Google Analytics Summit 2012 - Paul Muret Unveils ‘Universal Analytics’

by Prejushya Kalicharan - 10/30/2012 7130 Views

‘Universal Analytics’ Expected to Be a Trend Setter in the Field of Analytics and Business Measures

Google Analytics Summit 2012

Google’s decision to share information on the Google Analytics Summit 2012 sounds encouraging to the webmasters out here. This open copy is not only for this year but for EVERY year moving forward. This two day conference was attended by around 400 people from 46 countries and 250 unique companies and the hall became the venue for Google to update its Google Analytics partners about the latest innovations and new business under development.

The Event

The conference was presented by Paul Muret of Google (one of the tech nerds of Google working on Google Analytics right from the start). Paul called of the conference listing down the innovations in Google Analytics in the past:

RealTime Analytics
Social Media Analysis
Attribution modeling
Mobile App tracking
Remarketing
Tag Manager

Universal Analytics

The birth of ‘Universal Analytics’ was mainly to suppress the difficulty raised due to users being engaged across multiple devices. The older platform was built on a premise that tracks users having a single touch-point and access on a single device. In short – just for the web. Now that’s not the case since 90% of the consumers are on multiple devices and opt to make the purchase from wherever they feel comfortable. That was when there arose a need for technology that helps accomplish the goal of tracking users across devices. The engineers thought of coining just a single ID to track people across devices, rather rooting multiple set of cookies stored on a single machine that stores data and notifies whenever a web browser visits the site.

Universal Analytics accomplishes the following four tasks,

1) New Measurement Protocol:

The new tool works on a very simple and easier form of tracking system compared to the older Legacy event tracking one. The quantity of cookies involved in tracking a particular website is very much decreased to the level of 82% fewer bytes and 80% fewer cookies. This in turn significantly reduces the number and size of the cookies sent for tracking, since all cookies are handled in the back end of Google Analytics. The java script assembling is updated to accomplish this and more open source libraries have been built for more advanced integrations. Another feature incorporated is the live interactions like swiping an employee ID, getting reflected in Real Time Google Analytics.

2) User ID Control

Measurement is made possible for marketers across varied platforms like Desktop, Mobile Web & App, Game Console, TV Set-Up-Box, Ecommerce shop carts etc. using a single ID. Besides one can use a private ID for tracking, other than the one used by Google. That’s cool! The really cool news is yet to come…

Universal Analytics helps you shift from “a Visit centric view/session-based analytics” to a “User centric view”. This way we will be able to track users across devices, mediums, platforms and more. The Google team has undergone experiments based on this doing a live demo of how this feature works while using a tablet and a computer. The tablet drove the visit via email marketing and the desktop by means of direct visit. While the older Google Analytics tool treats these both as two different visitors and also direct visits add a credit, now with ‘Universal’ that’s not the case. The improved tracking facility identifies both visits made by the same user from multiple devices, thus avoiding misconceptions in business.

3) Offline Analytics

This is a really great feature now for business people who gets conversions mostly offline. Previously tracking their turn over, merging the results with the online data and finally arriving at the ROI was a real headache. But that’s no more a problem now, since ‘Universal’ helps you integrate offline results with that of online favoring an easy ROI calculation. This is how Google bullets the process:

Allow ‘hits’ from offline sources, i.e. CRM systems
Tie hits to existing web customers through the user ID feature
Track these hits as goals

4) Dimension Widening

This facility allows you to upload data from CRM or CMS system to Google Analytics in the form of a CSV file which in turn enhances your Google Analytics Reports through secondary dimension input.

How to use Dimension Widening

1. Choose from the dimensions you want to widen, and define what to widen them with.

2. Define the schema of the data you are uploading

3. Upload the .csv file to Google Analytics Dimension Widening via API or a user interface uploader, and take advantage of rich data analysis.

Wind Up

Probably the “Universal Analytics” will be in our hand by the beginning of 2013. Google ends their official announcement as “As a Google Analytics user, Universal Analytics won’t mean any changes in your account. But if you’re a large enterprise that is interested in exploring the integration options, you can request access to the Universal Analytics beta. You can also learn more in our help center.”

It appears beneficial to me if only Google delivers the product the same way it has announced. If for any tweaks done with a commercial motive? That would become a question ending up in a wide discussion and debate. Now, how far do you find this update by Google to its analytics tool to be interesting and beneficial to your business?

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

Google Analytics Summit 2012, Paul Muret, Universal Analytics, Google Analytics

About Prejushya Kalicharan

SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author