California, 13 July 2018: As the most widely used web analytics service, Google Analytics continues to play a powerful role in helping marketers define and simplify their customer’s journey. The just-announced ‘cross-device features’ added to Google Analytics will help marketers to understand their customer’s journey across multiple devices and the way they interact with websites across their digital journey. This comprehensive customer view and their entire cross-device journey, according to Google, will allow marketers to assess the impact of their marketing campaigns more effectively. At the same time, marketers will get an idea of what’s working and what’s not, so they can run smarter and more personalized campaigns for enhanced and more tailored customer experience.
How it works
Before this launch, Google Analytics would deliver metrics that would show two separate sessions: one on desktop and the other on mobile. With cross-device reporting, marketers can see when users visited their websites at multiple times from different devices. These reports empower marketers to understand the customer-device interaction and their journey, as that forms a part of a broader customer experience. Jesse Savage, Director, Product Management, Google Analytics, shared an example: “Say you’re a marketer for a travel company. With the new Acquisition Device report, you may find that a lot of your customers first come to your website on mobile to do their initial research before booking a trip later on desktop. Based on that insight, you might choose to prioritize mobile ad campaigns to reach people as they start to plan their trip.”
The 3 types of Cross-Device report available in Google Analytics are:
- Device Overlap Report: provides marketers with the tools that they need to organize data across multiple devices into a single meaningful analysis. It will give them a better idea about how seemingly unrelated touch points, interactions and sessions are co-related when it comes to customer journey. Marketers use this report to connect the data gathered from devices and the customer interactions from different sessions, to get a better view of the users, and to predict their next step in the conversion process.
- Device Paths Report: helps marketers see the sequence of device categories that are used for engaging content. This report lets marketers discover the ways a user moves from one device to another, consumes content and progresses towards conversion. Marketers use this report to optimize the device-specific experience while enhancing the ad strategy in sync with the engagements and activities, as customers proceed towards conversion.
- Acquisition Device Report: combining the attribution and traffic metrics, this report helps marketers see the relationship between user acquisition and conversion. Precisely, it shows 3 aspects: how many users acquired on a device convert on the same type of device, how many users convert on a different type of device and how many don’t convert at all. It gives an overall picture of all the types of devices involved in attracting customers and guiding them through the decision-making journey before converting them.
Also Read: Google Analytics 360 Suite for Enterprise Marketers
Putting it all together for a better CX
‘Analytics will now help you create smarter audiences based on the actions people take on various devices. That way, you can deliver more relevant and useful experiences,’ says a Google release. Google claims that the feature will guide marketers to segment their audiences and build remarketing campaigns to reach them across devices and channels with more relevant and enhanced experiences.