Simplifying eCommerce reporting across international sites with multiple currencies

It’s quite common for organizations to have complex reporting requirements that combine multiple data sources. In these cases, an efficient way to get at Google Analytics data is to use the API. But for those without the development resources needed to access the API there are many Google Analytics Apps available that can offer a solution. The following mini case study is about Analytics Canvas, a 3rd party Google Analytics App. Analytics Canvas helped Fairmont Raffles Hotels International take a complex reporting task and make it easy.

Like most global organizations, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International has regionally operated business units. Each unit typically maintains its own reporting profile in Google Analytics. But with individual business unit profiles, how do you analyze the data across all the business units? And, how do you combine external business data with each of these Google Analytics profiles?

For Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, the answers lie in the Analytics Canvas tool from nModal. Analytics Canvas is an easy to use, drag-n-drop interface for creating data queries and transformations needed for advanced reports and dashboards. Analytics Canvas can extract data from multiple Google Analytics accounts, combine it with additional data sources, and then segment and filter the data.

Barbara Pezzi, Director Analytics & Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, uses Analytics Canvas to automate her complex reporting tasks. “We trade in over 10 different currencies on our websites. We needed to have multiple international hotels’ eCommerce data converted to a common currency in various reports, such as ‘All Traffic Sources’ and ‘Campaigns’, to analyze the overall production of each traffic channel and marketing initiative. Traditionally we would have to export data from multiple profiles and do currency conversion by hand in spreadsheets. With almost 100 hotels, the large number of profiles made it a very time consuming and potentially error prone task to get a multi-hotel, single currency report.” With Analytics Canvas, Fairmont automated this task in minutes with a single currency report for all its hotels.

Analytics Canvas was built by nModal Solutions Inc using the Google Analytics API. Here is what James Standen, the founder of nModal, has to say “The Google Analytics API is very easy to use and the full access to data makes it possible to make a very powerful query interface. So far we’ve had a great response to Analytics Canvas. People are very pleased to have greater access to their web traffic data, and we’re thrilled to hear about the interesting new applications and integrations our customers are able to do using our tool.”

Join the GA team and Partners at GAUGE NYC

This is a guest post from Caleb Whitmore from Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Caleb is also the Chair of the Google Analytics Users’ Great Event (GAUGE) conference. We hope you’ll join the members of the GA team and GA Partners in New York for GAUGE.

The GAUGE Google Analytics User Conference in New York City is just around the corner on October 17th and 18th. It’s not to late to grab a spot and and catch up on the latest and greatest with Google Analytics, learn from top experts on GA, and meet other users of the product and members of the Google Analytics team! More information and registration is at www.gaugecon.com. Use code GBLOG10 for a 10% registration discount.

Whether you’re new to using Google Analytics or a veteran user with years of experience, there’s always something new to learn about the product thanks to the rapid change of the Internet and the hard work of the Analytics team at Google to continually improve GA. So, how can you keep your knowledge of how Google Analytics works and what you can do with it? There’s a great answer: Google Analytics User Conferences!

Attendees at GAUGE in San Francisco

I have the privilege of leading one such conference: GAUGE, or as we call it, the Google Analytics Users’ Great Event. GAUGE is one of many flavors of Google Analytics User Conferences popping up all over the world, led by cohorts of Google Analytics Certified Partners. The New York GAUGE event is presented by: Analytics Pros, Blue State Digital, Cardinal Path, and E-Nor. This event is also co-located with Data Driven Business Week, which includes eMetrics, Conversion Conference, Predictive Analytics World, IMC, and Text Analytics World.

Our goal with GAUGE is to create an event that is by users, for users and insanely practical. I started GAUGE after going to one-too-many conferences where great ideas were presented but little practical “how-to do this with Google Analytics” guidance was given. The GAUGE in New York is a two-day event that includes:

• 24 hands-on sessions and workshops led by top Google Analytics experts
• Two keynote addresses: Mythbusting Google Analytics by Stephane Hamel and How to use GA data by Piyanka Jaine
• “What’s New with Google Analytics” presented by Phil Mui of Google
• Q&A session with Google Analytics engineers
• Analytics Helpdesk where you can get direct consultation from a Google Analytics pro
• Exhibits from Google Analytics application developers
• Networking with Googlers and other GA users, and more!

Google Analytics blog readers can use code GBLOG10 for a 10% registration discount.  We also have a 15% discount for WAA members, a 25% discount for teams of 3 or more from the same company as well as a 50% discount for government and non-profit employees. You can contact gauge@analyticspros.com with registration questions.

If you’re not able to attend GAUGE in New York, consider attending our San Francisco event in early 2012, or watch for other Google Analytics conferences and training events happening around the world (here’s a page listing some recent/forthcoming events).

Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics for everyone

Back in June, we announced a pilot program to allow users to surface Google Search data in Google Analytics by linking their Webmaster Tools accounts. We’ve been busy making some improvements and tweaks based on user feedback, and today we’re excited to make this set of reports available to all users.

The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results. We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section. The reports you’ll find there are:

• Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
• Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
• Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

Queries report

To start using the reports you first need to link your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts. You can get step by step instructions and additional information on the reports in this Help Center article. If you’re not already using Webmaster Tools, we highly recommend you start. It’s a free tool that helps you understand how Google sees your site.

What’s happening on your site right now?

The web is getting faster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change. Before, it was fine to build a website and modify it only when new products were launched. All of us avid Analytics users know that’s just not good enough. We need to be constantly on the lookout for problems and opportunities.

Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.

Measuring social media impact
One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.

For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.

Campaign measurement
Another way I’m using Real-Time is to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a campaign. When getting ready to launch a new campaign it’s critical to make sure your measurement plan is working before you start driving visitors to the page. With the Real-Time reports you can find out in seconds whether you’re getting the data you want in Google Analytics.

Accessing Real-Time
You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the updated interface next week) . You will have access to Real-Time reports if you are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a profile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.

We just turned the reports on for a number of you, and over the coming weeks, everyone will have access to Real-Time. If you can’t wait, sign up for early access here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/. We’d love to hear about how you are using (or planning to use) Real-Time, so please share in the comments.

Design updates to the new interface coming next week

In March, we unveiled the new version of Google Analytics that included, along with many other improvements, a redesigned user interface. Since then we’ve heard from many of you on how we can improve different aspects of the design.

Designers from our User Experience team took a step back objectively asked “How can we make Analytics better?” They focused on the core organization (our information architecture) and way-finding as areas that could be improved. What followed were a series of brainstorming sessions with engineers and product managers, analysis of your feedback, customer interviews, card-sort studies, and general user testing – all done to iterate on our product while keeping our users involved in the process.

Next week we’ll release these changes. The biggest change you’ll notice is that we have simplified the primary navigation into three tabs – Home, Standard Reporting, and Custom Reporting – to give you quicker access to the information that matters. We also incorporated the second layer of navigation that appeared in “My Site” throughout the Home and Standard Reporting tabs.

Here’s what you can expect in each tab:

Home: The Home tab holds all reports and features that allow you to quickly understand what is happening on your site. You’ll find your custom dashboards here as well as your automatic and custom alerts from Google Analytics Intelligence.

Standard Reporting: All the built-in reports to understand your audience, advertising impact, traffic sources, conversions, content, and more are now displayed in one central place.

We’re also excited about the addition of a report finder in the Standard Reporting tab. This will allow you to type the name of a report you’re interested in and quickly navigate to it without needing to hunt for it in the proper section.

Custom Reporting: Google Analytics lets you build your own reports to get exactly the data you need. With the new tab, we’re making Custom Reports a more important part of the interface. You’ll be able to access any reports you’ve created here and build new ones.

So what’s next for our designers? We have a number of improvements planned to the overall Analytics interface to bring more focus on data, as well as exciting new features that will make analyzing data faster and easier.

If you’d like to help shape Google Analytics and want to participate in future user studies, please register here.