Google Airs TV Ad During Super Bowl!

Last night, google aired a TV Ad during the super bowl event, known to be one of the most expensive ad spaces out there. While the actual investment is high – it is less interesting than the ‘sub text’ which clearly states and presents google to become a much more “main stream” business and not much different than other mega-brands such as Coke and others – pushing its brand and investing heavily in its positioning.

Moreover, the ad itself is very “google” – it simply presents a chain of events, needs, wants, inspirations and dilemma people may occur, and how google easily helps us get where we want, do what we want, understand our world, our partners in life a bit better.

So here goes:

For More Info:

http://www.searchengineland.com/hell-freezes-over-google-airs-super-bowl-a-35476

http://www.sportingnews.com/blog/the_sporting_blog/entry/view/54867/the_best_and_worst_super_bowl_commercials

Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent. Google Analytics has Done it Again!

Google Analytics

It has been real hard to keep secret for the last weeks where I had those new features and could not share with anyone, and is somewhat “liberating” to finally have the chance to review the new version of Google Analytics being announced today.

Google, as Google, usually do not “announce” new features. What happens is you either find smth in their blog, or you simply log in to your account and you find some nifty new tools and gadgets. This is in their DNA and is part of the magic, at least in my opinion.

Today’s news: Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent

With a bundle of new features, Google Analytics includes more powerful
reporting capabilities, provides greater customization options, and
adds an innovative Intelligence engine to drive smarter data
insights. These capabilities help customers better understand visitor
interaction with their websites and make smarter, more informed
decisions for their businesses.

POWERFUL #1: Google Analytics Goals 2.0

Don’t you just hate it when you need more than 4 goals per profile? No more!
Now you can setup up to 20 goals per profile split to 4 sub-sets of 5.
More over, you are no longer tied to define a goal by a visitor who reached a certain page – If your website is trying to measure engagement, you can define goal for users who reached a certain threshold of pages/visit or time on site!

google analytics new goals

google analytics new goal setup

Powerful #2: Expanded Mobile Reporting:

Google Analytics now tracks mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices. Mobile app developers can understand how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used. For Android-based applications, engagement can be tied back to ad campaigns. Developers can see which ads drove downloads and then app usage and engagement.

In addition, for customers with a mobile website, Google Analytics can now track traffic to mobile sites from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript. In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Powerful #3: Advanced Analysis Features

Google Analytics provides an arsenal of power tools you can use to perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools. Using Secondary Dimensions, you can view multiple levels and combinations of data side by side instead of having to drill down into each level.

google analytics secondary dimensions

Secondary Dimensions are super useful, and enable to drill down data and cross reference it.
In the example above, we are looking at keywords then comparing them with the different geographic locations to find insights on the actual placements and users who arrived at the web site using those keywords.
You can then use the Pivoting feature to cross-tabulate two different metrics with two different dimensions. In the example below trying to match between organic keywords and the correlated search engines:

google analytics pivot tables

Advanced Table Filtering allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions and combination. In the example below, I’m trying to exclude those “bad” visits with 90%+ bounce rate and to look only at the quality traffic. You can save, edit and reuse your advanced filters

google analytics advanced table filtering

Unique Visitors as a new metric in Custom Reports: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment in a Custom Report.

Flexible #1: Multiple Custom Variables:

Organizations require flexible analytics tools that can meet their unique reporting needs. With the following features, Google Analytics adds powerful customization capabilities to meet those demands.

We are starting to release Multiple Custom Variables over the next few months. Custom Variables gives power-users the flexibility to customize Google Analytics tracking to collect the unique site data most important to their business. With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into trackable segments.
Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently.
For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).

Flexible #2: Share Segments and Custom Report Templates

In addition to the ability to create Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, you now have greater control over administering and sharing your customizations. Simply share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account. You can also select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.

google analytics share segments and custom reports

INTELLIGENT – The Tip of the Iceberg!

Well, first time I saw Intelligence reports, I had this funny smile all day long. Sometimes, you see that no matter how smart and sophisticated you think you can be, no matter how deep you will analyze, dig in the piles of raw data and reports – there will be a day when you will wake up and a click of a button will give it all to you at once. Google Analytics intelligence is one of those things.

Highly Intelligent #1: Automatic Analytics Intelligence:

New “Intelligence” reports provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your
site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.
It is a part of the initial release of an algorithmic driven intelligence engine.

google analytics intelligence automatic alerts

google analytics intelligence automatic alerts detail
For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday. Instead of having to monitor reports and mine through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business.

Highly Intelligent #2: Custom Analytics Intelligence:

Custom Alerts: Customers can create custom alerts to tell Google Analytics what to watch out for. They can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics, and be notified by email or in the user interface when the changes occur.

google analytics intelligence custom alert setup

To summarize this post – Google has done it again, they are presenting features and capabilities previously available only with super expensive and complex software suites, enabling web marketers and analysts of all sizes to enjoy the beauty of the web – the ability to measure, quantify, analyze and IMPROVE each and every single action.

For more information:

Google Analytics Channel @ YouTube

Google Analytics Official Announcement

E-Nor Review of the new features

Review @ Search Engine Land

(and if this post wasn’t clear enough – I simply love it!)

View-through conversion reporting on the Google Content Network

Last year we’ve written in our company blog about view through metrics, and apparently Google has listened 🙂 Last few days I discovered a cool new column in my Google AdWords panel called “view through conversions“.

These conversions, are, as Google states on their blog conversions which occurred on the target web site within 30 days of a display ad impression, in the content network. Yes, you are reading correctly – Google is reporting on conversions which occurred due to an Impression, not a Click.

This is simply HUGE.

Running display campaigns usually brings lower conversion rate and higher acquisition costs than search campaigns (except from very specific verticals). This does not mean that display does not work, it simply means that search is more goal oriented and that the display activities are geared more towards awareness and reach, and usually contribue to increase the search volume.

For example- An airline would launch a special sale on their website, and promote that sale in many online channels. In our standard conversion attribution models, we will see that the display campaigns show impression, clicks and very little to no sales at all.

However, the search volume (impressions, clicks, conversions) would amazingly soar. The soar in searches and search based conversions is much related to the fact that users see the ads in the diaply formats, assimilate the message and then when the time is right, they would search for the product or the brand, and convert.

View through conversions will let us, as campaign managers optimize our media plan not only by those display outlets which convert directly, but those which influence the audience to convert.

As website in the google content network may send clicks and lack in conversion rate or acquisition cost – but influence with its impressions on latent sales which may arrive due to direct traffic, search, email campaigns etc.

I highly recommend adding this metric to your KPI list.

Ophir

Google AdWords Did it again! Bid like a pro with the bid simulator – Coooool

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share something I found to be very useful and could be somewhat revolutionary to Google AdWords bud management.

Google Released their new “bid simulator” a few days ago, a super-cute tool which helps us find that sweet-spot where the keyword bid would be high enough to get the traffic and low enough not to waste all the budget.

The actual news here, is that Google is now revealing the very common question my colleagues ask – How much to raise/decrease the bid? Is X% enough? Well up until now it was mainly experience and guesswork – but Google is now showing us how much X% raising the bid will affect our traffic and how much Z% decreasing the bid would hurt the traffic (Hint: Sometimes you can cut the bid by 50% and not lose a single click, other times you can increase the bid 400% and win just a few more clicks).

Google’s official email describes the new feature herein:

Have you ever wondered how many impressions or clicks you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid? Until now, finding the right bid has typically involved a lot of trial and error.

The bid simulator, launched today, is a feature of the new AdWords interface that shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. While it can’t predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids.

Using data from the past seven days, the bid simulator re-calculates the number of impressions for which your ad could have shown had you chosen a different maximum CPC, how many clicks your ad could have gotten for those impressions and how much those clicks could have cost. The feature provides increased transparency into the AdWords auction and gives you the insight to make more informed bidding decisions to meet your advertising objectives.

This simulation data can help you figure out the trade-off between click volume and cost, enabling you to answer more confidently questions such as:

 

  • How can I increase traffic to my site without raising my costs too much?
  • For which keywords should I alter my spend?

As you use bid simulator, it’s important to note that past performance does not guarantee future results. Additionally, simulations will only be provided if there is enough traffic on a given keyword to conduct a meaningful analysis. These simulations are currently available only for Google.com and the Googlesearch network.

For more information, view thebid simulator videoand visit ourhelp center.

To see data from the bid simulator, go to the ‘Keywords’ tab in your AdWords account.

Then, click on the bid simulator iconin the Max. CPC column next to the bid of any keyword you could like to see data for.

In this example, you are seeing simulations for the keyword “search email.”

Posted by Dan Friedman,Inside AdWordscrew