As a Google Analytics Certified Partner, Teknicks was able to attend the Google Analytics annual summit for 2014. The annual summit allows for Google Analytics Certified Partners, premium customers, and developers to meet in the Bay Area to learn about upcoming features for Google Analytics, as well as provide direct feedback to Google Analytics leadership and engineers. Year after year, like-minded individuals shape the analytics industry at this conference. As Analytics Director at Teknicks, I was the lucky attendee.Although there were a lot of announcements for features and updates this year, below you will find the key feature updates that are allowed to be shared publically. 

1. Enhanced Ecommerce Beta

With the Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce beta, you will have incredible insight into the entire customer purchase journey. The new metrics and reports will provide insight into:

• Product detail views – When users click-through to read more information about specific products
• “Add to Cart” views – When users physically add a product to their shopping cart
• Internal campaign clicks and the success of internal merchandising tools – When users click on a homepage banner promoting a sale or view a product in a “Related Products” widget on your site, just to name a few examples
• The check-out process – When users reach the page requiring the user to provide billing and shipping information
• Purchase – When users complete an ecommerce transaction (convert)

In general, the new ecommerce tracking will allow you to see detailed shopping behavior, such as how users are entering the shopping conversion funnel and where they are dropping off. You will also be able to see insight into the users that are not completing any sort of ecommerce action. For a complete overview, visit the Enhanced Ecommerce Section in GA’s Help Center.

2. New Analytics Academy Course

Justin Cutroni is an Analytics Evangelist at Google that has been leading the Google Analytics education team. Justin and his team have been providing free digital analytics courses online ideal for web analysts and marketers. They announced the 3^rd course titled Ecommerce Analytics: From Data to Decisions, which is prefect for individuals interested in learning more about Enhanced Ecommerce. If interested, you can register here.

2)     Unified Channel Groupings

Create completely custom channel groupings that are unique to your company to use throughout your GA reports and share the same custom configuration with the rest of your team. By using custom acquisition channels for your attribution modeling, you will gain great insight into your marketing and site optimization efforts.

3)     Improved Dimension Widening with Data Import

With custom data import, the functionality of Dimension Widening has greatly improved. Users can import their own “offline” data directly into Google Analytics. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Specific product details
• Information about returned products
• Information about specific content on the site
• Insights about customer preferences

  

4)     Custom Tables for Premium Customers

This new feature is specific to premium customers. Custom Tables allows users to obtain unsampled data from a customized table. Once the premium users configure and schedule the custom table, the fresh unsampled data will be available each day for analysis.

5)     New Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Integration

Each day, marketers are looking to make the smartest marketing decisions by marrying data measurement to their actual media execution. There will now be a seamless integration between Google Analytics Premium accounts, DoubleClick Campaign Manager accounts, and DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts. Aside from understanding how users are interacting with advertising media on the DoubleClick Platform, marketers will now be able to send different remarketing lists from GA to DoubleClick.

6)     Four New Google Analytics APIs

For enterprise customers, service providers, and developers that manage many different GA accounts, Google announced four new APIs to save time and increase productivity:

• Provisioning API – Easily create new accounts (invite only)
• AdWords API – Easily manage AdWords linking configurations (get, list, create, update, and delete links)
• Filters API – Easily manage configuration of filters (create, get, list, update, and delete filters)
• Embed API – Easily create key reports and dashboards

7)     New Partner Gallery

Over the next week, the new Partner Gallery will launch. Formerly called the App Gallery, it will be re-launched to give users the opportunity to find different services provided by Google Analytics Certified Partners, as well as find apps created by Google Analytics Technology Partners.