Life After Enterprise Analytics

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How Google Analytics 360 helps Digital Analysts overcome the struggles they are faced with on a daily basis.

 

Overcoming 5 Obstacles to Great Data

In a previous article we explored five of the most common challenges faced by digital analysts who do not have access to an enterprise analytics tool. This article will address each of those issues and demonstrate how a platform like Google Analytics 360 is able to solve for them.      

#1: Complete, Unsampled Data for all Behaviors

GA Support article on Sampled Data: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2637192 In GA360, you have access to unsampled data and your reporting limits are increased dramatically. The API recently had an upgrade to quota limits as well. The decision of using sampled and unsampled data in your report should actually be rephrased as, "Am I going to use this data, or not?" Passing sampled data along to your stakeholders is risky business. It's not representative of your data, and can damage your team's trust and credibility in your organization. This makes the access to unsampled data the single most important point to support the investment in your data framework because it's the critical step that allows you to build reporting and, therefore, trust in your team and subsequently your insights and strategy. Not only is the unsampled data available in GA, it can be migrated to the Big Data machine that is BigQuery. This capability gives your entire company on-demand access to a powerful, yet inexpensive, data warehouse. Analytics Pros has focused on BigQuery for many years, and would love to review the possibilities available to you and your company using this platform!    

#2: Unified User Across Platforms

GA Support article on Roll-up Reporting: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6033415 We're given the ability to join our various products, website and application scopes and have consolidated reports, i.e. roll-up reporting. This means that in a single report in GA we're able to measure sessions and users that access both your website and mobile app. Roll-up reports are also helpful when there are multiple product teams maintaining multiple brands or applications. Each GA property should be configured to meet the reporting needs of the product owners, and your roll-up property gives you new visibility to analyze those disparate products in aggregate and better understand how the brands contribute referrals and share traffic. Using additional attributes, like the user-id, we have the ability to attribute conversion paths that cross domain and device boundaries. This new scope of data allows us to better understand our users at a high level, and properly attribute sessions to a consistent person, rather than a device ID.    

#3: Using Tag Management for Measurement Updates

Google Tag Manager: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ Having a tag management system in place on your sites and applications gives you the ability to move measurement at the speed of business. Your teams are constantly updating the product experiences and the demand for measurement does not stop with a product release! Google Tag Manager provides an easy to use management experience, with enterprise level workspace management, versioning and access-controls. The tool allows us to abstract measurement from code giving your team control over how measurement is accomplished. The tag manager also provides a medium for the developers to send metadata from the code into the measurement space, known as the Data Layer. This abstraction is a crucial architectural component to maintaining an agile and robust data framework.    

#4: Enhanced Ecommerce and Attribution Modeling

GA Support article on Enhanced Ecommerce: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6014841 and Data Driven Attribution Models:  https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3264076 The Enhanced Ecommerce measurement API provides an entirely new perspective into your data, including product impressions, check-out funnel, and product and promotion level interactions like detail views and add-to-cart. Demonstrating the Enhanced Ecommerce data model:     While this appears to be a linear flow in the above demonstration, as a digital analyst you're likely very familiar with the non-linear way your customers move through this model in reality. They come in using multiple devices and traffic sources and campaign initiatives, and all of these sources and contributors are at risk of being mis-attributed if you are only using a last-click model. With GA360, we get access to Data Driven Attribution Models that using machine learning processes are able to give your team a realistic view into the campaigns and sources that drive conversions.    

#5: Stakeholder Dashboards and Data Governance

Google Data Studio: https://www.google.com/analytics/data-studio/ Finally, with all this data, you need to be able to distribute these metrics and insights throughout the organization. You also need to be able to give users the ability to self-serve, without having to be formally trained on something as advanced as the Google Analytics interface. We know the data is in GA, but the insights and actionability are obscured by the need for advanced knowledge of how to filter, segment, and pivot the dimensional data to answer the business questions. This is where Google Data Studio can help enormously. By taking your stakeholders out of GA, and delivering the right information to the right users, means your team is distributing value, not burden, across the company. Data Studio is one of the most effective and capable data visualization tool available, and it's completely free!    

In Summary

Upgrading to an enterprise analytics platform is a must-have for any organization making critical business decisions based on user experiences within your products and services. Google Analytics 360 is uniquely positioned to address the many challenges faced by an analytics team going through this conversion. We have developed unparalleled expertise on this platform and would love to engage you and your team in your exploration for enterprise analytics tools!