Data at your fingertips: A new version of the Google Analytics App for Android

At Google, we want to build tools that help you stay connected no matter where you are. Whether you’re in the boardroom, at a live event, or even during a day at the beach: having access to Analytics at your fingertips is important. That’s why we previously launched an Android app for Google Analytics that we’re excited has been downloaded more than 700,000 times to date.

We’ve been listening to your feedback and hear you loud and clear: the Google Analytics Android app should do more. So today we are pleased to announce the launch the latest version of the Google Analytics App for Android devices.

Visit Google Play to download and install the app to keep up with your data anytime, anywhere. Like what you see in the new version? Review it in Google Play!

We’ve added more reporting tools and enhanced the functionality of this version, so you have a first-class Google Analytics experience on every device. What’s new, specifically?

• A completely redesigned look and feel, ideal for tablets and phones
• New visualizations that automatically resize to fit your screen size and orientation 
• Side navigation that mirrors Google Analytics on the web for quick access to reports
• Specialized reporting for web and app views (profiles)
• An Overview screen summarizing key metrics from each report 
• Deeper analysis via dimension-based drill down in most reports
• Better Real-Time reporting
• Advanced Segments to further analyze your data

See an overview of your important metrics on one screen

Bringing the robust features of GA on the web to your fingertips

With the Google Analytics App, you can access all of your data - for both web and app reporting views (profiles) - so you can keep track of all of your important data with reports that are optimized for whatever device you’re using, ensuring a beautiful and intuitive experience. 

We’re also introducing new visualizations designed with tablets and phones in mind. Rather than getting overwhelmed with too much information on a small screen, you now see just the most relevant metrics on cards, so you decide when you want to drill-down for details or just get a quick update on your performance. 

We built our app using Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps. As a result, it’s highly configurable and we can add new reports, change navigation, update visualizations all without having to update the app.  We’ve made several improvements to the app based on your feedback and have more planned, so please keep it coming. Learn more about how you can make your own apps highly configurable with GTM.

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Lead Product Manager, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

How Certain Affinity used Google’s Mobile App Analytics to improve game design

Certain Affinity, an experienced independent game developer has recently been working on their first mobile title, Age of Booty: Tactics. Age of Booty: Tactics is an asynchronous turn-based tactics game hybridized with a collectable card game. Certain Affinity wanted a solution enabling them to measure and analyze specific metrics to improve both the pre-release and post-release designs of the game. They researched a number of analytics solutions, but were frequently frustrated by the cost, size, and limited flexibility offered.

Ramping Up Reporting

Certain Affinity has used Google Analytics for website analytics since 2005, and began talking to mobile partners after becoming aware of Google Analytics’ (GA’s) application in mobile gaming. Given their existing experience, the relative cost of the platform, and the extensive feature set, Certain Affinity quickly and easily integrated GA into the game. The early inclusion of GA into the design process resulted in easy access to analytics to assist in influencing direction across design, art, and ultimately production.

UI Optimization

Google Analytics provides an intuitive way to understand engagement across multiple screens and events. By leveraging engagement flow and average screen time analytics, Certain Affinity understood when specific areas within the UI were either too complex or buried to drive the desired behavior. They identified that the storefront was overly complex and required significant streamlining to become easily accessible. Additionally,they found that a number of options within the menus were too complex and lead to users looping within the UI prior to engaging in an actual game. They also were able to reduce screens per session from 15.5 to 8, resulting in a cleaner UI as well as less back and forth in the game.

Gameplay Duration

Certain Affinity wanted to better understand the average duration of play to optimize the experience on mobile. Given that users tend to spend less time gaming on their mobile devices than in the console space, it was vital to ensure the game was consumable and enjoyable in the “bite sized” engagement window.

Certain Affinity leveraged session durations to understand the existing top-level behavior. In analyzing the data,they found that the typical session was over 25% longer in length than was ideal. They tracked events such as turn submission, undo, and return to main menu to identify any behavior that was artificially extending the average duration of play. Certain Affinity then specifically targeted optimization to the areas requiring the most work.

Custom Dimensions

By leveraging Google Analytics Custom Dimensions, Certain Affinity could measure analytics across a number of key metrics in the mobile gaming space including retention, virality, and monetization. While this data was not widely used until launch,the ability to verify collection was instrumental in ensuring a successful soft launch.“The flexibility GA provides is quite amazing. While no analytics provider will ever have everything you need out of the box, it is great to have a solution that allows us to implement our own requirements [through custom variables], so easily!” explains Certain Affinity’s Lead Server Engineer.

You can check out the full case study here.

Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics team

Projecting without a projector: sharing your smartphone content onto an arbitrary display

Posted by Yang Li, Research Scientist, Google Research

Previously, we presented Deep Shot, a system that allows a user to “capture” an application (such as Google Maps) running on a remote computer monitor via a smartphone camera and bring the application on the go. Today, we’d like to discuss how we support the opposite process, i.e., transferring mobile content to a remote display, again using the smartphone camera.

Although the computing power of today’s mobile devices grows at an accelerated rate, the form factor of these devices remains small, which constrains both the input and output bandwidth for mobile interaction. To address this issue, we investigated how to enable users to leverage nearby IO resources to operate their mobile devices. As part of the effort, we developed Open Project, an end-to-end framework that allows a user to “project” a native mobile application onto an arbitrary display using a smartphone camera, leveraging interaction spaces and input modality of the display. The display can range from a PC or laptop monitor, to a home Internet TV and to a public wall-sized display. Via an intuitive, projection-based metaphor, a user can easily share a mobile application by projecting it onto a target display.

Open Project is an open, scalable, web-based framework for enabling mobile sharing and collaboration. It can turn any computer display projectable instantaneously and without deployment. Developers can add support for Open Project in native mobile apps by simply linking a library, requiring no additional hardware or sensors. Our user participants responded highly positively to Open Project-enabled applications for mobile sharing and collaboration.

Introducing an all-new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

The phase of adolescence is a transitional one, and this year, on the 15th anniversary of DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) we find ourselves celebrating a big milestone: an entirely rebuilt campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, the coming of age of DFA. In June, we announced that DoubleClick Campaign Manager would be available to all advertisers in the coming months, and today I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched globally.

DoubleClick Campaign Manager is at the core of our DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. It re-imagines how marketers and agencies manage the entire scope of their digital marketing efforts - from planning and executing, to measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

Intuitive workflows that give you back time. With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we started by building new, time-saving features into a noticeably more beautiful and responsive user interface. This means the time gained from speeding things up can free up opportunities for you and your team to work on higher-value activities.

A new trafficking interface loads up to 5 times faster than before, and ads and ad changes now go live in just 2 minutes. You can also view campaign information centrally from a single page, rather than flipping across tabs. With in-line and bulk editing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks.

Easy tagging. Floodlight, DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag is integrated with Google Tag Manager. Now, you can push Floodlight tags directly from DoubleClick Campaign Manager to Google Tag Manager (and your site), reducing the time it takes to implement tags from weeks, to minutes.

Programmatic and reservations in one place. With one unified UI and reporting system across DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, you get access to accurate, de-duplicated conversion data. Creatives and tags are shared, and remarketing lists are synced so you can engage your audience seamlessly across every part of your buy.

Seamless support for mobile/HTML5, video, and rich media formats. DoubleClick Campaign Manager makes it easier to produce, scale, and traffic creative formats - from mobile and video, to rich media and dynamic.

A mobile-first approach. Mobile is built into the fabric of our platform. Support for IAB-compliant HTML5 creatives means a single creative can render on any device and help you take advantage of the engaging, rich-media capabilities of HTML5. We’ve ensured that your tags work everywhere too. There is no longer a separate mobile tag, and mobile targeting and reporting dimensions are automatically available in all served tags.

Powerful video features. An intuitive approach to video trafficking allows you to share and re-use companion ads across videos, and get a detailed performance breakdown. And support for the next wave of video formats - including interactive video and dynamic VPAID - helps you deliver more engaging videos. Additionally, you can now track your YouTube TrueView campaigns alongside all your other placements, allowing for more holistic insights.

Easier Rich Media. Integration with DoubleClick Studio allows you to easily sync creatives into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, saving you time and effort. New preview functionality allows you to test and QA creatives without relying on your creative agency. And you can create ads that are tailored to your audience with dynamic creative that optimizes the best combination of variables to serve the “perfect ad” for every impression.

New audience features help you surface key insights and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Create powerful remarketing lists based on custom Floodlight variables. Your lists are automatically shared with DoubleClick Bid Manager and updated in real-time, helping you establish second contact with your audience quickly.

New audience reporting gives you strategic insights. Audience is now a new dimension in standard reporting, so you can understand the segments with which your message best resonated. If you use DoubleClick Bid Manager, audience composition reporting shows you how your first party lists overlap with your third party lists. We will be bringing this capability to all customers soon.

Enhancements in reporting for better decisions. Reporting has always been the backbone of the DoubleClick platform, with de-duplicated reporting across channels. We built on this foundation last year with Report Builder, Multi-Channel Funnels, and DoubleClick Verification. Now, with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we bring you even more insightful reporting tools:

Powerful attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels helps you better understand your customers’ journey from initial interaction to final conversion and more accurately credit the channels and touchpoints that contributed to your conversions. With the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can choose from several basic models of assigning credit for impressions and clicks, or you can create your own model in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

Integration of Wildfire’s social technology platform with the DoubleClick attribution suite means you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving social conversions. Additionally, social ad impressions and clicks can be tracked directly in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, allowing you to measure your social programs alongside the rest of your efforts.

When DoubleClick for Advertisers was founded in 1998, we invested in the promise that digital can forge connections and bring value to advertisers, publishers and users. Today, as we celebrate its 15th anniversary, we’re excited to be investing in the next wave of digital marketing where we are even more connected than ever before.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Campaign Manager

'Access, Empower, Act' - Save the date for the 2013 Google Analytics Summit [#GASummit]

Our team is committed to keeping you at the bleeding edge of data. That's why we've continually made the content at our annual user summit more accessible. Last year we liveblogged the event on social and published a recap of key announcements. But we've heard you loud and clear: you want more. So we're excited to fulfill that request: this year, we're extending a virtual invitation to all our users.

Join us for a livestream of key sessions during our Google Analytics summit, on October 1 at 9:10a PT. Watch and hear about the future of marketing analytics from Google leadership: Paul Muret, Vice President of Google Analytics Engineering, and Babak Pahlavan, Director of Google Analytics Product Management. You will learn about new products we’re launching and hear three ways to take advantage of The Data Opportunity:

1. Connecting the right data to the right people.
2. Empowering every employee to analyze data 
3. How acting on insights drives organizations forward

Set the event reminder today, and be sure and join the conversation on Google+ and Twitter using the hashtag #GASummit. 

Posted by Suzanne Mumford Google Analytics Marketing

Google Analytics earns ISO 27001 certification

With infrastructure and services that include robust data protections for all customers, enterprises like Google are able to invest in security measures that might be challenging for businesses to attain on their own.  

We’re pleased to announce that Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium have earned the independent security standard ISO 27001 certification. As one of the world’s most widely recognized standards, ISO 27001 certifies the compliance of the systems serving Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium.

Assurances like these provide users with additional confidence and peace of mind when they use Google Analytics.  As Rob Jackson, Head of Elisa DBI, Havas Media explains, "Our clients take data security extremely seriously. Having Google Analytics attain ISO 27001 certification further strengthens our trust in the product and that our client's data is being protected at the highest standard."

Our compliance with the ISO standard was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, a member of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF). The validity of certificates issued by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint is recognized in all countries with an IAF member.

Posted by Paul Muret, Vice President of Engineering, Google Analytics

Learn From Googlers At These Upcoming Analytics Events

Fall is a busy time for the Google Analytics team. Conference season is in full swing, the Google Analytics summit is fast approaching and our product team is heads-down, focused on iterating and improving the product to create the future of Analytics. Things are likely moving fast for you as well, so we wanted to make sure you were updated on some of the key industry events our team members would be participating in this fall. Following is a brief list:

Justin Cutroni, Analytics Evangelist at Google, presenting on GA Premium in NY

September

9/26: ACCELERATE Conference, Columbus 

Accelerate is a “Ten Tips in Twenty Minutes” format conference on a wide range of digital analytics and marketing optimization topics.  Google’s own Krista Seiden will be speaking on “Ten Tips for Getting the Most out of Google’s Analytics Platforms.” Tips will include Krista’s practitioner viewpoint on best uses of Google Analytics dashboards, advanced segments, Content Experiments and Google Tag Manager. Learn more.

October

9/30-10/3: eMetrics Boston

eMetrics Summit is a comprehensive and forward thinking digital analytics forum sharing best practices, tools and techniques to optimize successful digital marketing programs. Krista Seiden will be there presenting on ‘The art of being a digital analyst and the road to management.’ Learn more.

10/16: 4A’s Data Summit, New York

This summit will feature data thought leaders and practitioners from agencies and key data and analytics companies who are data providers to agencies. Google’s Analytics Evangelist Justin Cutroni will participate on a mobile panel discussing how mobile data is changing the ad target landscape as well as customizing mobile experiences for users. Learn more.

10/24: eMetrics London

eMetrics Summit is a comprehensive and forward thinking digital analytics forum sharing best practices, tools and techniques to optimize successful digital marketing programs. Googler Daniel Waisberg will be there answering questions from attendants in a Google Analytics Q&A. Learn more.

10/24: Restaurant Innovation Summit, New York

Rapid change in how consumers want to pay for products and services is significantly affecting the restaurant industry. Restaurants of every size and in every segment plan to invest more in customer-facing and point-of-sale technology to enhance the customer experience. Justin Cutroni will be speaking on Universal Analytics and how it can be an entry into the big data world. Learn more.

10/25: Hawaii Social Media Summit

The Hawaii Social Media Summit is a chance to learn from the top social media leaders in this highly competitive, and ever-evolving field. Googler Adam Singer will be presenting on social media measurement best practices and how you can better value the entire customer journey - across social and your other digital channels. Learn more.

10/25: Online Marketing, Mobile & Social Media Travel Summit

Europe's premier event for social media, mobile and online marketing professionals from across the travel industry is back for another successful year. Daniel Waisberg will be in Attendance presenting on how to place Analytics at the heart of your Marketing Strategy Learn more.

10/27: PRSA National Conference in Philadelphia

Designed by communicators for communicators to increase ROI, the International Conference offers practical insight and networking for public relations professionals of all career levels, sectors, work environments and industries. Adam Singer will be sharing how to use data for real-time, smart and actionable insights to improve PR programs. Learn more.

November

11/8: SMX Milan

On the 7th and 8th November 2013 Milan will host for the first time ever in Italy the SMX – Search and Social Media Marketing Expo, a unique opportunity for both managers and experts to analyze and discuss the most innovative themes on digital marketing. Justin Cutroni will deliver a session on Universal Analytics and how this will change the future of measurement. Learn more.

11/12: Digital Analytics Association (DAA) Symposium, San Francisco

Join the San Francisco chapter of the Digital Analytics Association for a concentrated and fast-moving survey of the people, platforms and practices organizations are using today to play and win in the age of big data.  Justin Cutroni will share training and best practices for thinking holistically about your digital analytics across channels and platforms, with a focus on mobile. Learn more.

11/13: Smarter Travel Analytics Europe

The Smart Travel Analytics Europe Show: explores data, analytics and performance strategy for the European travel industry. Daniel Waisberg will be delivering a Google Analytics Travel Masterclass Learn more.

11/14: BEST Practices Conference, Seattle

Seattle’s weather may be notoriously dreary, but those of us who call it home know that the weather (and coffee) make it a great place for new ideas. BEST Seattle will again be held at the Seattle Art Museum and will feature a mix of strategic discussion, helpful instruction and room for creative thinking. Justin Cutroni will be presenting on the state of Google Analytics. Learn more.

December

12/4: REMIX Summit London

REMIX Global Summits tackle the big ideas shaping the future of the cultural sector. It is a forum where creative leaders from different sectors can exchange insights, ideas and work together towards common goals. Daniel Waisberg will deliver a workshop on the basics of measurement and optimization using Google Analytics. Learn more.

We hope to see you out at some of these conferences, but if you can’t make it be sure and follow Google Analytics on Google+ and Twitter where we always share inspirational and actionable bits from events.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Monitoring & Analyzing Error Pages (404s) Using Analytics

I recently wrote a post on the Google Analytics + page about monitoring error pages on websites. The post was well received and generated a healthy discussion on Google+, so I decided to write a more detailed article on the subject here.

First of all, what exactly is an error or 404 page? According to Wikipedia “The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested.” Or, in more general terms, the 404 is the error you get when the page you are looking for does not exist, usually because the link you clicked was broken.

Another important question is: why should I care? Often times the 404 is forgotten and no one cares to prioritize its optimization. I believe the answer to prioritization lies on section 2 of this post: by monitoring the percentage of users that arrive at this page you will be in a better position to know if (and how quickly) you should optimize your 404 page. In any case, even if the number of people viewing this page is low, you should at least have a page in the lines of your brand and try to add the elements described in section 1 below; after all, you don’t want to disappoint your customers!

In this post I propose a few techniques to help improve error pages, engage visitors and improve the website experience. The questions I will try to answer are the following:

1. How to build your 404 page?
2. How to monitor your 404 page traffic efficiently?
3. How to analyze & optimize 404 page success?

1. Error Pages Best Practices

Before we dive into Google Analytics, let’s take a look into some ways to create a great 404 page from the beginning. Following are some good usability insights proposed in a book called Defensive Design for the Web. The authors advise us to offer customized "Page Not Found" error pages; and they provide an interesting insight into how to create error pages:

Instead of merely saying a page is not found, your site needs to explain why a page can't be located and offer suggestions for getting to the right screen. Your site should lend a hand, not kick people when they are down. Smart things to include on your 404 page:

1. Your company's name and logo
2. An explanation of why the visitor is seeing this page
3. A list of common mistakes that may explain the problem
4. Links back to the homepage and/or other pages that might be relevant
5. A search engine that customers can use to find the right information
6. An email link so that visitors can report problems, missing pages, and so on

2. Monitoring Error Page Traffic

Suppose a prominent blog links to your site and the link is broken, this will cause a negative experience to users (which will not find what they expected) and to search engines (which will not crawl the right content). How long will it take until you notice it? How often do you check the traffic to your 404 page? Chances are you don’t do it every day, but you should! Or at least you should have someone look at it: why not let Google Analytics do it for you? 

Create an Alert on Google Analytics

In the screenshot below you will see how to set an alert on Google Analytics that will let you know each time your 404 pageviews increases above a certain threshold. This will enable you to do the work once and be alerted every time there is a problem. 

The alert below is based on the increase in error pageviews, but if you decide to create a goal (as suggested below) you could create the alert based on the goal too. Note that you can opt in to receive an email or a text message when the condition is met (404 pageviews increases more than 15% compare to previous day). Also note that I decided to define the 404 page based on the title of the page, very often there is no indication of an 404 page on the URL (read more about this below). 

To learn how to set a Custom Alert check this help center article.

Measure your 404 Page as a Goal

Setting the 404 page as a goal on Google Analytics will surface important information that can be achieved only through goals, e.g. the last three steps before getting to this page. Below is a screenshot on how to do it, but note that you would need to have an identifier on your URL (or trigger an event) in order to set your 404 as a Goal.

Add Your 404 Content Report to Your Dashboard

Every report on Google Analytics can be added to the dashboard. By adding the 404 page to your dashboard you will be able to constantly monitor the trend of visits to your 404 page. Learn more about customizing dashboards.

3. Analyzing & Optimizing Error Pages

Monitoring your 404 pages is important, but useless if you don't take action using this information. Taking action means doing all you can to decrease the number of people getting missing pages. Below I provide a few tips on how to find and fix both internal and external broken links.

Check Your Navigation Summary Report

This will help you understanding where did visitors come from from inside your site, i.e. it will tell you which pages contain internal broken links. You will also be able to understand what is the percentage of visitors that arrive to the 404 page from internal and external sources; the internal sources will be listed on this report. See navigation summary screenshot below:

Check 404 Page URLs

Learning which URLs are producing the errors is a great way to get rid of them. If you learn, for example, that 100 visitors a day get an error when they visit the page “/aboutS” you can infer that there is a broken link leading to it; sometimes it might not be possible to find the source of the error to fix the link, but you can add a redirect from that page to “/about”, which looks to be the right page. 

In order to do that you will need to find the report below, but please keep in mind that some assumptions were made to arrive at it. Most CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, and others) will return an error for non-existing pages on the actual content section, but they will keep the original URL; however, they will have a page title with the word 404 in it. So check your site to know if that is the case before you try the report below.

Once you find this report, click on the first entry and you will get a list of all the URLs that triggered an error page. Good luck with the redirects!

Measure Internal Searches From this Page

If you do not have a search box on your 404 page, you should seriously consider adding one. Through searches performed in this page you will be able to understand what people were expecting to find there and you will get insights on which links you should add to the page. If you don’t have Internal Site Search enabled on Google Analytics check this help center article.

Below are the metrics you will be able to analyze if you use this feature:

• Total Unique Searches: the number of times people started a search from the 404 page. Duplicate searches within a single visit are excluded.
• Results Pageviews/Search: the average number of times visitors viewed a search results page after performing a search.
• % Search Exits: the percentage of searches that resulted in an immediate exit from your site.
• % Search Refinements: the percentage of searches that resulted in another search (i.e. a new search using a different term).
• Time after Search: The average amount of time visitors spend on your site after performing a search.
• Search Depth: The average number of pages visitors viewed after performing a search.

Closing Thoughts

As we mentioned above, errors happen, and we must be prepared for them. We must give a hand to our visitors when they are most frustrated and help them feel comfortable again. The level of online patience and understanding is decreasing and users have a world of choices just one click away, so website owners cannot let one small error get on their way.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate

Broadening Google Patents

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

Cross-posted with the US Public Policy Blog, the European Public Policy Blog, and Inside Search Blog.

Last year, we launched two improvements to Google Patents: the Prior Art Finder and European Patent Office (EPO) patents. Today we’re happy to announce the addition of documents from four new patent agencies: China, Germany, Canada, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Many of these documents may provide prior art for future patent applications, and we hope their increased discoverability will improve the quality of patents in the U.S. and worldwide.

So if you want to learn about a Chinese dual-drive bicycle, a German valve for inflating bicycle tires, attach a Canadian trailer to your bike, or read the WIPO application for pedalling with one leg, those and millions of other inventions are now available on Google Patents.

Thanks to Google Translate, all patents are available in both their original languages and in English, and you can search across the world’s patents using terms in any of those languages. When there are multiple submission languages, you can move between them with a single click on the tabs at the top of the page, as shown in the screenshot below:

Happy patent searching!

We are joining the Open edX platform

Posted by Dan Clancy, Director of Research

A year ago, we released Course Builder, an experimental platform for online education at scale. Since then, individuals have created courses on everything from game theory to philanthropy, offered to curious people around the world. Universities and non-profit organizations have used the platform to experiment with MOOCs, while maintaining direct relationships with their participants. Google has published a number of courses including Introduction to Web Accessibility which opens for registration today. This platform is helping to deliver on our goal of making education more accessible through technology, and enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of cloud platform services.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform.

We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem, as learning expands in the online world. Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. Our industry is in the early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today.

We appreciate the community that has grown around the Course Builder open source project. We will continue to maintain Course Builder, but are focusing our development efforts on Open edX, and look forward to seeing edX’s MOOC.org platform develop. In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder. We hope that our continued contributions to open source education projects will enable anyone who builds online education products to benefit from our technology, services and scale. For learners, we believe that a more open online education ecosystem will make it easier for anyone to pick up new skills and concepts at any time, anywhere.

Make Your Websites More Accessible to More Users with Introduction to Web Accessibility

Eve Andersson, Manager, Accessibility Engineering

Cross-posted with Google Developer's Blog

You work hard to build clean, intuitive websites. Traffic is high and still climbing, and your website provides a great user experience for all your users, right? Now close your eyes. Is your website easily navigable? According to the World Health Organization, 285 million people are visually impaired. That’s more than the populations of England, Germany, and Japan combined!

As the web has continued to evolve, websites have become more interactive and complex, and this has led to a reduction in accessibility for some users. Fortunately, there are some simple techniques you can employ to make your websites more accessible to blind and low-vision users and increase your potential audience. Introduction to Web Accessibility is Google’s online course that helps you do just that.



You’ll learn to make easy accessibility updates, starting with your HTML structure, without breaking code or sacrificing a beautiful user experience. You’ll also learn tips and tricks to inspect the accessibility of your websites using Google Chrome extensions. Introduction to Web Accessibility runs with support from Google content experts from September 17th - 30th, and is recommended for developers with basic familiarity with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

There’s a lot to learn in the realm of web accessibility, and a lot of work to be done to ensure users aren’t excluded from being able to easily navigate the web. By introducing fundamental tips to improve web usage for users with visual impairments, Introduction to Web Accessibility is a starting point to learn how to build accessibility features into your code. Registration is now open, so sign up today and help push the web toward becoming truly universally accessible.

A Comparison of Five Google Online Courses

Posted by Julia Wilkowski, Senior Instructional Designer

Google has taught five open online courses in the past year, reaching nearly 400,000 interested students. In this post I will share observations from experiments with a year’s worth of these courses. We were particularly surprised by how the size of our courses evolved during the year; how students responded to a non-linear, problem-based MOOC; and the value that many students got out of the courses, even after the courses ended.

Observation #1: Course size
We have seen varying numbers of registered students in the courses. Our first two courses (Power Searching versions one and two) garnered significant interest with over 100,000 students registering for each course. Our more recent courses have attracted closer to 40,000 students each. It’s likely that this is a result of initial interest in MOOCs starting to decline as well as students realizing that online courses require significant commitment of time and effort. We’d like other MOOC content aggregators to share their results so that we can identify overall MOOC patterns.

*based on surveys sent only to course completers. Other satisfaction scores represent aggregate survey results sent to all registrants.

Observation #2: Completion rates
Comparing these five two-week courses, we notice that most of them illustrate a completion rate (measured by the number of students who meet the course criteria for completion divided by the total number of registrants) of between 11-16%. Advanced Power Searching was an outlier at only 4%. Why? A possible answer can be found by comparing the culminating projects for each course: Power Searching consisted of students completing a multiple choice test; Advanced Power Searching students completed case studies of applying skills to research problems. After grading their work, students also had to solve a final search challenge.

Advanced Power Searching also differed from all of the other courses in the way it presented content and activities. Power Searching offered videos and activities in a highly structured, linear path; Advanced Power Searching presented students with a selection of challenges followed by supporting lessons. We observed a decreasing number of views on each challenge page similar to the pattern in the linear course (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Unique page views for Power Searching and Advanced Power Searching

Students who did complete Advanced Power Searching expressed satisfaction with the course (95% of course completing students would recommend the course to others, compared with 94% of survey respondents from Power Searching). We surmise that the lower completion rate for Advanced Power Searching compared to Power Searching could be a result of the relative difficulty of this course (it assumed significantly more foundational knowledge than Power Searching), the unstructured nature of the course, or a combination of these and other factors.

Even though completion rates seem low when compared with traditional courses, we are excited about the sheer number of students we’ve reached through our courses (over 51,000 earning certificates of completion). If we offered the same content to classrooms of 30 students, it would take over four and a half years of daily classes to teach the same information!

Observation #3: Students have varied goals
We would also like to move the discussion beyond completion rates. We’ve noticed that students register for online courses for many different reasons. In Mapping with Google, we asked students to select a goal during registration. We discovered that

• 52% of registrants intended to complete the course
• 48% merely wanted to learn a few new things about Google’s mapping tools

Post-course surveys revealed that

• 78% of students achieved the goal they defined at registration
• 89% of students learned new features of Google Maps
• 76% reported learning new features of Google Earth

Though a much smaller percentage of students completed course requirements, these statistics show that many of the students attained their learning goals.

Observation #4: Continued interest in post-course access
After each course ended, we kept many of the course materials (videos, activities) available. Though we removed access to the forums, final projects/assessments, and teaching assistants, we have seen significant interest in the content as measured by Google and YouTube Analytics. The Power Searching course pages have generated nearly three million page views after the courses finished; viewers have watched over 160,000 hours (18 years!) of course videos. In the two months since Mapping with Google finished, we have seen over 70,000 unique visitors to the course pages.

In all of our courses, we saw a high number of students interested in learning online: 96% of Power Searching participants agreed or strongly agreed that they would take a course in a similar format. We have succeeded in teaching tens of thousands of students to be more savvy users of Google tools. Future posts will take an in-depth look at our experiments with self-graded assessments, community elements that enhance learning, and design elements that influence student success.