Google Launches Updated Google Analytics

Google today launched an updated Google Analytics platform with new machine learning capabilities, unified app and web reporting, native integrations, and privacy updates. Google is calling this the biggest overhaul of Google Analytics in nearly a decade.

The new Google Analytics features include the following:

• Advanced machine learning models that can automatically alert users to significant trends in their data, like calculating churn or purchase probability;
• Unified measurement to remove fragmentation and help businesses understand how all channels are performing in real time;
• Integrations between Analytics and Google Ads, helping users measure in-app and web conversions across Google and non-Google paid channels, YouTube video campaigns, and organic channels like Search, social, and email; and
• Privacy-safe measurement with new controls to help users better manage their usage of data.

Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president of measurement, analytics, and buying platforms at Google, wrote in a blog post earlier today, calls this latest release a "more intelligent Google Analytics that builds on the foundation of the App + Web property we introduced in beta last year. It has machine learning at its core to automatically surface helpful insights and gives you a complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. It’s privacy-centric by design, so you can rely on Analytics even as industry changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers create gaps in your data. The new Google Analytics will give you the essential insights you need to be ready for what's next."

She highlights new predictive metrics, like the potential revenue users could earn from a particular group of customers, allowing them "to create audiences to reach higher value customers and run analyses to better understand why some customers are likely to spend more than others, so you can take action to improve your results."

The new Analytics "uses multiple identity spaces, including marketer-provided user IDs and unique Google signals from users opted into ads personalization, to give you a more complete view of how your customers interact with your business. For example, you can see if customers first discover your business from an ad on the web then later install your app and make purchases there," she said.

"You'll also get a better understanding of your customers across their entire lifecycle, from acquisition to conversion and retention. This is critical when people's needs are rapidly changing and you have to make real-time decisions in order to win and keep new customers," she said. "Because the technology landscape continues to evolve, the new Analytics is designed to adapt to a future with or without cookies or identifiers. It uses a flexible approach to measurement, and in the future, will include modeling to fill in the gaps where the data may be incomplete. "