Less is more

A couple of days ago, Google Analytics announced its new features,  below are some brief examples of the updates.

• New goal setting features allow users to measure visitor engagement, such as time on site and page views

• Up the number of goals that user could define to 20

• Provide code snippet on mobile portal, enable users to track mobile traffic regardless whether the visitor’s device runs JavaScript

• Enable tracking how visitors engage with mobile app

• Introduced Analytics Intelligence, which could tell users what are the significant changes in data pattern in a defined period. e.g., a 300% traffic increase from a referring site yesterday. (It seems the feature has not launched yet since I couldn’t find it in my account)

Above all, the most sigificant change could be the new goal setting features.  So the question is , for marketers,  how can we leverage them in our marketing campaigns?

• Set up your engagement goal

  

  Find out how many visitors out of the total are truly engaged visitors?  Is the number increasing / decreasing due to the change of website design and content? You may think the higher numer means your changes are effective, but be cautious, data could be misleading! The increase in time on site could also due to returning visitors not get used to the new features on your website as well.  In that case, you could test your hypothesis by choosing new visitors only in Google Analytics advanced segment function.

  If clearly, your site has a branding purpose and  you want to drive visitor’s brand awareness after bring them to the site, and then optimize your marketing channels such as paid search, banner ads, social media, etc.  this goal setting feature could be a valid measurement with a dollar value assigned – to test the effectiveness of  your branding efforts.

  Set up your relevancy  goal

  

  Generally speaking, the more people explore on your website, the more relevant they found of your website content. Do you want to track the ROI according to the degree of relevancy visitors find of your site? Now you can do it easily in Google Analytics.

  In marketing branding practices, if the “awareness” is the very first stage of consumers’ psychological behavior, the “relevancy” could be the next one, then normally it will come to “preferrence “ and in the end, “action” -close the deal.  Hence if you are running an ad campaign in order to capture your target at the right time, allocate your dollar value according to relevancy could tell you how valuable your campaign is.

  Questions about  Analytics Intelligence
  

  I feel the Analytics Intelligence is a quiet huge offering for a free tracking tool like Google Analytics, but since Google Adwords has  similar functions, it might be an easy movement for the Analytics product to have its own intelligence algorithm. What it means to the users is with this function, it saves marketers time to dig into the data and find unusual patterns (or for marketers who don’t even have time digging into it), but since I haven’t experienced it, it is hard to tell how smart it could be. Ｗill it be smart enough to discover patterns in the sub-segment group? Will the findings be statistically significant? How flexible it allows users to define the confidence interval of the data string? – These will be the questions I have in mind and wanna to test later.