Engagement Jumps 30% for Wyndham Vacation Rentals With Help from Google Analytics Premium

Wyndham Vacation Rentals runs 9,000 North American rental properties from the mountains of Utah to the beaches of South Carolina.  As you can imagine, that many guests and destinations creates some interesting challenges for Wyndham's online booking system.  

They turned to Google Analytics Premium and Google Tag Manager for help, and we've just published a new case study showing the results. (Spoiler alert: property search CTRs are up by 30%.)

Wyndham did some very clever things with both tools. For instance, they used Google Tag Manager to implement Google Analytics Premium Custom Dimensions to capture user behavior around metrics like rental dates and length of stay. Then they used Google Analytics Premium to dig into the details and gather insights. That's how they learned that, while a "good view" is one of the top things customers included in searches, the scenic view attribute actually had a lower conversion rate than other features offered in their suites.  

As a result, Wyndham redesigned its search results to put the properties with the most profitable mix of attributes on the first page. The Wyndham team also learned how far in advance people begin searching for various vacations, and have adjusted their campaigns and spending to match the peaks in demand.

With changes like these, Wyndham's customers are maintaining more interest through all stages of the funnel. Wyndham says its property search CTR has skyrocketed by more than 30%. Here's what Nadir Ali, their Director of eCommerce Analytics, has to say about this success:

“Google Analytics Premium is helping us connect the dots. As a data-driven organization, we strive to approach each business challenge objectively and back our assumptions with data. Google Analytics Premium gives us the flexibility to customize the data we collect in a manner that makes it easy to answer our business questions.” 

We're always happy to see the creative ways partners use Google Analytics Premium and tools like Google Tag Manager. Congrats to Wyndham on some excellent (and ongoing) results.

See the Wyndham Vacation Rentals case study

Posted by Rachel Reader, Google Analytics Marketing

Progressive Builds a Better Mobile App with Google Analytics Premium

You've probably seen Progressive Insurance's terrific commercials with Flo the enthusiastic cashier. But have you seen their terrific new mobile app?

It's a story of perseverance. Their full site at Progressive.com has been rated as America's best insurance carrier website for more than a decade.¹ But a few years back, as consumers shifted to mobile, the company realized it needed to make a whole new push to build a mobile app that matched its customers' changing behavior. They had a mobile app—they just didn't have a great mobile app. 

Progressive recognized to get started, they'd need sophisticated analytics to really understand what their customers wanted most from a mobile experience. They turned to Google Analytics Premium, in combination with other Google measurement tools, for the solution. Features like Custom Reports, Custom Dimensions and the integration with BigQuery let them streamline the app testing process, spot the root causes of app crashes, and simplify user logins.

“The Google Analytics Premium user interface lets us easily understand the consumer experience on apps. Both our IT and Business organizations rely on this data.” — Kaitlin Marvin, Digital Analytics Architect, Progressive Insurance

Google Analytics Premium helped Progressive move fast. Their team lowered app testing time by 20% and boosted successful customer logins by 30%. The result is a mobile app that may not be quite as famous as Flo, but continues the best-in-class tradition that keeps Progressive customers happy and loyal. 

See how they did it: read the full Progressive case study.

¹Progressive Insurance, "Keynote Recognizes Progressive Insurance for the 24th Time as Premiere Insurance Carrier Website," March 17, 2015.

Posted by Rachel Reader, Google Analytics Marketing

L'Oréal Canada finds beauty in programmatic buying

Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

While global sales of L'Oréal Luxe makeup brand Shu Uemura were booming, reaching its target audience across North America proved challenging. By collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld (and his cat, Choupette) and using DoubleClick Bid Manager and Google Analytics Premium, the campaign delivered nearly double the anticipated revenue.

Goals	Re-introduce and raise awareness of the Shu Uemura cosmetics brand in North America Drive North American sales of Karl Lagerfeld’s Shupette collection for Shu Uemura Grow the Shu Uemura email subscriber list
Approach	Organized website audiences with Google Analytics Premium Used programmatic buying to lead prospects down the path to purchase Leveraged a range of audience data in DoubleClick Bid Manager to buy paid media in display and social channels
Results	Drove almost 2X the anticipated revenue Exceeded CPA targets and achieved a 2,200% return on ad spend (ROAS) Increased web traffic and email subscribers

To learn more about Shu Uemura’s approach, check out the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

BT Increases Sales Volume and Efficiency Using DoubleClick Bid Manager With Google Analytics Premium

Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

Modern marketers live in a world that’s dominated by data. Advancements in programmatic buying enable marketers to leverage data and analytics to connect precisely, in real time. Advertisers who are smart about organizing, segmenting, and acting on this data are realizing the benefits of more personalized marketing. BT, a leading telecommunications firm in the UK, did just that and saw fantastic results.  

BT wanted to increase the relevance of their remarketing campaigns by creating more precise audience lists. With the help of their media agency Maxus, BT found that using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager offered the ideal solution. 

Google Analytics Premium gave BT the ability to create granular audience segments based on site behavior metrics such as recency, frequency, referral source, and stage of cart abandonment. Once these audience lists were created, the native integration between Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager meant they could be shared with the platform to make more precise media buys in just a few clicks.

Using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager put Maxus and BT in the driver’s seat of their media campaigns. They not only gleaned full transparency with a single customer view and de-duplicated metrics across all channels, but also saw better measurement through unified reporting, and the ability to optimize based on the results.

”Our goals were to build up ‘best practices’ of programmatic display remarketing techniques with a focus on driving post-click sales,” says Alison Thorburn, Head of Digital DR Media at BT. “The DoubleClick suite of products enabled us to do this quickly and efficiently as audience data can be easily organized and utilized.” 

The new analytics-driven approach produced a 69% increase in post-click sales and an 87% reduction in post-click cost per acquisition compared to the previous year’s remarketing activity. It also compared favorably to the remarketing activity that ran simultaneously outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager; post-click sales were 30% higher and post-click cost per acquisition was 42% lower. BT has now consolidated its display remarketing through DoubleClick BidManager.

Read the full case study here.

Posted by-

Kelley Sternhagen, Product Marketing, Google Analytics

Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

AccuWeather Unlocks Cross-Channel Impact Using Google Analytics Premium

“The ability to overlay our own data on top of traditional dimensions and metrics has provided valuable insights into the kind of information our consumers are looking for.” 

-- Steve Mummey, Director of Browser Products at AccuWeather

AccuWeather is the world’s largest weather media company with over 1 billion people a day relying on AccuWeather’s suite of products to give them real-time weather information. Today we wanted to highlight AccuWeather’s success with the Measurement Protocol in Google Analytics Premium. The Measurement Protocol is a feature where businesses can send requests to Google Analytics from countless customer touchpoints. 

Measuring the complete customer journey

AccuWeather needed to find a way to increase the impact of digital across all its channels and products. They were determined to find a robust solution that collected data from each customer touchpoint to give a comprehensive analysis to make better business decisions.

The team wanted to sought out accomplish four goals: 1) analyze the effectiveness of weather forecast emails 2) attribute credit to campaigns that drove users to app store pages, 3) better understand their mobile audience, and 4) collect this new data without compromising AccuWeather’s fast and simple user experience.

Google Analytics Premium solves the challenge

Using Google Analytics Premium, plus the Measurement Protocol, allowed AccuWeather to report on a variety of the company’s services simultaneously from one source. AccuWeather was able to have information from emails, mobile devices, and QR codes sent through the Measurement Protocol. This feature provided the AccuWeather team with a complete picture in the Google Analytics reporting interface alongside their other metrics.

Data-driven decisions that drive action

As a result of the sophisticated and comprehensive set of Google Analytics Premium features, AccuWeather has been able to more accurately identify the source of app downloads to track application traffic from QR codes and other offline campaigns to the app stores.

The team’s analysis revealed that 10% of the brand’s mobile traffic came from devices that either did not support JavaScript or had the feature disabled. Without using the Measurement Protocol in Google Analytics Premium, they would never have been able to account for this portion of its audience. The team can now include this audience in its product and monetization decisions.

Pleased with the success of this solution, AccuWeather now plans to apply it to other parts of its business to uncover new insights, new leads, and, of course, new customers. 

You can read AccuWeather’s full story and dive deeper into the results here. To learn more on the Measurement Protocol, check out this video.

Posted by: the Google Analytics Premium team

With Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick: Matalan increases conversion rate 28%

This post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser blog as part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

As one of the UK's leading family clothing retailers, Matalan must be nimble -- faster decisions mean better customer engagement and more sales. So they worked with Morpheus Media to implement Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Google Analytics' powerful insights helped Matalan make better business decisions, faster.

Matalan was already using DoubleClick Campaign Manager to centralize their digital marketing and reports. Adding Google Analytics Premium side-by-side showed them campaign effectiveness even more clearly, allowing them to uncover the hidden value of their digital marketing efforts, like transactions where digital advertising had assisted a conversion on another channel.

“It’s really helpful to be able to see one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel,” says Lee Pinnington, Matalan's Multi-Channel Marketing Director.

With a complete view of their digital marketing ROI thanks to the integration of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics Premium, Matalan was able to put their marketing dollars where they would truly be most effective. And the results were dramatic: a 28% rise in conversion rate and significant growth in both site visits and revenue.

To learn more about Matalan's approach, check out the full case study.

U.S. Cellular reveals true impact of digital media on sales with Google Analytics Premium

With 10.6 million cell phone customers and retail stores in 400+ markets, U.S. Cellular needs to reach a lot of people with marketing messages. That's why U.S. Cellular uses many marketing channels -- online, in-store and telesales -- to drive mobile phone activations.

U.S. Cellular was challenged though. They didn’t know how many of their offline sales were driven by their digital marketing. This made it harder to adjust their media mix accordingly and also to forecast sales. To fix that situation, U.S. Cellular and its digital-analytics firm, Cardinal Path, turned to Google Analytics Premium and its integration with BigQuery. 

Part of Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery allows for highly flexible analysis of large datasets. The U.S. Cellular team used it to integrate and analyze terabytes of data from Google Analytics Premium and other systems. Then they mapped consumer behavior across online and offline marketing channels. Each transaction was attributed to the consumer touchpoints that the buyer had made across various sales channels. 

The result: U.S. Cellular got real insight into digital’s role in their sales. They were surprised to find that they could reclassify nearly half of all their offline activations to online marketing channels.

U.S. Cellular now uses this complete (and fully automatic) analytics framework to really see the consumer journey and forecast sales for each channel. Their team has the data they need to make better business decisions. 

“We’re now in the enviable position of having an accurate view at each stage of our customer journey," says Katie Birmingham, a digital & e-commerce analyst for the company. "The Google Analytics Premium solution not only gives us a business advantage, but helps us shape a great customer experience, and ultimately ties in to our values of industry-leading innovation and world-class customer service.”

Be sure to read the full case study. 

Posted by: Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Premium Marketing

Rooms To Go Improves the Shopper Experience by Integrating Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery

Rooms To Go, a home furnishing retailer, simplifies the shopping experience by offering completely designed room packages. When the company wanted to better understand how its customers purchase its different furniture and decor variations and add-ons to streamline online customization options, it turned to its agency -  LunaMetrics - who integrated Google Analytics Premium and BigQuery. This approach helped to identify which items customers commonly buy together, leading to smarter and easier customization for its users.

The Google Analytics Premium integration allowed Rooms To Go to:

• Better understand what their site visitors were purchasing
• Organize the data and isolate the products that were frequently purchased together in order to discover customer buying patterns
• Expand functionalities of the website to accommodate these customer patterns—for example, making it easier for users to add extra dining chairs when purchasing a dining room set

Overall, this strategy helped Rooms To Go create a better user experience for its customers, and the company expects an increase in sales because of it. Read the full case study on Think with Google, and learn about being a Google Analytics Premium customer here.

New Google Analytics Premium Feature: Unsampled Reports in the Management API

Today, we are adding Unsampled Reports to the Google Analytics Management API for Google Analytics Premium customers. 

Accurate analysis when you’re not online

Enterprise analytics users need to execute complicated, ad hoc reports and download them into their own systems. The Unsampled Reports feature provides accurate analysis of large unsampled data sets. 

Easily integrate data

This enhancement to our Management API offers a new way to access unsampled data, so you’re free to spend more time on other strategic areas of your business. It also increases the integrity of the data in your internal systems and provides the flexibility to access your data in a way that best fits your business needs. For example, you can integrate the API into your Business Intelligence (BI) system to retrieve unsampled data, and to provide accurate metrics that support your critical business decisions.  

How it works

When you create an Unsampled Report using the API, it is processed in an offline manner. The completed reports are available through the API and under the Customization tab in the Unsampled Reports section. You can define whether you would like the report to be saved in Google Drive or in Google Cloud Storage. Read the Unsampled Reports API documentation for more details.

Posted by Yaniv Yaakubovich, Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium

Broader views and faster action for marketers: Google Analytics Premium integrates with DoubleClick Digital Marketing

“With Google, we’re getting actionable insights, whereas before we were just getting a lot of data.”

- Lee Pinnington, Multi-Channel Marketing Director, Matalan

As we announced earlier this week, Google Analytics Premium is now integrated with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This enhancement is now available for Google Analytics Premium customers.

Today's consumers move easily across many channels and devices on their journey to a purchase. Top marketers rely on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to run the sophisticated cross-channel ad campaigns that can reach their customers every step of the way. This new step gives Google Analytics Premium users even better ways to see the full customer journey, so they can adjust and make the most of marketing dollars across all channels and devices. 

The integration is providing a whole new level of visibility for display advertising by reporting on view-through visits in addition to click-through visits.  We're now reporting detailed post-view and post-click engagement and conversion metrics to offer a better view of your strongest opportunities.

1. A clearer view of the customer journey

Display campaigns are typically used in the upper funnel, so they don't get credit in simplistic last-click attribution models. But better attribution models can give full credit to display and other top-of-funnel marketing tools. With the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration you can link your DoubleClick Campaign Manager campaign information into Google Analytics Premium reports, Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) and/or Data-Driven Attribution (DDA), and as a result, you'll see a much more holistic view of how display works together with other channels to drive site engagement and conversions.  

“This gives us the ability to see the hidden power of different channels. One of the most interesting things about the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration has been around assisted conversions. It’s really helpful to see how one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel.”

 - Adam McCann, Online Search & Affiliate Assistant, Matalan

2. Better investment decisions

With a complete view of the customer journey, you can make smarter decisions on how to allocate your marketing spend. This change helps Google Analytics Premium customers analyze campaigns and ROI at the level that matters to them most, even down to specific versions of creative. It's even easier now to act on this data in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, since Google Analytics Premium uses the same campaign hierarchy and dimensions as DoubleClick Campaign Manager. 

3. Greater speed

The integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager means you can spend less time merging campaign data and more time planning winning strategies.  We've also made this integration easier, starting with new automatic campaign tagging within DoubleClick for Google Analytics Premium. In the past you had to manually tag every single campaign, creative and landing page URL for them to be recognized in Google Analytics Premium. Now, in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, a simple checkbox makes it incredibly easy to accurately track those campaigns in Google Analytics Premium. 

4. Automated and customized marketing

Advertisers are seeing great results with Google Analytics remarketing, for example, Watchfinder revealed a 1300% return on their campaign investment. We’re improving these tools by enabling you to create granular remarketing lists from your Google Analytics Premium account and then share the lists with a DoubleClick Bid Manager advertiser account for real-time remarketing. Plus, Google Analytics Smart Lists feature also works with this integration, allowing you to generate a remarketing list of your best users automatically, based on machine learning from their conversion data. 

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.  

- Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

The amazing changes in customer journeys are opening up real opportunities for businesses. Making the most of those opportunities starts with seeing the journey more clearly, then reacting quickly to reach the right customers at the right moments with messages that are designed just for them. This new integration is designed to help Google Analytics Premium customers do all those things. We’re just getting started as we’re planning deeper integrations within DoubleClick Digital Marketing in the coming months so stay tuned!

Learn more today and get started

Find out more about the Google Analytics Premium integrations with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager.  And download a case study. 

Posted by: Ravi Mruthyunjaya, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Google Analytics Summit 2014: What’s Next And On The Horizon For Analytics

As they have for years, Google Analytics Certified Partners, Premium customers and developers will once again join us in the Bay Area for our annual summit this week. We are constantly working to improve our products based on feedback from our most dedicated users and this event lets us hear directly from our community. We wanted to share an overview of some of the tools and features we’ll discuss at the 2014 summit so that even if you aren’t able to attend, you can about hear what’s next. 

Enhanced Ecommerce

Google Analytics Ecommerce data traditionally focused on details about the purchase - transaction details, product details, and others. But, marketers today want to understand the entire customer journey. They want more details about customer behavior when looking at products, interacting with merchandising units and on-site marketing. Today we’re announcing the beta for Enhanced Ecommerce - a complete revamp of how Google Analytics measures the Ecommerce experience. 

Businesses can now gain clear insight into new important metrics about shopper behavior and conversion including: product detail views, ‘add to cart’ actions, internal campaign clicks, the success of internal merchandising tools, the checkout process, and purchase. Merchants will be able to understand how far along users get in the buying process and where they are dropping off. For a complete overview of new features, have a look at our Help Center.

For marketers and Ecommerce managers looking to hone their analytic skills, we are also announcing a new Analytics Academy course titled Ecommerce Analytics: From Data to Decisions. Students will be guided through interactive examples of analyses for a fictional retail company to practice techniques they can apply to their own business. You can sign-up to be notified when this course opens on the Analytics Academy site.

Flexible and Scalable Reporting  

Today’s marketers and analysts are looking to multiple data sets to gain deeper insights. We’re working on a number of new features to make it simple for businesses to work with different types of data in Google Analytics.  

• We unveiled Unified Channel Groupings to ensure all traffic that comes to the your site are classified in-line with your unique channel definitions. This is especially valuable for attribution, so marketers can interpret and report on the consumer journey based on their unique view of acquisition channels. 

• We’ve expanded the functionality of Google Analytics Dimension Widening, now called ‘Data Import’, to enable customers to import more of their own data into Google Analytics. This could include specific product details, information about returned products, insights about your customers’ preferences, and more. Imported data can be used with almost all of the standard Google Analytics features. For a complete list of the types of data you can import please see our article in the help center (linked above).

• For Google Analytics Premium users, we’re introducing Custom Tables. This powerful feature enables users to retrieve unsampled data using customized tables that best fit their business’ needs. Once configured, fresh data will be available daily for unsampled analysis and segmentation. 

Enterprise-Class Features

Today, smart marketers are increasingly tying measurement to media execution. We’re excited to announce a seamless integration between Google Analytics Premium, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Google Analytics Premium is uniquely positioned to help today’s advertiser understand how customers, and potential customers, interact with advertising media trafficked on the DoubleClick platform. In addition to understanding impression level data, advertisers can now send remarketing lists from Google Analytics to DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.  

-Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

Additionally, for enterprise customers, service providers, or developers that manage many accounts we are offering 4 new APIs to help you save you time and increase productivity: the new Provisioning API to create new GA accounts (invite only), the AdWords and Filters API to manage configurations, and the Embed API to surface key reports and dashboards. We’ve also re-launched the App Gallery as the Partner Gallery, the new destination to find services by Google Analytics Certified Partners and apps by Google Analytics Technology Partners. The new gallery will rollout to all users over the coming week.

Stay tuned in the next several days for deep-dives about our various new tools and features. You can also sign-up for the whitelist of several of the features listed above here. Thank you to our partners, developers, and customers for all the great feedback over the year. We hope to continue developing and launches capabilities that matters to you most.  

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Google Analytics Premium launches executive-level business reporting

“Prior to using roll-up reporting we had no way to see all of our sites in a single Google Analytics view. Now we can easily compare our nine sites and react to trends in real time. This means that a product manager with a hunch about a new traffic pattern can quickly prove/disprove a theory without wasting hours of time pulling numbers for every site.”   - Jesse Knight, VICE Media Group

Google Analytics already helps you gather deep insights into one website or app at a time. But what if you want to understand the overall performance and interactions of all your company’s digital properties? In today’s multi-touchpoint consumer world, this is a much greater priority. 

Today we’re launching Roll-Up Reporting in Google Analytics Premium to help address this need. Roll-Up Reporting is a single interface that moves your aggregate business data much closer to your high-level business decisions.

The Executive Dashboard

One spot with aggregate data for all your sites and apps? Check. Key summaries with no compromises on data accuracy and segmentation? Check. Everything available in real time? Check. With Roll-Up Reporting, there's no need to export from dozens of properties and collate data offline. It's all built in.

Spot Overperforming Business Units

Suppose you want to compare the performance of the sites and apps for your company’s various brands, franchises or regional subsidiaries. The new Source Properties Report has you covered, with at-a-glance views of business units that are outperforming or underperforming. To compare specific segments, try using the new Source Property Display Name dimension in advanced segments, in custom reports, or as a secondary dimension. 

A Single View of Your Customer Journey

In many cases, Roll-Up Reporting can de-duplicate unique visitors across your websites and apps, so you can see the total unique-visitor reach of all your digital properties. You can also use segments to study the overlap and pathing of visitors who traverse several of your sites and apps. If your business owns multiple brands or franchises that target similar consumer populations, or if you expect the same consumer to interact with multiple marketing or landing sites over time, be sure to try this out. 

This is also a great way to tie together platform and device touchpoints. Google Analytics already provides powerful features, like cross device reports and single-view app and web data, to help you report on multiple types together. With Roll-Up Reporting, you’re no longer restricted to reporting on those tied to the same Google Analytics Property. That means more agile setups and more powerful analysis.

Fast Setup:

Roll-Up Reporting is made possible by Roll-Up Properties, a special type of Google Analytics property whose hit data comes exclusively from other Analytics properties. Setting up a Roll-Up Property is straightforward: no tagging changes needed. Simply select the Google Analytics properties that need to be reported on together, and Google Analytics will configure each selected property, called a Source Property, to forward a modified copy of all future hits it receives to the Roll-Up Property. 

To get started with Roll-Up Reporting, contact your Google Analytics Premium Account Manager to request your new Roll-Up Properties. 

To learn even more about Google Analytics Premium, contact your Google Account Manager or visit google.com/analytics/premium.

Posted by Yi Han, on behalf of the Google Analytics Premium team

Zillow uses Google Analytics Premium to make data-driven decisions

Google Analytics Premium lets Zillow grow and scale their company.

“A host of functions at Zillow use Google Analytics every day… Marketing, business intelligence, design, engineering and usability are using it to drive product decisions, user experience decisions, and business decisions.”

- Jeremy Wacksman, VP Marketing at Zillow

Zillow is the home and real estate marketplace that helps people share vital information about home values, rentals, mortgages and a lot more. Zillow was founded in 2005 and now has over 110 million U.S. homes in its living database. (That name? A combination of “zillions of data points” and the pillows where happy homeowners rest their heads.)

Recently we sat down with Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow’s VP of Marketing, to learn how they’ve been using Google Analytics Premium to help them grow at such an amazing pace. Here’s what he told us:

This comment stands out: “As an Internet company that has reinvented itself as a mobile-first business, analytics across devices is a big challenge for us.”  

A lot of companies are reinventing themselves for mobile today, and we’ve been working hard to make sure Google Analytics Premium can help them measure all those new cross-device journeys. The goal, as always, is to help businesses gather meaningful data, easily discover insights that they can act upon to improve results and boost the bottom line.

Learn more about Google Analytics Premium here.

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Advocate

How attribution modeling increases profit for Baby Supermall

"Attribution modeling changes everything."

That's what Joe Meier of Baby Supermall told us recently.  If you're looking for alphabets or monkeys on your new baby bedding, Baby Supermall is the place to be. But those products have an unusually long buying cycle. "Our typical customer is a pregnant mother-to-be," says Meier. "They have months to make a decision."

In this video, Meier describes how Google Analytics’ attribution modeling tool let them measure the impact of different marketing touch points before customers finally made a purchase. So they could figure out which of their marketing activities led all those moms (and dads) to visit the Baby Supermall site. It also saved him from the monster 80-megabyte spreadsheets he'd been building as he tried to manually figure those patterns out. 

Result? “We’re spending our money more efficiently than we were before. We know what we’re getting for it,” says Meier. By linking their Google Analytics and Adwords accounts, Baby Supermall was able to see the impact of different keywords and optimize their AdWords ads, bringing in “tens of thousands of dollars in additional sales every week."

He calls the results "groundbreaking." Check out the video:

(PS: Don't miss their site if you happen to like very cute baby bedding.)

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by: Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Fairmont Gets Deeper Understanding of Social Interactions for Real Results

How do you improve social messaging for some of the world's most prestigious hotels? If you're Fairmont Raffles Hotels, you turn to Google Analytics. 

Fairmont is famous for its nearly 100 global luxury hotels, from the original Raffles Hotel in Singapore to the grand Empress Fairmont in Victoria, B.C.  The variety of the properties can make social impact tricky to measure, says Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics & SEO.

Charmingly direct, Pezzi says her team tried other social media analytics tools and found that "the metrics were really lame. Number of likes and retweets — that didn't really tell us anything." They wanted to know exactly who they were attracting and how.

Once the Fairmont team began using Google Analytics, they were able to see their audiences more clearly and tailor messages to fit. The results were impressive: a doubling of bookings and revenue from social media. 

Here's the whole story:

"It was a big revelation for everyone" — when it comes to analytics, those are the magic words.

Learn more about Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium here.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Intuit Team Crunches its Own Numbers with Google Analytics Premium

Intuit products like Quicken and TurboTax have been putting the power of numbers in the hands of users since 1983.

Which is why we're so pleased that when Intuit wanted to boost the power of analytics for one of their own teams recently, they turned to Google Analytics Premium. The details are in our new case study, which you'll find here.

The study has the full story of Intuit's Channel Marketing Team, which now uses Google Analytics Premium to measure data for multiple business segments. Once they began using it, Intuit discovered that they had been under-reporting the success of their SEO traffic by at least 27% and conversions by up to 200%.  

Those are exactly the kind of vital numbers that Google Analytics Premium is designed to provide.  

Intuit used Blast Analytics and Marketing, a Google Analytics certified partner, to build out their solution, which was configured to match Intuit's own organizational structure. That structure helped Intuit "democratize" its data so that now anyone on the team can get what they need right away, in real time. Instead of the two days it used to take to request and deliver reports, it takes two hours or less.

Simply put, Ken Wach, Vice President of Marketing at Intuit said, “Google Analytics Premium increased the speed and accuracy of actionable data that drives our business.” 

For more, read the full Intuit case study or learn about Google Analytics Premium.

Post by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Learning what moves the needle most with Data-Driven Attribution

"Tremendously useful."  That's what Chris Bawden of the TechSmith Corporation says about Data-Driven Attribution.

What is Data-Driven Attribution? Well, in August we launched a new leap in technology that uses algorithmic models and reports to help take the guesswork out of attribution. And it's available now to Google Analytics Premium customers around the world.

Data-Driven Attribution uses statistical probabilities and economic algorithms to analyze each customer's journey in a new way. You define the results that count — sales, sign-ups, or whatever matters to you— and the model assigns value to marketing touchpoints automatically, comparing actions and probabilities to show you which digital channels and keywords move the needle most. 

The bottom line: better returns on your marketing and ad spend. 

We checked in with companies using DDA and results have been strong:

• "Data Driven Attribution really showed us where we were driving conversions," says Will Lin, Senior Director of Global eMarketing for HomeAway. They saw a 23% increase in attributed conversions for their test keywords after making changes suggested by Data Driven Attribution. Download case study.

• TechSmith Corporation saw a 19% increase in attributed conversions under the Data Driven Attribution model. "It uncovered growth potential we would have not seen otherwise," reports Nicole Remington, their Search Marketing Manager. Download case study.

• And the digital analytics firm MaassMedia saw display leads increase 10% while costs per lead remained flat. "We now have a much more accurate measure of how display impacts our business," one of their clients told them. Download case study.

In short, the early returns for DDA users have been strong. Some of the key advantages of this model:

Algorithmic and automatic: The model distributes credit across marketing channels scientifically, based on success metrics you define. 

Transparent: Our unique Model Explorer gives you full insight into how marketing touch points are valued — no “black box” methodology.

Actionable: Detailed insights into both converting and non-converting paths offer clear guidance for your marketing decisions.

Cross-platform: DDA is deeply integrated with other Google products like AdWords, the Google Display Network, and YouTube, and you can pull in data from most any digital channel.

You'll learn much more about the benefits of Data-Driven Attribution when you download our cheat sheet. Or to learn more about Google Analytics Premium, contact your Google Account Manager or visit google.com/analytics/premium.

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, and Jody Shapiro, Product Manager for Google Analytics Premium