Google announced on April 2nd that Universal Analytics was released from beta status. Universal Analytics is now Google Analytics and Google Analytics is now Universal Analytics.
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes ourselves to help our clients prepare for this roll out. If you’re a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions store owner and use Monitus, we can help you transition to the new version of Google Analytics.
So why am I so excited about the release of Universal Analytics? Let me give you five reasons:
- Custom Dimensions and Metrics – Dimensions are new to UA. They’re server-side values that can be uploaded to Google Analytics. For example, we can grab a user’s IP address, look up the weather in their area and draw correlations to see how it affects a user’s interaction with your site. Do more people make purchases when it’s sunny or rainy? I don’t know, let’s test that! Metrics, a client-side value, are new, as well. Imagine being able to call the same IP address as before and get their local time. This is much more powerful than setting time zones in Google Analytics. Instead of guessing, now you’ll know the highest converting hour!
- User ID – Helps you better understand your customers’ full journey. This feature shows anonymous engagement activity across different screens. You can track site visits to provide a more user-centric view of traffic so you can build a more tailored customer experience.
- Cross Device Tracking – The new USER ID also helps with Cross Device Tracking. It shows how your users are interacting with your business across multiple devices. Information like this lets you fine-tune your marketing plan and site design for an improved customer experience.
- User Centric Analysis – In UA, we’re seeing Google really consider the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on hits, UA lets you focus on individual users and how they perform on your site. By default, there is no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in UA.
- Remarketing and Demographics – These features were previously available in the classic version of Google Analytics. They were two of the main reasons we hadn’t upgraded sooner. Remarketing enables ecommerce stores to capture customers who may have previously failed to complete a goal on their website. The classic example is someone who clicked add to cart but didn’t complete a purchase. Demographics gives you a 30,000 view of how men and women and various age ranges perform on your site. One example we’ve seen is how much better Men ages 25-34 convert on one’s client’s site compared to every other category. It’s fascinating and can help you make data-driven decisions.
If you’re a current FastPivot customer or an online retailer curious about trying out all of these great features in Google Analytics, contact us today. We can discuss how we can help you upgrade.
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