaign tracking.
If you’re attending SMX on Wednesday, you’ll have a chance to learn about Pion Lite in person. Atomic Labs CEO Mike Dickey and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Senior Product Manager, will be giving back-to-back presentations at the SMX Expo starting at 1:20pm on Wednesday, March 3rd.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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Sharing Our Favorite Custom Segments

posted by GoogleAnalytics 1:05 PM
Friday, February 26, 2010
Analysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. But, looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. Different types of visitors – whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on – behave very differently and have vastly different expectations. The ability to understand what each of them wants, and how to cater to them, is important towards building a successful online presence.
Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your audience with advanced segments. Google Analytics includes a number of predefined advanced segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors, iphone users) that you can take advantage of immediately. More importantly, however, you can create custom advanced segments tailored to your own specific needs.
One of the new Google Analytics features announced in October is the ability to share custom advanced segments with other users across accounts. Using this feature, I’ll share links to my favorite custom segments that you can use too. Head over to the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog to learn more and for links to the following segments.
* Bounced visits
* Visits that dropped out of the funnel
* Brand keyword visits
* Brand keyword (organic) visits
* Brand keyword (paid) visits
* Non-brand keyword visits
* Non-brand (organic) visits
* Non-brand (paid) visits
* Visits from Country X
* First-time buy visits
* Return visit buys

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer

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Master Class In Singapore And Kuala Lumpur

posted by GoogleAnalytics 1:05 PM
Thursday, February 25, 2010

Are you ready for a Google Analytics Master class, happening Tuesday, 9 March in Singapore and again on Thursday March 11 in Kuala Lumpur? We bet you are, and we bet, as seekers of data and truth, you ask, what makes it a Master class? And why so far away from Mountain View, CA?

Well, you know how proud we are of how global Google Analytics has become. But this is a special class because it’s run by the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer team in Southeast Asia, spearheaded by the excellent Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia, who manages the Southeast Asia blog. He’s an engineer’s engineer, and has organized a great day of sessions, including a keynote by Beth Liebert, Google Analytics product manager here in Mountain View who led the Google Analytics Intelligence launch, among other great features.
There will be a session on Website Optimizer of course, and a full day of talks by both specialists on the Google team both from here in Mountain View and also from Southeast Asia, as well as local partners who have great case studies from the region and techniques anyone can, and should, use.

Take a look at the agenda and register if you’re in the area. It will be worth the time.
  • Singapore: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/singapore
  • Kuala Lumpur: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/malaysia

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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​Upcoming System Upgrade for Greater Scalability & Reliability

posted by GoogleAnalytics 7:05 PM
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
​Within the next two weeks, Google Analytics will be performing a system upgrade. This upgrade is to further increase the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics to meet the demand of an increasing number of enterprises using Google Analytics. Rest assured your website traffic data will be unaffected and there will be no interruption to data collection or processing. All reports will be available and accessible to users. However, for some limited hours, users will not be able to perform administrative account actions such as opening new accounts, creating or modifying profiles, setting up filters and goals, managing user access, etc. The specific system upgrade times will be posted in the Google Analytics administrative interface. If you anticipate a need to make account changes during the next two weeks we encourage you to make them as soon as possible to ensure smooth operations during the system upgrade.
We are proud to see the continued growth in Google Analytics and are committed to delivering the unparalled reliability and scalability that users have come to expect from products running on Google’s globally renowned infrastructure.
P.S. Google Website Optimizer will also be undergoing a system upgrade. All running experiments will continue to run and collect data. However users will be unable to create or modify experiments. Read more on the Website Optimizer blog.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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Web Analytics TV Episode #6 with Avinash and Nick

posted by GoogleAnalytics 7:05 PM
Tuesday, February 23, 2010

This is the sixth edition of Web Analytics TV with with a dash of Nick and Nash! In this series you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them! And, here is the list of last weeks questions.

We love hearing from you and thank all the folks who rated last weeks comments.

In this episode we discuss:

  • What you can do if you get spammed pageviews in your Analytics Account.
  • How to collect ecommerce tracking variables on 3rd party shopping carts.
  • Issues with maintaining campaign information with 3rd party shopping carts.
  • How do links from competitors show up in your referring sources site?
  • How to find Singapore in the Google Analytics map overlay.
  • How to see referring URLs in the campaign report.
  • How Google Analytics treats conversions from multiple sources in the same visit.
  • Why certain referrals like search can have a number of pageviews but 0 visits.
  • Computing page influence to conversion and the Google Analytics $Index metric.
  • How events effect and sometimes lower the bounce rate.

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

If you found this helpful, we’d love to hear your comments.

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer them in a couple of weeks with yet another Nick and Nash video.

Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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Powerful, Flexible, Secure and now approved by the US Federal Government

posted by GoogleAnalytics 7:05 PM
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

This week, the US federal General Services Administration (GSA) has approved listing Google Analytics in its apps.gov web site, which is a place for government agencies and services to find approved cloud computing applications. It’s goal is to drive innovation and adoption of cloud-based apps in the government, and Google and the GSA have worked together to ensure that Google Analytics is compatible with the needs of US Federal agencies (e.g., Department of Homeland Security, NASA, FCC, and others).

We are very proud of and humbled by this listing and excited by the potential opportunities to serve US federal agencies and help them monitor and improve their website experiences. We understand that working with US Federal agencies includes a responsibility to protect our users and we would like to take this opportunity to further explain how seriously Google Analytics takes data security and protecting data privacy for our users, as detailed in our Terms of Service.
As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Privacy and security are core elements of Google’s design and development processes, and we’re proud to pass that benefit on to users of Google Analytics. Google’s security philosophy is outlined here, and Google’s commitment to protecting the information stored on its computer systems is outlined in the Google Code of Conduct.

We’re gratified that the US Federal GSA has approved the listing of Google Analytics in its apps.gov site. We will continue to work hard to ensure that we earn this approval in the years ahead.

Posted by Phil Mui, Sr. Product Manager, Google Analytics

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Upcoming Google Analytics Workshop

posted by GoogleAnalytics 1:05 PM
Monday, February 8, 2010

Feras Alhlou, president and principal consultant of E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will be conducting a Google Analytics workshop at SMX West on March 5, called “Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing & Business.” Register here and get 10% off with this discount code: GA@SMX

Many organizations, large and small, struggle to go beyond basic web metrics of visitor counts and pageview volumes. In this workshop, senior consultant Feras Alhlou will walk you through what you need in order to drive your online marketing strategy ahead of your competition. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on Feras‘ workshops in the past, and it was the one of the main reasons we were so proud when E-Nor in the Bay Area joined our Google Analytics Authorized Consultant network. His clear, engaging and energetic teaching style will make the day fly by as you learn. It’s time well spent.

Workshop Agenda

Morning Session – Marketer/Business Focus – Strategy & Planning

  • Web Analytics Strategy – approach, opportunities and limitations
  • How It Works – overview, accuracy and privacy implications, integrating with other data
  • Practical – understanding the user interface
  • Advanced Features Overview – clever stuff you can do with Google Analytics

Afternoon Session – Webmaster/Technical Focus – Implementation

  • Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properly
  • External Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email, banner campaigns
  • Reporting – dashboards & insights
  • Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights
The Google Analytics team will also be at SMX West, and we’ll blog about that in the near future. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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Quick Survey on the Help Center

posted by GoogleAnalytics 10:05 PM
Thursday, February 4, 2010

We’re always looking for ways to improve Google Analytics – not just the product itself, but also the ways in which we provide information about the product. So help us help you – take a minute to fill out this quick survey on our Help Center, and let us know what we can improve!

Posted by the Google Analytics Writing Team

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Web Analytics TV #5 with Avinash and Nick

posted by GoogleAnalytics 10:05 AM
Tuesday, February 2, 2010

This is the fifth installment in our Web Analytics TV series in which you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

Here is the list of this week’s questions. You all are keeping us on our toes!

In this episode we discuss:

  • Tracking online conversions and success for small, local, businesses
  • Tracking the number of times a visitor converts in one visit
  • How the e-commerce conversion rate can be greater than 100%
  • How you can change the duration of Google Analytics campaigns
  • How you can differentiate between paid and organic search in Google Analytics
  • What is the recommended % balance between branded and category terms
  • Why is time spent 0 for visits with 1 page/visit
  • Why unique visitor numbers are higher than visits
  • How visits and unique pageviews are calculated
  • Would survey and qualitative help measure “engagement” ?
  • How to best track mailto: links on your site
  • What are the best practices for using virtual pageviews, event tracking and custom variables?
  • How to see dimensions and metrics by location
  • Where to find custom variables reports Google Analytics

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

Now to a special sidebar with our friend Michael:
Michael, we realized that we didn’t actually answer your answer on why unique visitor numbers are higher than visits for a particular page. The real answer is that visits are only incremented for the first hit (pageview, event, transaction, etc..) of a visit whereas unique visitor is increment for each page in the visit. So say a visitor visits pages /foo and /bar in that order. Only /foo would get one visit, and both /foo and /bar would each get one visitor.

Hope that makes sense :)

We hope you found episode helpful, and we’d love to hear your comments and have your questions. Please use the comment form below.

In case you missed them, here are our previous videos:

Episode #1
Episode #2
Episode #3
Episode #4

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with another video. We can’t wait!

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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