Are You Aware of These Google Analytics Changes?

As Google integrates machine learning and AI into each of its products, they aim to deliver better data that informs your marketing across multiple channels. Google’s recent enhancements and updates to its analytics platform will give marketers deeper insight into their marketing campaigns.

These enhancements will give you a better understanding of individual customers and have a positive impact on your search marketing analysis.

Here are four of the latest updates to Google Analytics:

User-Level Data

Google Analytics has adapted its standard report dashboard to give you more insight into behavior at the user level. Instead of focusing broadly on sessions, Google has shifted their default positioning to look deeper into individual users and sessions. This user-focused reorientation should allow for greater data accuracy when used with other features like the Cohort Analysis. You’ll get a clearer idea of how groups of users come to your website and interact with it.

Lifetime Data

The new Google User Explorer lets marketers dig into the session level to observe user behavior. This new feature draws valuable data from a user’s cookie lifetime. Lifetime metrics and dimensions, such as past and present behaviors and predicted future ones, display at the individual user level in the dashboard.

You can use this information to scale performance and show patterns across large sets of clients. For greater efficiency, consider grouping similar users together to help you tailor your marketing campaigns and personalize messaging. That way, you can find current customers with a high projected lifetime value to help maximize your revenues. This strategy works well for prospecting and remarketing.

Audience Creation

Before now, the only choice you had for creating an audience was to publish it to Google Ads. While helpful for remarketing purposes, you were unable to create an audience report in Google Analytics.

Now, Google Analytics prioritizes your audience, letting you compare your marketing campaign’s performance across different segments. For example, if you create an audience for customers who bought four times or more in the last six months, you can compare that group with visitors who consume content but never buy.

You can create audiences around behaviors that you want to target and learn more about their interactions. This process helps you align AdWords with Google Analytics to find trends within specific customer groups to target with your AdWords campaigns.

Conversion Prediction

When you analyze your website’s historical data, you can find and use patterns in the behavior of high-value customers to determine possible outcomes. Now, Google Analytics can help you examine recent site visitors and predict which of them will have the highest probability of converting. While you could do this in the past through Google Analytics Premium, the standard Google Analytics platform now allows everyone to access predictive analytics about users and customers.

Savvy marketers can use the updated platform to highlight the quality of traffic generated by marketing campaigns. Look for the new metric, “Average % Conversion Probability,” in conversion reports to help you create remarketing lists targeting users with a high probability of buying and reach them through your AdWords campaigns.

Google is also enhancing conversion predictions by adapting and adopting machine learning capabilities to create a deeper understanding of individual users’ behavior and action on the internet. These predictive analytics can be profitable for marketers. Use the new Google Analytics to improve your understanding of individual users and boost your search engine marketing efforts to new heights.

Questions about Google Analytics? Contact us; we’re happy to help.