As consumer journeys become increasingly complex, marketers have more opportunities to reach them. However, with more channels, you’re also looking for easy and confident ways to make budget decisions, all backed by data. That’s why we introduced new tools in Google Analytics at Google Marketing Live to help you drive ROI.
Last year, we shared our vision on how Google Analytics provides a comprehensive and actionable understanding of your marketing performance, helping you optimize your digital strategies and improve your business outcomes. Today we’ll dive deeper into these and other new announcements that will allow you to get a unified view of performance across channels and better allocate your budget.
Unlock the full customer journey impact
To drive ROI more effectively, you should have a unified view of what's driving conversions across all channels. So we’re updating the attribution path reporting and introducing assisted conversions in Google Analytics which will show your performance across channels. This will help you see how your media drives early engagement and interactions that lead to conversions, providing a true sign of prospecting success.
To get this same level of insights today, you would have to download the raw path data and run your own analysis offline – which can be both time-consuming and costly. We’re changing that! Before the end of the year, you will see new conversion attribution reports in the Advertising section. This will include a refined funnel report that helps you better understand multi-touchpoint paths and include an assisted conversions report. So you can get a more comprehensive understanding of which channels and campaigns are effective at capturing customers early in the path to conversion.
These new features are only possible because we’re building a new, consistent conversion infrastructure that allows you to confidently make decisions on where to put your budgets so that they’ll go the furthest. With this change in our technology, you’ll be able to better connect your paid advertising and organic marketing efforts across all campaign objectives. So you’ll better understand your marketing impact on your most important site and in-app outcomes.
Make smarter budget decisions with projections & scenario planning
Understanding your campaign spending and its impact across different channels can be a game-changer to help you increase ROI. Google Analytics is allowing you to do just that with two powerful tools.
First, the projections report shows you how your advertising channels are projected to perform against key performance indicators (KPIs) like spend, key events, and revenue per channel. Monitor plan progress and performance to identify areas for improvement, and optimize inflight budgets based on channel performance. The projections report also enables agile budget management, allowing you to refine or rebalance budget allocation based on how your advertising channels are pacing against your business goals. The projections report will be available in open beta by the end of September.
Second, scenario planner is a best-in-class modeling solution to help you create highly effective media plans through cross-channel budget allocation with an easy to set up and use interface. In practice, the scenario planner creates comprehensive plans to maximize effectiveness across channels for quarterly or annual media plans. You can flexibly create and view scenarios to understand ROI at different spend levels and ultimately create future media plans that drive the highest return based on your defined spend. Once these plans are live, you can understand pacing and projected performance by jumping back into the projections report.
With these tools, you'll be able to answer critical questions like, "Is my spend on track?", "How many future conversions are forecasted based on my planned spend?" and “How should I allocate my budgets to maximize revenue and ROI?”
Measuring campaign performance beyond just clicks
Later this year, we'll enhance multi-touch attribution to give you a fuller picture of your marketing impact. With engaged-view conversions you'll gain a more comprehensive understanding of media effectiveness and advertising ROI across Google and non-Google platforms like TikTok, Snap and Pinterest. Next year, we’ll also expand your ability to measure performance with view-through conversions. This way you can get a complete picture of your ROI across channels and format types.
To improve ROI for your campaigns you can go to the Advertising section of your Google Analytics property, your one-stop shop to get all your insights about your cross-channel campaigns.
Your own personal expert: Google Analytics chat
Imagine having an expert analyst right within Google Analytics. We're bringing an AI agent to Google Analytics with our new chat function. The Google Analytics in-product agent will answer your data questions with single-number answers and visualizations. It also understands what you're looking for and provides direct links to relevant reports, guiding you to your destination. Plus, it's trained on Google Analytics Help Center documentation, offering instant answers and guidance to enable fast learning.
These new features and enhancements in Google Analytics are designed to provide you with clearer insights, more agile budgeting, and a deeper understanding of your marketing's true impact.
Posted by Steve Ganem, Director, Product Management, Google Analytics