AdWords conversion tracking reports in DS

DoubleClick Search (DS) is expanding into supporting conversion tracking solutions beyond Floodlight activities. As a first step, we now give you the ability to pull AdWords conversion tracking columns directly from the DS interface!

• Save time: You no longer need to pull these metrics from two different sources to complete your reporting.


• Get fresher AdWords conversion data: AdWords conversion data is processed throughout the day for near-real-time conversion reporting. Read this Help Center article for more information on the freshness of this data.


• Onboard new advertisers more easily: This feature can be very beneficial for new advertisers who only track conversions in AdWords and have not yet implemented DoubleClick Floodlight activities.

To see these columns in DS:

1. Above the performance summary graph, click Columns to access the column selection tool.


2. Under Available columns, navigate to Engine stats > AdWords Conversions.


3. Add the desired AdWords conversion tracking columns to your report.


4. In your report, look for the columns that begin with AW.

This initial launch is reporting-only, but if the demand is there as we hope, we’ll make plans to support bid strategies on top of AdWords conversion tracking data.

Simplify your workflow today with these new reporting columns!

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

YouTube invites you to cheer for Indian athletes at the London 2012 Olympic Games

With the excitement building up for the London 2012 Olympic Games, we’ve lined up a special treat for all of you by bringing live coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games to India and 63 other countries and territories across Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa on the IOC’s channel www.youtube.com/olympics. And we’re inviting all of you to join us and cheer for the Indian squad at the Olympics 2012.



As part of this initiative, we’re very excited to launch a special theme song composed by the noted music composer Shantanu Moitra and lyricist Swanand Kirkire titled “Aap Agar Saath Hain. Tou Jeet Bhi Saath Hai”. And that’s not all, to gather more support for the athletes from their hometowns, we’ve also launched the YouTube Bus for Olympics, which will travel across nine key cities including hometowns of the athletes from Punjab and Haryana. The bus will offer an opportunity to watch Olympic Games live on YouTube on the bus and learn more about the history of Indian athletes at the Olympics.










Millions of Indians will be able catch 10 high-definition live-streams of the London games and one dedicated Olympic news feed. All these feeds will be available to users on their desktop, tablet, or mobile device free of cost. Users will also be able to watch catch-up content and highlights, divided by event.



In addition to the anthem, we’ve also produced a series of specially shot ‘Know your Stars’ & ‘Know your Sport’ videos featuring the Indian athletes like Sandeep Singh (Indian Hockey team), Mary Kom (Boxing), Heena Sidhu (Shooting) and many more. We hope that these videos will help YouTube users to know more about our Indian contingent at the Olympic Games 2012 and the sports they play.



YouTube Bus for Olympics will commence its journey from Gurgaon on 26th July and end at Jalandhar on the 14th of August covering nine key cities in Punjab & Haryana in this period.





Details of the Bus Journey:

• 26th July - 27th July - Gurgaon


• 28th July - 29th July - Sonipat


• 30th July - 31st July - Bhiwani


• 1st Aug - 2nd Aug - Hissar


• 4th Aug - 5th Aug - Kurukshetra


• 6th Aug - 7th Aug - Dera Basi


• 8th Aug - 9th Aug - Patiala


• 11th Aug - 12th Aug - Faridkot


• 13th Aug - 14th Aug - Jalandhar

Posted by Nikhil Rungta, Country Head Marketing, Google India

New way to submit feedback about the administrator control panel

Google Apps is changing the way in which we collect your feedback. To provide feedback about the administrator control panel, navigate to the page you'd like to improve and click the 'Send Feedback' link at the bottom.

If you are experiencing an issue or would like to reach out to someone directly, please contact support. Contact information is available under the Support tab.

Editions included:
Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education

Languages supported:
All languages supported

For more information:
http://www.google.com/tools/feedback
http://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/learnmore.html



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Tracking Adjusted Bounce Rate In Google Analytics

Have you ever wondered how many visitors really pay attention to your website before exiting the page? Have you wondered how many of those “bounced” visitors will remember where they’ve been in future? How many of them are totally useless, how many are not?

There is a way to track this!

“Bounce rate” in Google Analytics is one of the key metrics that helps to evaluate the quality of your traffic. “Bounce” happens when the visitor exited the website right from the landing page, without going to any other page. This is a great indication on how relevant the content was for the user and how engaged they were with your website.

While working perfect for most websites, there are categories of sites where this metric is not enough. 

Imagine you’re promoting a blog post that describes all the benefits of your company. The visitor might read the whole post and remember your company and products really well - they might even go to search for your product on one of the search engines straight away. However, since the visitor only looked at 1 page (exactly where the blog post is) they will be recorded as bounced visitor.

Another example if you have a description of the product right on the landing page, and your phone number on the same page. The visitor might study the description and call straight away - again, they will be recorded as a bounced visitor, as only 1 page was viewed. There are many more examples, and even traditional websites may benefit from the method described below as opposed to the standard bounce rate.

There is a solution to this - something that we call “Adjusted bounce rate”. You implement a small tweak to your Google Analytics code, which executes an event when a user has spent over a certain amount of time on the webpage. Depending on the website, the time can range from 10 seconds to few minutes - you should decide for yourself the amount of time you consider the user to be sufficiently engaged with your website or product.

Once the event is executed, the visitor is no longer counted as “bounce,” even though no additional pageview is recorded. This will mean your bounce rate will show users who have not spent a required “minimal time” on your website - the ones who have really bounced. Here is a modification to the Google Analytics code that you need to make (on the example of the latest, asynchronous code):

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];

  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);

  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '15_seconds', 'read'])",15000);

  (function() {

    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;

    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

  })();

</script>

The setTimeout function is the one that does the trick here, and you can set it up to whatever delay you wish (in this case, it is 15 seconds).

Moreover, since the event is created once 15 seconds lapse, you can define this event as a goal in Google Analytics, and even import this goal as a conversion to AdWords, provided the conditions are met.

We hope this small fix will allow you to track and understand the users’ behavior and quality of the traffic coming to your website more accurately, and make more informed decisions. One thing website owners should be vary of, though, that not only the function may slow down the users' experience, even insignificantly, but will also increase the volume of hits your site sends to Google Analytics, which might bring your usage over the limit (currently set at 10 mln hits per month). As such, this fix should only be applied when necessary and justified by the concept of the website and the landing pages.

Posted by Alexey Petrov, Google Analytics Insights Team

Scheduled Release track features update 7/24/12

- Documents: Users will have the ability to edit documents and leave comments offline. You must be running the latest version of Chrome or ChromeOS and install the Google Drive Chrome app to edit offline.

- Drive: Google Drive automatically deletes versions of files when they're older than 30 days or there are more than 100 previous versions of the same file. A new feature allows Drive users to specify that certain revisions should be kept forever.



The following features are intended for release to these domains on July 31st:

- Documents: Users will have the ability to create documents offline. You must be running the latest version of Chrome or ChromeOS and install the Google Drive Chrome app to use this feature.



Release track: 

Scheduled*



Editions included: 

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education



For more information:

Documents:

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/06/announcing-your-two-most-requested.html

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/07/offline-updates-and-quick-look-back-at.html

http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&hlrm=en&answer=1628469



Drive:

https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375120&p=dialog_autodelete



*Scheduled Release track: Domains with ‘Scheduled Release’ option enabled in the administrator control panel. Learn more.



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What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

Our engineers have been hard at work during the last few weeks to provide you with some new, exciting features in DFP. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.


Available in DFP:

Teams: Imagine that your organization operates an East and West coast sales team, and you'd like to restrict access to your East coast orders and advertisers so only users on your East coast team can view and edit the campaigns. With the new Teams functionality in DFP, you can now group your network's users into teams, defined by you, enabling you to restrict access to any combination of companies, orders and inventory. Learn more.

Auto-Macro Insertion for Creative Templates: The key to successfully serving third-party creatives and minimizing discrepancies is to make sure that you are properly inserting macros into the third-party code. A macro is a short piece of code provided by DFP that will enable your third-party tags to properly track clicks or track impressions.  In addition to automatically inserting macros for reconginzed third-party creatives, DFP will now also recognize and insert macros for  third-party code in custom creatives and custom creative templates. This provides you with the same macro-insertion support and efficiencies you are used to when trafficking regular 3rd party creatives.

Ad Exclusions: There are situations when you will want to avoid an advertiser running on a competitor's website. For example, if you've got a news story about a plane crash, you probably don't want to run airline ads next to it. Ad Exclusions provide controls to prevent labelled line items to deliver on specific inventory. These labels can additionally be added per default on company level to ensure a smoother workflow for your trafficking operations.


Creative Upload for Standalone Creative Library: The recently launched Standalone Creative Library now supports the ability to upload creatives and creatives sets directly, which can be stored for later use.

Local Time Zone Trafficking: In addition to being able to change the role and language you use DFP in, you can now change a DFP user's time zone to match the user's location. When you do, the displayed times throughout the trafficking sections of DFP will be adjusted to match the time in the location you've set for the user.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Additional Reporting Scheduling options: We’ve added further  granularity to reporting scheduling options to give you more insights into the health of your inventory. You can now schedule your reports with additional breakdowns such as year-to-date, quarter-to-date, month-to-date, and lifetime.

SDK Mediation for Mobile: SDK Mediation is a form of ad network optimization for mobile in DFP which allows you to set up a waterfall (or daisy chain) of networks, where one network after another is called until an impression is filled. Use this new feature to send impressions from mobile applications to ad networks via the ad networks' own SDKs.This is useful when:

• An ad network only accepts requests from its own SDK


• Certain custom formats are only available in the ad network's SDK


• Information provided by the SDK, such as location information or a unique user ID, enables higher CPMs

Available in DFP Mobile:

Frequency Capping: Frequency capping is now available for mobile in two ways:

• Line item frequency capping: For mobile web, this uses cookies in a similar fashion as desktop (the DoubleClick cookie where possible; otherwise the DFP first party cookie). For mobile applications, this uses a double-anonymised identifier generated by the Google AdMob SDK.


• Ad unit frequency capping: Ad unit frequency capping now works for mobile in cases where there is an identifier available.

Available in DFP Video:

• Fallback Image for VAST Non-linear ads: It’s now possible to display a fallback image when VAST non-linear ads fail to render.


• VPAID Creative Validation: DFP will validate hosted linear and non-linear VPAID creatives and notify the user if it's invalid.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

Understanding And Using Page Value

When Google launched Google Analytics many moons ago (2005 to be exact) there was a metric named $Index. It wasn’t your standard analytics metric, like pageviews or visits. It was a calculated metric to help businesses understand value of content. Unfortunately $Index was removed from Google Analytics version 5 due to some technical limitations.

But now it’s back as a new metric named Page Value!

How Page Value Is Calculated

Page Value is calculated using the value of your transactions and your goals. So even if you don’t have an ecommerce website you can still use Page Value. Just make sure you have defined some goals and assigned them a value. (If you need more information about defining and tracking conversions check out our Getting Started Fast with Google Analytics webinar).

Here’s the exact formula of how Page Value is calculated:

Page Value = (Transaction Revenue + Total Goal Value) / Unique Pageviews for the page

Page Value can also be calculated for a group of pages, like a directory. In that case the definition changes slightly.

Page Value = (Transaction Revenue + Total Goal Value) / Total unique Pageviews for the group of pages

Remember, a unique pageview is just a count of visits that include the page. If a page is viewed five times in a single visit, Google Analytics will count five pageviews but one unique pageview.

Now there are a couple of things to be aware of. The calculation does not include all transaction and goal revenue for the entire visit. It’s only the goal conversions and transactions that happen after the page is viewed, not before the page is viewed.

Enough of the math and description, let’s look at an example. 

Here are two hypothetical visits:

Visit #1 activity:

Visit #2 activity:

Here’s how Google Analytics would calculate the value of Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3.

Page 1: ($100 revenue + $40 revenue + $0 goal value) / 2 unique pageviews = $70

Page 2: ($100 revenue + $40 revenue + $0 goal value) / 2 unique pageviews = $70

Page 3: ($100 transaction revenue + $0 goal value) / 1 unique pageviews = $100

How to Use Page Value

Page value is a measure of influence. It’s a single number that can help you better understand which pages on your site drive conversions and revenue. Pages with a high Page Value are more influential than pages with a low Page Value.

Get started by reviewing the Page Value column in the Content > All Pages report.

Your site probably has a lot of pages. Here’s a tip, use the Advanced Table Filter in the content report to remove some of the noise from this data. You can set up a filter to exclude pages with a Page Value of 0 or less than 30 pageviews. 

If you’re an ecommerce company you’ll immediately notice that the most valuable pages on your site are your checkout pages. This makes sense because everyone needs to view the checkout pages before converting.

Start by looking for pages that get a lot of traffic (pageviews) but have a low Page Value. Why don’t these pages help conversion? Should they? Use some of the other metrics, like Avg. Time on Page, Bounce Rate  or Exit Rate to get a better picture of the user experience on this page. 

If people are using the page, but not ultimately converting you may want to use some of the other content tools, like Flow Visualization, to get a better understanding of their experience after using a piece of content. 

Also look for pages that get a low volume of traffic but have a high Page Value. These pages are influential but don’t get a lot of attention. You might consider promoting them more via an external marketing campaign (email, PPC, social media) or an internal campaign (homepage banner, etc.).

If you work in SEO then you should definitely check out the Page Value for the content you are optimizing.

Page Value is not a silver bullet. It does not magically generate more conversions for your business. But it is an actionable metric that can help you understand the behavior of your visitors.

Posted by Google Analytics Advocate Justin Cutroni