Last week in Mountainview at the Computer science history museum, Google analytics certified partners, Google Analytics Premium customers, Googlers and a select group of five software vendors attended the annual Google Analytics Summit. Analytics Canvas was proud to have been invited again this year by Google to present our latest version and participate.
This was a particularly exciting summit, as Google made some very significant announcements regarding the future and direction of Google Analytics. Many of these are game changing, particularly for enterprise users. At a high level, I see two key points.
- User Centricity Google Analytics is moving from a session centric to a USER (read customer) centric model
- Data Import and linking It is now possible to load data INTO Google Analytics to enrich analysis, as well as to link external enterprise data sources to GA data based on user (customer) ids
First, rather than thinking about individual visits, the underlying model of Universal Analytics will be customer centric. Companies can build their analytics to revolve around customers, their actions, behaviors and the profitability attached to them. This means that web analyics data can become less isolated from other customer data and improves accross the enterprise visibility, bringing Google Analytics into the main stream of all tracking, not just web analytics.
The second point makes the first one actually work- because a large number of your customer interactions occur outside of your website, in places like customer relationship management systems (CRM) or enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), or point of sale (POS) to have a true global view of the customer, this data has to be tied into your Google Analytics Data.
Analytics Canvas will continue to provide the data integration and analysis capabilities needed, particularly by Google Analytics Premium customers to fully take advantage of all of the GA capabilities and to tie Google Analytics in ever more powerful ways to enterprise data. Companies that embrace these new capabilities are going to have visibility accross their entire operations and marketing process that will be a significant competitive advantage.
For a detailed overview of some of the new features that are bringing about these changes, Justin Cutroni from Google put together a great summary on his blog.
We’ll be blogging and talking much more about what all this means for integration going forward. To discuss this with us directly, feel free to contact us.
As an aside If you like computers then if you are ever in Mountainview you should definitely check out the museum- this is a place where there is a cray super computer across the room from a full size working model of one of Babbages difference engine designs- very cool for data folks.