Google Analytics Enhancements for Mobile Apps

November was a busy time in Google Analytics. In particular, the Mobile App Tracking Team has a few things to announce.

• EasyTracking Library - automatic session management, better integration with Google Analytics SDK
• Updated Google Analytics SDK - More reliable method for sending hits, Android Market referral issue fixed, available via the Android SDK manager
• More samples - new open source application aimed to help reduce the ramp up time for new developers who want to track their apps

EasyTracker Library
We’ve created EasyTracker libraries for both iOS and Android.  The EasyTracker library will enable tracking of your application down to the Activity (or UIViewController for iOS) level with almost no coding required on your part.  See the ReadMe file and source code for details. These Libraries are intended for use with the standard Google Analytics SDKs and should make it very easy to add standard tracking to your applications.

Another advantage to using the EasyTracker library is session management.  As many developers know, it’s not always easy to determine whether your application is active and when to start a new session.  The EasyTracker library handles this for you.  It will determine when your application has been put into the background and will start a new session automatically.

The Android version of the Library not only provides for easy tracking, but also ensures that all calls to GoogleAnalyticsTracker are done off the main UI Thread.  Using this library should address responsiveness issues some Android developers have seen using the Google Analytics SDK.

We’ve adapted the Android Notepad sample application to use the EasyTracker library, just to show you how easy it can be.

You can find the libraries and sample applications at
http://code.google.com/p/analytics-api-samples/.  Check the downloads section for the libraries.  The source for the libraries is available in subversion as well.  Drill down into trunk/src/tracking/mobile/android/EasyTracker for Android and trunk/src/tracking/mobile/ios/EasyTracker for iOS.  The Notepad sample application is there as well.  We’ve released them as open source and contributions to making them better are welcome.

Check the ReadMe files in the libraries themselves for more information on how to use them.

New Versions of Google Analytics SDK for Android and iOS
We’ve released version 1.4 for iOS and version 1.4.2 for Android.  The iOS version of the SDK has one new feature.  Both versions contain several bug fixes as well.  Read on for details.

iOS
We’ve added a new method, dispatchSynchronously, that blocks while it dispatches hits.  It won’t return until the hits sent have either been acknowledged by the Google Analytics servers or the specified timeout period has elapsed.  This provides a more reliable method for sending hits before your application terminates or goes into the background.

We’ve also addressed several memory leaks and crashes reported against the SDK.

More details on the new version of the SDK can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/ios.html.

Android
The Android SDK will now handle referrals from the Android Market properly.  This applies to autotagging as well.

We’ve fixed several other bugs in the Android SDK.  Check out the details at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/android.html.

Google Analytics SDK now available via the Android SDK Manager
We’ve added the Google Analytics SDK to the Android SDK Manager.  You can download the latest versions using the Android SDK Manager instead of checking the website for updates.

Of course, this only applies to the Android version of the SDK.

MobilePlayground
We’ve released an open source application for both iOS and Android that exercises all the APIs for Google Analytics that are available to Mobile Application developers.  You can find them at trunk/src/tracking/mobile.

New Home for the Mobile Tracking Documentation
The Mobile Tracking documentation has moved.  It now resides with the rest of the Google Analytics tracking documentation.  Check it out at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/overview.html.

Reporting Problems and Feature Requests
We really value your feedback. If you are having problems with the SDKs, let us know by posting them on the Google Analytics issues website at http://code.google.com/p/analytics-issues/issues/list.  Use the component MobileTracking when entering an issue or looking through the list for issues already reported against the Mobile App SDKs.

Please stay tuned for more exciting news regarding Mobile Application Tracking with Google Analytics.

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Advanced Segments for Holiday campaigns

With only a week before the holiday gift season is over, it’s time to shut down your online ads and turn off the lights at your e-store, right? Not so fast, not if you want to ride the final shopping wave!

Holiday shoppers are still out in full force, and “dollars per buyer” are up 12% this year, so you’re likely to get even more bang for your advertising buck. Since Christmas is on a Sunday this year, that means last-minute gift-givers could be shopping up until Thursday the 22nd if you offer 2-day shipping. However, you also have visitors looking for physical stores where they can buy your product, and (if you offer it) those willing to “pick up in store”.

With Advanced Segments, you can find these visitors and help them get their gift on time!

The first thing to research is who were these last-minute shoppers last year? If you had goals or e-commerce tracking installed back then, shrink your date range from December 18th, 2010 to December 24th, 2010. Next, select the “Visits with Transactions” default advanced segment:





(if you don’t have e-commerce tracking, you may want to create a custom advanced segment like this one:


where the goal# that you select is your most valuable goal).

Then, go to the organic keywords report by navigating to Traffic Sources > Search > Organic.

What keywords were these buyers searching on? Were there any good generic terms like “last minute gifts” or “gifts before christmas”? Were there any long-tail terms that are still relevant this year? If so, make sure you’re bidding on these terms in your paid search accounts so you get maximum coverage on keywords that brought in revenue last season. Also be sure to check out the paid search report to see if there were any converting paid keywords from last year that you have been missing this time around.

(Also try repeating this process for December 26th 2010 through January 1st 2011 to find trends during the post-Christmas week).

Next, find out if there is any crossover between your online store and physical store. If you have a store locator for your physical stores (or that lists stores who sell your products), then create the following advanced segment:



With this segment applied, shrink your date range to the past seven days and go to the Pages report (under Content > Site Content) to cross-list those products against any that are out of stock (one reason why they could be checking for stores). Then, call around to make sure the physical locations have the items that these visitors are searching for.

If you only sell products online, then create similar advanced segments to the one above for people who visit your most popular holiday promotional pages. Then, go to the Pages report to see what other products those visitors are viewing (and the transactions report to see what people are buying) and feature that content on the landing page to make it easy to find!

One more advanced segment tip for you: It’s estimated that half of online shoppers will use their mobile phone while shopping this year. This could be to locate stores, find better deals, or find coupons. This connection to shopping in the physical world will be critical for these final seven days, when shipping costs are high.

Check your AdWords report, and make sure you try out the new “non-mobile”, “high-end mobile” and “tablet” default segments.




You might be surprised at how your paid traffic behaves differently, so be sure to consider the device when running analysis and set up goals that make sense for them!

Happy analyzing and happy holidays!

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Customize your AdSense personal contact information

As you may know, we periodically send out emails with tips for increasing your earnings, updates on the latest product improvements, and information regarding your account. In your AdSense account settings you can select which type of messages you’re interested in receiving.

We understand that some publishers may prefer to receive AdSense-related messages at a different email address than the Google Account used as their AdSense login. From now on, every user on an AdSense account can specify a personal contact email, contact name and optionally a phone number. It’s important to note that this contact email doesn’t need to be associated with a Google Account, and adding it to your account won’t update your login information or change the login you use to access your AdSense account.

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To customize your personal contact information, log in to your account and visit the Account settings page under the Home tab. Under Personal settings, click “edit” and enter the desired data in the contact name and contact email fields. We encourage you to also take the opportunity to review your email preferences and then save your settings. Once you make any changes, you’ll receive a verification email to the contact address to confirm that you can receive messages at this address.

If you’d like to learn more about the messages we send to publishers and how you can benefit from them, visit this blog post. We’re looking forward to keeping in touch with you!

Posted by Dan Banfield -- AdSense Engineering

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Create a mobile-friendly website

Did you know that there will be a mobile device for every person on earth by 2015, and that mobile searches have grown by 4x since 2010¹? That means that every day more and more of your users are looking for your content…on mobile devices. What’s their experience like? Can they easily read what’s on the screen without pinching and zooming? Do you have links that are difficult to click instead of user-friendly navigation buttons?

61% of users are unlikely to return to a site that isn’t mobile friendly². It’s important to remember that even if users can see a website on a smartphone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. Your users are going mobile as we speak, and so the most important thing you can do to grow your business using the mobile web is to create a mobile-friendly website.

Here are ten tips to help you design a mobile-friendly site:

1. Keep it quick - Design your site to load fast and make copy easy to scan
2. Simplify navigation - Create clear navigation and search functionalities
3. Be thumb-friendly - Design your site so any size hand can easily interact with it
4. Design for visibility - Make it easy for your customers to read
5. Make it accessible - Mobile sites should work across all mobile devices
6. Make it easy to convert - Create clear ways for your users to make purchases or contact you
7. Make it local - Consumers look for local info on their phones all the time
8. Make it seamless - Convert as much of the functionality of your desktop site to mobile
9. Use mobile site redirects - Ensure that visitors who visit your website from a mobile device are redirected to your mobile-friendly site
10. Listen, learn and iterate - Make testing and optimization an ongoing process

To review a detailed set of these best practices, download a copy of the 10 Mobile Site Best Practices. Visit howtogomo.com to explore actual mobile site examples of each best practice and use the GoMoMeter to see how your site is faring on mobile*.




Finally, take a look at Google Sites for Mobile Landing Pages*, a free and easy-to-use tool that enables you to build mobile pages.

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Smarter default font settings

When it comes to customizing the appearance of AdSense text ads, we’ve heard from many publishers that they aren’t always sure what combinations to pick. As a starting point, we offer a set of default options for ad colors, font size and font face, which are based on positive performance across all publisher sites.

Today, we’re announcing an exciting improvement to our default font settings, which will optimize your ad units for your unique site and users. For each ad unit that’s set to show the default font face and font size, our system will now automatically select and show the best-performing option. This best-performing option will depend on a variety of factors, including the user’s viewing environment (operating system, browser) and the ad unit itself (language, size, number of ads, etc). We’ve tested the effects of these factors on our AdSense fonts and incorporated the best combinations into our default font settings. Our aim with this update is to help improve ad performance on your site by automatically applying optimal font settings to your ad units.

Please keep in mind that this change will only affect ad units which have “AdSense default font family” and “AdSense default font size” selected. You won’t be affected if you’ve previously set your ads to a specific font face or size, but we encourage you to give our new settings a try. To change the font settings of any existing ad unit, simply edit it under the My ads tab. If you’d like to change the preferences for future ad units you’ll create, visit the Account Settings page under the Home tab, and edit the “Default ad display preferences” section.

We hope you’re as excited about this development as we are -- we’ll continue to bring you the latest in our research around text ad options.

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Web Analytics TV #23 - The Holiday Episode Welcome to the holiday episode of Web Analytics TV! Web Analytics TV, as you well know by now, is powered by your amazing questions. In this merry episode we had questions from France, Australia, Sweden, India, Germany, The Netherlands and the US.

Welcome to the holiday episode of Web Analytics TV! Web Analytics TV, as you well know by now, is powered by your amazing questions. In this merry episode we had questions from France, Australia, Sweden, India, Germany, The Netherlands and the US.

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 Maggie in Bulgaria, for a great question about the difference between the days and visits to transaction report and the time lag reports in multi channel funnels. Maggie, 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:

• (0:35) Working with changes in various country’s cookie policies
• (1:56) Recommendation for tracking bounces on content sites
• (4:32) Tracking exit links from your website
• (7:00) Tracking and reporting customer lifetime value
• (9:47) Days to purchase vs time lag reports in multi-channel funnels
• (11:48) Cross domain and sub-domain tracking using a GACP
• (13:01) Funnel visualization via the API
• (16:03) Interaction hits and impact on quota
• (16:41) Tracking internal referrals / campaings / house ads
• (17:51) Why visits and entrances are the same for page level custom vars
• (19:54) Comparing mondays, week over week
• (20:42) Time between setting profiles filers and seeing data in reports

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Funnel visualization using paditrack
• Vote on developer issue in our issue tracker
• Justin Cutroni explains how to use internal site search to track internal campaigns
• Use Excellent Analytics, GA Data Grabber, Next Analytics to extract data into excel
• Check out the Google Analytics App Gallery for great tools

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.

Thanks!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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AdSense for mobile content in 15 new countries

We’re excited to announce the launch of AdSense for mobile content in 15 new countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Slovenia, Thailand, and Turkey.

AdSense for mobile content allows publishers to generate earnings from their mobile webpages using targeted Google ads. Just like AdSense for content, Google matches ads to the content of your site -- in this case, your mobile site. You'll earn money whenever visitors to your mobile site click on the ads they see.

For mobile websites, AdSense will automatically detect the type of phone viewing your site and deliver ads to match. For example, if someone views your site through an iPhone, we'll deliver ads specifically designed for high-end phones.

Please note that AdSense for mobile content ad units may be used in mobile websites only, not in mobile applications -- our policies don't permit placement of AdSense for mobile content ads in a mobile application. If you’re looking for an advertising solution for your mobile application, sign up for AdMob, Google’s leading mobile advertising display product.

Posted by Emanuele Brandi - Product Sales Lead

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