Google made several announcements around analytics at SMX East in New York City on Wednesday.
In a keynote discussion and blog post, Babak Pahlavan, senior director of product management for analytics solutions and measurement at Google, explained a number of new features and product tests available for both the free and paid versions of Google’s analytics suite.
Here’s a look at what’s coming.
Free version of Optimize 360
Google introduced a set of measurement products with the Analytics 360 Suite in March. Shortly thereafter, the company released a beta version of its new reporting solution, Data Studio. Now comes the free version, also in beta, of Optimize 360. Google Optimize is a landing page testing and optimization tool that integrates directly with Google Analytics. Users can request an invite to the beta starting today.
Report templates in Data Studio
Google rolled out a free version of Data Studio 360 in beta shortly after the release of Google Analytics 360 Suite. That release was for the US only, however. On Wednesday, Google announced the free Data Studio is now available globally.
New report templates will also be available in Google Data Studio starting next month. The templates will make it that much easier to start building and sharing reports that incorporate a variety of data sources, including Google Analytics, AdWords, Google Sheets and more.
Session quality score
A new metric called session quality score will soon be available in beta in both the free and paid versions of Google Analytics. Many Analytics users have created Goals aimed at capturing sessions that would seem to show signs of high consideration or purchase intent by looking at metrics like average session duration, certain pages visited, number of pages visited and more.
The new session quality score built in to Analytics uses machine learning to “predict the likelihood of a visitor making a transaction (purchase) on your site or app.” The metric then makes it possible to remarket to those visitors deemed high-value.
This is just one more way Google is incorporating machine learning into its products. Quality session score follows on the introduction of Smart Goals, designed for site owners that don’t have conversion tracking set up or don’t capture enough e-commerce conversion data to be used for ad optimization. In fact, session quality score surfaces the technology that underpins Smart Goals.
Other examples of incorporating machine learning include the recent addition of automated insights in the Google Analytics app and machine learning-driven targeting in the recent update of Universal App Campaigns that aims to show ads to users more likely to download advertisers’ apps.
Tag Manager integrations with 20 more data sources
Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 users will be happy to see the addition of 20 new integrations with data sources like Quantcast, Twitter, Bing, Nielsen and others.
Rather than having to use the custom HTML tag type to add the tracking pixels for these services, marketers will be able to select the tag template from the growing list of integrations. Users will start to see the new tag templates become available over the next couple of weeks.
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