Simplifying eCommerce reporting across international sites with multiple currencies

It’s quite common for organizations to have complex reporting requirements that combine multiple data sources. In these cases, an efficient way to get at Google Analytics data is to use the API. But for those without the development resources needed to access the API there are many Google Analytics Apps available that can offer a solution. The following mini case study is about Analytics Canvas, a 3rd party Google Analytics App. Analytics Canvas helped Fairmont Raffles Hotels International take a complex reporting task and make it easy.

Like most global organizations, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International has regionally operated business units. Each unit typically maintains its own reporting profile in Google Analytics. But with individual business unit profiles, how do you analyze the data across all the business units? And, how do you combine external business data with each of these Google Analytics profiles?

For Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, the answers lie in the Analytics Canvas tool from nModal. Analytics Canvas is an easy to use, drag-n-drop interface for creating data queries and transformations needed for advanced reports and dashboards. Analytics Canvas can extract data from multiple Google Analytics accounts, combine it with additional data sources, and then segment and filter the data.

Barbara Pezzi, Director Analytics & Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, uses Analytics Canvas to automate her complex reporting tasks. “We trade in over 10 different currencies on our websites. We needed to have multiple international hotels’ eCommerce data converted to a common currency in various reports, such as ‘All Traffic Sources’ and ‘Campaigns’, to analyze the overall production of each traffic channel and marketing initiative. Traditionally we would have to export data from multiple profiles and do currency conversion by hand in spreadsheets. With almost 100 hotels, the large number of profiles made it a very time consuming and potentially error prone task to get a multi-hotel, single currency report.” With Analytics Canvas, Fairmont automated this task in minutes with a single currency report for all its hotels.

Analytics Canvas was built by nModal Solutions Inc using the Google Analytics API. Here is what James Standen, the founder of nModal, has to say “The Google Analytics API is very easy to use and the full access to data makes it possible to make a very powerful query interface. So far we’ve had a great response to Analytics Canvas. People are very pleased to have greater access to their web traffic data, and we’re thrilled to hear about the interesting new applications and integrations our customers are able to do using our tool.”

The Analytics Canvas application can be found through the Google Analytics App Gallery and can be downloaded from the Analytics Canvas website.

If you’re interested in developing applications for the Google Analytics platform visit Google Analytics for Developers.

Posted by Pete Frisella, Google Analytics API team

Web Analytics TV #22 - The Automation episode

Welcome to another delightful episode of Web Analytics TV! Web Analytics TV, as you well know by now, is powered by your amazing questions. In this wonderful episode we had questions from Australia, Denmark, India, Sweden, Germany andThe Netherlands.

If you’re new to this show, our process is simple.


Step 1: You ask, or vote on, your favorite web analytics questions. Vote on next week’s questions using this Web Analytics TV Google Moderator site.

Step 2: From a secret undisclosed location at the Googleplex Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer them. :-)

In this episode we award the “Ninja of the Episode” and award it to Niklas in Sweden, for a great question about the difference between events and custom variables. Niklas, just email us and we’ll send you a signed copy of Web analytics 2.0.

OK. Here is the list of last episodes questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:

• (0:23) Best practices for rollup reporting across multiple sites (See answer below)
• (0:53) Reporting secure search in Google Analytics
• (3:27) Troubleshooting funnel navigation reports
• (4:31) Comparing using event tracking and session level custom variables.
• (6:28) Measuring how visitors who interact with a video influence conversions
• (7:35) When data in Google Analytics updated
• (9:55) Representing multiple date ranges by column
• (11:04) Best practices for tracking widgets
• (11:40) Exporting greater than 500 rows from Google Analytics
• (13:43) Comparing days to purchase by medium
• (15:20) Using multiple tracking codes on the same page (see answer below)
• (16:25) Best practices using custom variables to track multivariate test information
• (18:10) Reporting across multiple currencies in Google Analytics
• (19:10) Segmenting 'serious' visitors by loyalty and engagement metrics
• (21:32) Measuring click to call buttons in your mobile websites
• (22:45) The best and most time efficient way to put Google Analytics data into a powerPoint
• (23:47) Tracking cross-sells or up-sells on a product page
• (26:05) Tracking multiple ids or paths per page
• (26:45) Why single page website show time on site metrics
• (28:27) Using the reverse page path report for analysis
• (30:21) Do profile filters impact site search reports
• (32:39) How to get fast traffic in your reports

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• A custom report users using secure site search
• Use nextAnalytcs to extract custom views of data out of Google Analytics
• Tracking users without JavaScript using Mobile tracking snippets
• Reporting tools to simplify data access using the Google Analytics API
• A custom report comparing days to purchase by medium
• Using Analytics Canvas to report in a common currency across Google Analytics profiles
• Applying advanced segments to custom reports by Avinash (includes downloadable report)
• Google Analytics PowerPoint integration provided by Shufflepoint
• Using the new flow visualization (to replace reverse goal path analysis)
• There was one question asked which we needed to get more information. 

“What is your recommendation to simultaneously track data for a local site & having a roll-up profile to track aggregate data across all sites of a company.”

What we learned was that there are 25+ sites on different domains split across 2 business units. A simple solution is to pull out data using the API to create any rollup reports you need. Another option is to have multiple tracking codes on the same page, and have one code be the same across all the sites. That way all the data is sent into a single report which you can view.

One thing to keep in mind, is that each site will track visitors separately. So visitor numbers will not be accurate across all the sites.

So hopefully this helps you out. As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below.

This series would not be possible without your awesome questions. Please submit them on our public Google Moderator site, and while you’re there don’t forget to vote for your favorite questions.  Avinash and I will answer them in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics team

Email scheduler, PDF export, and a transition to the new Google Analytics interface

Two of the most requested features from the old version of Google Analytics that have been absent in the new interface are report email scheduling and PDF export.  We are happy to announce that both email scheduling and PDF export functionality will be the new interface in a few weeks.

Because there are significant differences between reports in the new and old versions of Google Analytics, we would like to use this opportunity to solicit your feedback regarding which scheduled email reports should be preserved in the new version. We suspect that many of you would like to use this opportunity to “reset” the number and types of scheduled Google Analytics emails. As we roll out the new email system in the coming few weeks, we encourage you to examine your existing scheduled emails and make a personal decision on whether to recreate a similar scheduled email report.

Every standard and custom report will have an email scheduling option, shown below in the report options bar:

Clicking on the “EMAIL” button pulls up the following email scheduling dialog:

(A more detailed blog post about the emailer and its new functionality will be available when the it is released in a few weeks.) The above email preview shows the work we have put into improving the email report setup over the older Analytics interface.

PDF export for every report will also be available within a few weeks.

With the upcoming release of both the new emailer & PDF download, we want to give you three months notice (as of today) that the old Google Analytics interface as well as all existing scheduled emails will be sunset starting in January 2012. We believe that the new Google Analytics interface provides significant advantages over the old version, including access to Real Time Analytics, Multi-Channel Funnels, Social Plugin Analytics, & Flow Visualization. And hope you'll find enough value in these new features that you'll switch to the new version well before then.

We welcome your feedback and comments.

- Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Optimize Engagement using AddThis and ShareThis with Analytics

Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this year we introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with any social plugin installed on your site - after all, what can be measured can also be improved and optimized!

MilkADeal started using Google Analytics earlier this year.  It is a company in Malaysia that has benefited greatly from using Social Plugin Analytics.  By using these new reports, they are able to uncover insights and create significant business process improvements. As reported in the New Straits Times, "In particular, the newly introduced social interaction tracking tool...We've been using it only in the last couple of weeks but we have seen an increase of almost 60% in social interaction visitors to our site," said Wilson Quah, founder of MilkADeal."

By optimizing the instrumentation of a few buttons on their site, MilkADeal is able to achieve better engagement, a big boost in number of high quality referrals, and better outcomes!  Today, we are happy to announce that our partners, AddThis and ShareThis, are making this social plugin analysis even easier. Just as the +1 button is automatically instrumented for you by the Google+ team, publishers using AddThis and ShareThis will now have first class integrations with Social Plugin Analytics!

“Providing real-time analytics to 10 million domains each month, we see what big data can do every day.  Integrating AddThis social signals into Google Analytics is a big win for publishers. We’re excited to contribute social sharing insight where it can be viewed in context of the GA interface.” 

Will Meyer, VP of Publisher Products, Clearspring

“At ShareThis, we work to provide our publisher network of one million+ websites with actionable analytics on their social activity. It's great to see Google paving the way for the entire industry to derive meaningful insights from the social Web and we're incredibly pleased to be a launch partner."

Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!


Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team


Update: AddToAny users will also be happy to know that their social buttons are automatically instrumented to work with event tracking and social plugin analytics!

Non-Interaction Events! Wait... What?

Hey event tracking friends, we are really excited to announce a new feature to the Analytics event tracking landscape: non-interaction events. “But wait!” you ask, “How can an event—which measures user interaction—be non-interactive? And why would I want that anyway?”

The answer is simple: sometimes you want to track passive events on your pages, like images from an automatic slide show. In this case, you want such events to be excluded from bounce rate calculations because they don’t track visitor interaction. Now, you can mark these events as non-interaction events, so that they don’t affect the bounce rate for the page.

Let’s illustrate. Suppose your home page has an image slide show that automatically serves up 5 images in rotating order. Like so:

You want to apply an event tracking call with each movement of the slider, so that you know which images are being seen most by visitors to your home page. However, there isn’t really any interaction required on the visitors’ behalf to engage with this slider. You know that in the past, event tracking for this slider would make the bounce rate for your home page drop dramatically. Better to exclude these events from bounce rate calculation, so that the bounce rate for your home page is calculated only from pageviews for the page and not events.

How do you use it? Add our new non-interactive parameter with the _trackEvent() method like this:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'ImageSlider', 'Home', 'Image1', 1, true]);

To read the details, check out our Event Tracking Guide or our Reference doc on the _trackEvent() method.

In the past, you had to trade off bounce rate signals for event tracking in some situations. Now, with the ability to designate an event as either interactive or not, you can have your events and bounces too.

We hope you think this features is as nifty as we do. Tell us some of your great applications and uses below!


Posted by Patricia Boswell, Google Analytics team

BCIT increases visitor satisfaction with 4Q Suite and the Google Analytics API

One of the great aspects of being part of the Developer Relations team for Google Analytics is that I get to work with a lot of awesome partners that build cool and successful apps using the Google Analytics API. We've decided to share these successes as a series of mini case studies highlighting a variety of Google Analytics Apps. And to start off with we have iPerceptions’ 4Q Suite.

Objective: Improve the visitor experience
British Columbia Institute of Technology wanted their website to be both functional and satisfying. But, behavioral data alone wasn’t telling them what key audiences thought about the site. BCIT knew what visitors were doing on the site but wanted to learn more about why they behave the way they do. The overall objective for BCIT was to gain a better understanding of which content and processes were most effective for various audiences.

The Solution: 4Q Suite and the Google Analytics API
To meet this objective, BCIT chose 4Q Suite, an online survey tool built by iPerceptions. 4Q uses the Google Analytics API to link 4Q Suite survey responses with the corresponding Google Analytics session data. An analyst can then use this data to answer questions related to visitor intention and satisfaction. 4Q tracks six “Voice of Customer” events within Google Analytics. These events are related to survey completion, task completion, purpose of visit, and overall satisfaction. With 4Q survey data available in Google Analytics, marketers can better prioritize site enhancements, monitor the effectiveness of ad campaigns and marketing events more closely, and quickly identify changes in conversion. The Google Analytics API also makes it possible for 4Q to export GA data into the 4Q Suite dashboard, enabling analysis of the integrated dataset and open-ended feedback. And, users can view or receive automated alerts of significant changes based on the combination of 4Q Suite and Google Analytics data.

Result: Increased visitor satisfaction
Alan Etkin, Project and Web Analytics Manager at British Columbia Institute of Technology uses Google Analytics and 4Q Suite to segment site visitors by key audiences (students, prospective students, and faculty & staff), and see the differences in task completion and satisfaction. When BCIT redesigned their site with a strategic focus on prospective students, they saw a 15% increase in satisfaction among these visitors. Their behavioral analytics data also showed a 279% increase in a key conversion event for prospective students. From a strategic standpoint, 4Q Suite has given BCIT a clearer understanding of key audiences and has helped them report their results to the leadership team with easy to understand metrics. This, in turn, has helped them secure additional resources and the support to move forward with new projects.

About 4Q Suite and Google Analytics
4Q Suite was built by iPerceptions. According to Claude Guay, President & CEO, “The response has been tremendously positive. Many of our clients insist that the integration between 4Q Suite and Google Analytics is the most valuable feature that iPerceptions has to offer because it connects what visitors are doing on their website with why they are doing it and how satisfied they are. 4Q Suite has rounded out our Voice of Customer analytics offering. Now companies of all sizes can hear what their website visitors are saying, connect the what with the why, and react to the issues that affect satisfaction and conversion. In the space of a few weeks since launching, hundreds of 4Q Suite customers have already enabled Google Analytics integration.”

4Q Suite can be found through the Google Analytics App Gallery or directly from the 4Q Suite website.

If you’re interested in developing applications for the Google Analytics platform visit Google Analytics for Developers.

Posted by Pete Frisella, Google Analytics API team

Google Analytics User Conference in Spain - October 27

We are excited to announce our first Google Analytics User Conference in Spain, which will be held on October 27 in Madrid.

At the conference, you’ll learn from national and international Google Analytics specialists, who will discuss their vision for maximizing Google Analytics performance for different online business areas. You’ll also have the chance to meet some of the most influential Google Analytics professionals in Spain, including Enric Quintero from Metriplica, Pere Rovira from Web Analytics, and Jaum Clotet & Andrés Flores from Watt. They are all Google Analytics Partners, and they’ve worked together closely to develop this exciting event.

This event will be an ideal opportunity to share your own analytics knowledge and talk with other Google Analytics users, experts, and members of the Google Analytics team.

Key benefits of attending the Google Analytics User Conference:
Meet members of the Google Analytics team, experts, and other users like you
Improve your skills with Google Analytics through hands-on workshops
Ask your business questions at the Google Analytics Help Desk
Discover new features in Google Analytics
You can find further information, such as the agenda and speakers, on the Google Analytics User Conference Website. Please visit the site today and and buy your tickets to attend.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Timo Josten, Google Analytics team