Marketing Analytics Archives Marketing Analytics

Jun 28 2024

What Is Bounce Rate & How To Audit It via @sejournal, @vahandev

Many people talk about how important it is to have a “low bounce rate.”

But bounce rate is one of the most misunderstood metrics in SEO and digital marketing.

This article will explore the complexities of bounce rate and why it’s not as straightforward as you might think.

You’ll also learn how to analyze your bounce using Google Analytics 4 exploration reports.

In order to understand what bounce rate is, we need to define what engaged sessions are according to GA4.

What Is An Engaged Session?

An engaged session in GA4 is a session which meets either of the following criteria:

Lasts at least 10 seconds.
Has key event (formerly conversions).
Has at least two screen views (or pageviews).

Simply put, if a user lands on your homepage and leaves without converting (key event), that would produce a 100 percent bounce rate for that session.

If one lands and visits a second page or signs up for your newsletter (as you defined it as a key event), that would mean the bounce rate for that session is 0%.

What Is Bounce Rate In Google Analytics?

Bounce rate is a percentage of unengaged sessions, and it is calculated with the following formula:

(total sessions/unengaged sessions)*100.

So, it’s not only visiting a second page that brings the bounce rate down but also when key events occur.

You can set up any event, either built-in or custom-defined in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), to count as a key event (formerly conversion), and in cases when it occurs during the session, it will be counted as a non-bounce visit.

Here is how to define any event as a key event:

Navigate to Admin.
Under Data display, navigate to Events.
Find the event you are interested in and toggle Mark as key event to turn it blue.

How to mark events as key events in GA.

How To Change The Default Engaged Session Timer In GA4

As a marketer, you may want to adjust the default 10-second timer for engaged sessions based on your project needs.

For example, if you have a blog article, you may want to set the timer as high as 20 seconds, but if you have a product page where users typically take more time to explore details, you might increase the timer to 30 seconds to better reflect user engagement.

To change:

Navigate to Data streams and click on the stream.
In the slide popup, navigate to Configure tag settings.
In the second slide popup, click Show more at the bottom.
Click on the Adjust session timeout setting.
Change Adjust timer for engaged sessions to the value of your choice.

Here is the detailed video guide on how to adjust the timer for engaged sessions:

What Is A Good Bounce Rate?

So, it’s not as straightforward as saying, “Example.com has a bounce rate of 43 percent, and example2.com has a bounce rate of 20 percent; therefore, example2.com performs better.”

For example, if you search [what’s on at the cinema…], then land on a website and have to dig through five pages of the site to find what’s showing, the website might have a low bounce rate but will have a poor user experience.

In this case, that’s misleading if you consider a low bounce rate good.

On top of that, what use is there in measuring the bounce rate for the whole website when you have lots of different templates that are laid out and designed in different ways, and you track ‘key events,’ aka conversions, differently?

In most cases, this shows that your marketing is effective and well-targeted, and visitors are engaging with your content and wanting to know more.

Remember, bounce rate is not a ranking factor, but when users navigate deeper into your pages, it is an engagement ranking signal that Google may take into account, according to what Google’s Pandu Nayak said during hearings.

That said, it may make sense to track the number of sessions with two or more pageviews in GA4, which you may want to consider as a KPI when reporting.

How To Set Up A Custom Audience With Multiple Pageviews Per Session

If you want to know how many visitors you have who have more than two page views in a session, you can easily set it up in GA4.

To do that:

Navigate to Admin.
Under Data display, navigate to Audiences.
Click the New Audience blue button on the top right corner.
Click Create custom audience.
Set up a name for your audience.
Select scope to “Within the same session.”
Select session_start.
Click And and select “page_views” with the parameter with “Event count” greater than one.

You simply tell it to add to my audience all users who viewed more than two pages within the same session. Here is a quick video guide on how to do that.

You can set up audiences with any granularity, like sessions with exactly two or three pageviews and greater than three pageviews.

Later, you can filter your standard reports using your custom audiences.

How To Do Bounce Rate Reporting And Audit

Next time your boss or client asks you, “Why is my bounce rate so high?” – first, send them this article.

Second, conduct an in-depth bounce rate audit to understand what’s going on.

Here’s how I do it.

Bounce Rate by Date Range

Look at bounce rates on your website for a particular period. This is the most simple reporting on bounce rate.

To do that:

Navigate to Explorations on the right-side menu.
Click ‘Blank’ report.
From Metrics choose “Bounce rate.”
Set Values to a “Bounce rate.”
Under Settings (2nd column), choose visualization type “Line chart.”
Select the date period of your choice.

How to set up a bounce rate report for the entire website by date range.

If you see spikes in the chart, it may indicate a change you made to the website that influenced the bounce rate.

How To Analyze Bounce Rate On A Page Level

When running a lead generation campaign on many different landing pages, evaluating which pages convert well or poorly is vital to optimize them for better performance.

Another example use case of page-level bounce reports is A/B testing.

To do that:

Navigate to Explorations on the right-side menu.
Click Blank report.
From Metrics, choose Bounce rate and Sessions.
From Dimensions, choose Landing page + query string.
Under Settings (second column), choose visualization type ‘Table.”
Set Rows to a “Landing page + query string.”
Set Values to a “Bounce rate: and “Sessions.”
Set the filter to include pages with more than 100 sessions ( to ensure the data you’re mining is statistically significant).
Select the date period of your choice.

Tip: You don’t need to create a new blank exploration report; instead, add another tab to the same report and change only the configuration.

How to set up page level-bounce rate report.

If we don’t filter by sessions number, you’ll be looking at bounce rates on some pages with only one or two sessions, which doesn’t tell you anything.

Once you’ve done the above, repeat the process per channel to gain an even more rounded understanding of what content/source combinations produce the most or least engaged visits.

How To Analyze Your Bounce Rates By Traffic Channel

Bounce rates can be wildly different depending on the source of traffic.

For example, it’s likely that search traffic will produce a low bounce rate while social and display traffic might produce a high bounce rate.

So you also have to consider bounce rate on a channel level as well as on a page level.

The bounce rate from social and display is almost always higher than “inbound” channels for these reasons:

When a user is on social media looking through their news feed, they are (often) not actively looking for what we are promoting.
When a user sees a banner ad on another website, they are (often) not actively looking for what we are promoting.

However, for inbound channels like organic and paid search, it’s logical that the bounce rate is lower as these users are actively searching for what you are promoting.

So, you capture their attention during the “doing” phase of their buyer’s journey (depending on the search term in question).

To dig deeper into each one:

From Metrics, choose Bounce rate and Sessions.
From Dimensions, choose Session default channel group.
Under Settings (second column), choose visualization type Table.
Set Rows to a Session default channel group.
Set Values to a Bounce rate and Sessions.
Select the date period of your choice.

How to set up a bounce rate report by traffic channels.

A little homework: Try to plot a line graph based on the bounce rate for your organic traffic.

Now, you can dig deeper into the data and look for patterns or reasons that one page or set of pages/source or set of sources has a higher or lower bounce rate.

Compile the information in an easy-to-read format, ping it to the powers that be, and head for a congratulatory coffee.

Do You Have The Right Intent?

Sometimes, you’ll find pages that rank in search engines for terms that have more than one meaning.

For example, a recent one I discovered was a page on a website I manage that ranks first for the search term ‘Alang Alang’ (the name of a villa), but Alang Alang is also the name of a film.

The villa page had a high bounce rate, and one reason for this is that some of the visitors landing on that page were actually looking for the film, not the villa.

By doing keyword and competition research to see what results your target keywords produce, you can quickly understand if you have any pages that rank well for terms that could be intended for other topics.

When you identify such pages, you have three options:

Completely change your keyword targeting.
Remove the page from the SERPs.
Overhaul your title and meta description, so searchers know explicitly what the page is about before they click.

How To Increase Website Engagement

Now you’ve figured out what’s going wrong, you’re all set to make some changes.

All of this depends on your study’s findings, so not all of these points are relevant to every scenario, but this should be a good starting point.

Most importantly track custom events as “key events” (conversions) so things like newsletter sign-ups result in Google Analytics classifying that as a non-bounce even if the user didn’t visit a second page.

Is High Bounce Rate Bad?

Hopefully, you now understand why bounce rate isn’t simply “high” or “low”. It depends on many factors, and there is no single answer to the question, “Is high bounce rate bad?”

If you defined your ‘key events’ (conversions) and GA4 settings correctly for your goals, a high bounce ( +90% ) rate is definitely concerning because it means your visitors don’t engage enough with your webpages.

But if you have GA4 on default settings, you can never rely on data because of the reasons we discussed above.

Never assume anything. Do your research and make sure you configure your GA4 account properly to track ‘key events.’

Now, go forth and conquer your bounce rate!

More resources:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

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Jun 18 2024

Razorfish R-Index Turns Consumer Data Silos Into Strategic Insights via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Razorfish launched a new technology called R-Index that measures disparate online and offline customer interactions (including for paid and owned interactions) and generates prescriptive insights on consumer sentiment, brand performance and business impact. R-Index turns otherwise disconnected data into strategic insights on consumer journeys and brand sentiment.

R-Index is based on a custom algorithm that leverages Google Cloud, Big Query, and a suite of machine learning and Vertex AI, working together to analyze what customers are doing at every step and providing actionable insights about customer insights and learning how to engage with customers better.

What Is R-Index About?

I interviewed Razorfish to get a better idea of what R-Index is and why it’s an important tool for brands.

I asked Razorfish about what’s being measured:

“R-Index helps measure brand performance, consumer sentiment, and business impact. It includes a brand’s experience touchpoints across the consumer journey, including paid and owned interactions.”

The press release notes how there’s an abundance of data about “moments that matter” but that its inherent disparate quality makes it challenging to get a holistic picture of what it all means and extract meaning from it. So I asked them to elaborate on that.

“The holistic journey looks different for different consumers and consumer journeys. R-Index aims to capture how consumers start their journeys through purchase and loyalty, and distill how resonant each of these touchpoints are along the journey into a single, easy-to-use metric.

A moment that matters is a specific engagement that a consumer has with any of our experience touchpoints, whether that’s marketing, going to a website, etc. These are the moments where we see
more engagement based on our observations. They can be different across consumers and segments.

As we analyze what the consumer is doing across the full journey, we’re identifying touchpoints that are resonating more and helping brands refine and optimize those experiences. This could be increasing the frequency, delivering a more personalized message, or focusing on a specific touchpoint. But with R-Index, we’re capitalizing on this behavioral data and using it to serve consumers better.”

What are the concrete real-world “touchpoints” you are referring to?

“Real-world touchpoints include call data, CRM information, web traffic, mobile app clicks, ad traffic or offline interactions like TV. As the number of avenues for consumers to interact with a brand continues to increase, data from those sources is continuing to fragment and shift further into silos.

Similarly, despite recent delays, third-party cookies will continue to deprecate and newer regulations will further the challenges in data collection, making it vital for brands to be able to access and process any and all data options into one source.

When you think about how traditional measurement tools have looked at performance (ex: acquisition and how that works across specific channels, paid media, or television) they aren’t really connected to measuring the actual sentiment or perception of consumers and how these translate into specific business value for brands.

And sentiment descriptions really differ from brand to brand, as some labels that are considered “negative” for one brand might not be the same for another.

R-index is meant to aggregate all the different touchpoints that a consumer could theoretically interact with and get to a perspective of what’s actually driving either positive sentiment and resonance for consumers or what areas need to be optimized for better experiences.”

Tell me more about the insights and how R-Index provides more a “nuanced view”?

“R-Index is a simpler tool to get the insights that are needed to help a brand optimize overall performance, dive into the specific drivers of that performance for a brand, and make those experiences more resonant and relevant for their core consumers. R-Index provides more insights into what’s truly driving positive and helpful consumer experiences, and driving resonance for brands across the entire marketing mix and marketing investment.

Even if you have specific segments of consumers, they can behave very differently based on how they’re interacting with the touchpoints. While the aim is not to drill down to any one
specific customer, it can provide improved segment understanding to make each touchpoint more appropriate and personalized.

There are many measurement solutions in the market that can look at channel performance or sentiment performance in a silo, but R-Index is putting everything together in one place. R-Index has the components of being more dynamic, being able to scale and being able to plug into a number of different tools and AI capabilities to provide predictive optimized recommendations at scale.

The combination and connectivity of the data being pulled, the AI capabilities, and rigorous testing of the tool is helping drive the more nuanced views of insights that provide prescriptive strategic recommendations and analyses of data with greater detail. The definition and understanding of a brand’s audience segments will be deeper than ever before.

R-Index is prescriptive, providing automated insights and recommendations, and allows for drill-down insights at granular levels for components that make up the index score.

R-Index’s capabilities go beyond simply understanding what ads work to understanding how nuances across media investment, macroeconomic data, etc., impact overall consumer perceptions and interactions with brands, and how to best refine experiences to be resonant to consumers with those insights in mind.”

A Powerful Tool For Actionable Insights

R-Index is a powerful marketing insight tool that measures brand performance, consumer sentiment, and business impact and provides prescriptive recommendations to help make marketers and marketing teams improve consumer experiences and business outcomes.

Read more about R-Index:

Razorfish Unveils R-Index, A Proprietary Data Solution for Creating Unified Experiences in Collaboration with Google Cloud

Featured Image by Shutterstock/PCH.Vector

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May 16 2024

What Is Conversion Rate & How Do You Calculate It? via @sejournal, @coreydmorris

Conversion rate is one of the most common metrics used by marketers, sales folks, and business professionals.

It is discussed often and taken on the surface as an important metric or key performance indicator (KPI) for most businesses.

However, it can also be misapplied, misunderstood, or improperly established for use as a key metric.

It is important to revisit conversions, conversion rates, and the use of the metric periodically.

It is even more important for any new initiative to have the metric well defined and understood before positioning it as a key KPI.

In this guide, I’m going to dive deeply into what conversion rate is, how to calculate it, why that’s important, and ways to improve it.

What Is Conversion Rate?

Google provides one of the more concise definitions of conversion rate:

“Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period.”

Now, let’s get into what it all means.

Conversions

Unlike some business and marketing metrics, understanding conversion rates require some self-definition.

It starts with defining what a conversion is – which can mean different things for varying types of brands and organizations.

You can have more than one type of conversion. As a goal, you can have it factored into a marketing funnel or customer journey. Or, it could be a firm financial metric your business hinges on.

Step one is to clearly define what a conversion is for you.

One of the most common definitions I see relates to someone becoming a lead for a business that is focused on driving leads via its website.

Another applies to ecommerce businesses, where the conversion is the completed sale transaction.

Other common definitions include certain engagement metrics for businesses that rely on ad revenue generated by page views.

Secondary types of conversions get into events, engagement, and other things like email signups that help support funnels, customer journeys, and overall sales processes.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a %.

In high-level terms, it tells you the % of how many people came to your site who took the conversion goal action you defined.

Some sources provide benchmarks for specific industries or areas to help you understand a good conversion rate and offer some objectivity.

I’m not telling you to copy your competitors, but I think if you want to value conversion rate, you need internal and external research to validate where you stand and where you want to be.

Match this up with your persona research, target audiences, marketing funnels, and customer journeys.

You likely know what you want your site visitors and audience to do.

How many of them do you want to do it? How big is the universe of your target audience? What is realistic regarding the number of total visitors you think you can get?

Find answers to these questions along with mapping out your conversion goals and conversion rate goals.

How Do You Calculate Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate Formula

The formula to calculate the conversion rate is straightforward:

Conversions / Visits* = Conversion Rate

*I have to include an asterisk, though, as some definitions might not be as straightforward.

You could also call these “clicks” or “sessions” or look at them more granularly.

My definition here can be adapted based on the language and definitions used by your analytics platform and your other KPIs.

An example in calculating conversion rate for my site (a marketing agency providing services to clients) with the inputs and calculation:

August 2022 website visits: 1,122.
August 2022 contact form submissions (my conversions): 61.
61 conversions/1,122 visits = 5.4% conversion rate.

Getting It Right

Again, conversions are custom-defined by you.

It can be a common conversion goal like a lead form submission, something more secondary, or something more obscure.

That part can be somewhat custom or variable for you as well.

You can look at it as clicks to a website from a specific channel or ad campaign.

You can get really granular with the segmentation of your data, source and channel filtering, and even with the definitions themselves.

That becomes especially variable or custom if you’re tracking specific actions that lead up to a conversion goal and how granular you want to be with it.

Make sure the definition of what you’re counting as a conversion and what you’re counting as the total audience (clicks, visits, or some other “total” metric) is mapped out in a meaningful way.

Why Do I Need To Be Able To Calculate Conversion Rate?

First, where do you measure and track conversion rate? You can use Google Analytics, other analytics suites, or any data you must manually calculate.

Google Analytics

If you’re relying on Google Analytics (GA), you’ll want to ensure you have your “Goals” set up properly and test them. Conversions are reported based on the goals you configure.

Out of the box, Google has no context as to what a conversion is for you and no ability to calculate a conversion rate off of it.

If you use GA, dive into conversion goal configuration and testing to ensure things are in a good place before you trust the metrics you see (if you inherited the setup) or move forward with any measurement and improvement plan.

And, speaking of mapping out – tracking and measurement are critical.

You want to ensure that your tech stack and tools can help you properly track visits, conversions, and the overall conversion rate in alignment with your definitions and goals.

Getting this right is critical, whether it is Google Analytics or third-party reporting tools.

Segmentation & Filtering

Plus, you’re able to then segment at the levels you want to with examples, including:

By conversion type (if you have more than one).
All website traffic.
By source or channel.
By pages/actions/events in the session.
By campaign or initiative.

There are many more segments and ways to filter and slice up conversions and conversion rate reporting.

You want to be able to calculate the conversion rate and get into the details with segments of traffic and your audience to help understand where you can improve.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

Calculating conversion rates and having the data is one thing; using it to make improvements is where the real work starts.

Improving Conversion Rates

You can look for improvement in two broad areas, and I strongly recommend evaluating both.

One is sources of traffic and the influences that drive visitors to your site.

That includes advertising, referrals, and any awareness activities and campaigns you have that generate traffic.

The other area consists of what influences the traffic that has already arrived at the site – things like UX/UI evaluation, review of messaging, calls to action, and ways that users navigate through and engage with the site.

Improvement in this arena is often called Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO.

Traffic Sources Optimization

In the case of the traffic you’re sending to the site, you can look at targeting, ad creative, and keywords you’re organically ranking for – the ways that ad targeting and creative provide the first impression or directly funnel traffic into the site.

There are a variety of optimization and refinement tactics to shift your focus to higher quality traffic and aim to increase conversion rate by getting more qualified visitors from external sources that you influence.

Beware, though, that you need to have a good idea of your customer journey and not knock out traffic that is awareness focused or at the top of the funnel (e.g., traffic tied to thought leadership).

Increasing the conversion rate is important, but make sure you segment well enough to not inadvertently stop targeting the top of the funnel, awareness-level visitors, and sources.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Now, onto looking inward at the traffic you already have.

This is where most people start digging into CRO tactics. Web analytics can help you see where people exit, bounce, and stop short of getting to your conversion actions.

Beyond that, great heat mapping and CRO tools will give you insights into UX and UI issues and how people truly engage with your site versus how you intended in your design.

By focusing on CRO and putting a strategy into place, you can evaluate everything from site speed to content, messaging, and UI.

I strongly encourage you to do so.

Conclusion

Conversion rate continues to be a valuable marketing metric.

Understanding it, defining it for your organization, measuring it, and improving it are all important.

Whether you have a small business or enterprise-level website, you likely care about specific conversion goals.

In short – for conversions and conversion rate – understand, define, measure, and improve it.

Yes, we all want more traffic. And maybe a static conversion rate is fine if you add more traffic.

However, wouldn’t you like more traffic and a higher conversion rate?

It is possible to have both, and crucial to understanding what levers to pull to influence it.

More resources:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

FAQ

What is the significance of conversion rate in online marketing?

Conversion rate is a crucial metric for assessing the effectiveness of online marketing strategies. It represents the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. Understanding this rate helps businesses evaluate the success of their marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement. Accurate measurement and analysis of conversion rates can lead to better targeting of marketing campaigns, improved user experiences, and increased return on investment (ROI).

What are some effective strategies for improving conversion rates?

Improving conversion rates involves optimizing both the sources of traffic and the user experience on your site. Key strategies include:

Refining ad targeting and creative to attract more qualified traffic.
Enhancing site usability and navigation to make it easier for visitors to complete desired actions.
Testing and updating calls to action (CTAs) to ensure they are compelling and clear.
Employing A/B testing to compare different versions of landing pages and identify the most effective design and messaging.
Using analytics and heat mapping tools to gain insights into user behavior and address any barriers to conversion.

Why is it important to periodically revisit and redefine conversion metrics?

Periodically revisiting and redefining conversion metrics is essential to ensure they remain aligned with evolving business objectives and market conditions. As your business grows and changes, the definitions of conversions and the goals associated with them may need adjustments. Regularly updating these metrics helps maintain their relevance and ensures that your marketing strategies continue to drive meaningful results. This practice also allows for the incorporation of new insights and technologies, keeping your approach current and effective.

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Apr 25 2024

Google Universal Analytics 360 Sunsetting Soon: Migration Tips & Top Alternative Inside via @sejournal, @PiwikPro

This post was sponsored by Piwik PRO. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

This year, Google will finally phase out Universal Analytics 360, requiring paid users to switch to Google Analytics 360.

This is not something you can skip or postpone, and the clock is ticking.

The new analytics differ significantly from the previous version, and you can’t migrate data between them, so the transition can be challenging for organizations.

Since you’ll be starting from scratch, now is a good time to explore other options and determine if there are better solutions for your needs.

The three main areas to consider when deciding if you want to stay with Google or move to another platform are: the migration process, privacy and compliance, and ease of use.

When Is Google Universal Analytics 360 Sunsetting?

July 1, 2024 is when Google will phase out Universal Analytics 360.

What Should I Do Next?

Google encourages you to migrate to Google Analytics 360 as quickly as possible.

If you don’t, you could:

Lose critical advertising capabilities.
Lose the ability to export historical data.
Face delays in setting up Google Analytics 360.

How To Migrate To Your Next Analytics Platform

Moving to a new platform is much more than just implementation; it is vital to plan your migration properly. Below are five steps to help you through the entire process.

Step 1. Evaluate Your Stack & Resources

Before you switch analytics tools, take the time to evaluate your entire stack, not just the tool you’re changing. Ensure that your stack is up-to-date and meets your current business needs. Migrating to a new analytics vendor almost always requires more people and more time than originally estimated. It’s a good occasion to remove redundant tools from your stack; it might also allow you to integrate with new ones that can help you run your analytics and collect data more comprehensively.

Step 2. Tidy Your Data

Over time, data collection may get messy, and you find yourself tracking data that isn’t relevant to your business. A migration gives you a chance to clean up your data taxonomy. Ensure that your new tool allows you to use the same categories of data as the previous one. Pay close attention to any data that needs to be collected automatically, like location data (country, region, city), and device details (device type, browser). Finally, make sure the SDKs you need are supported by your new tool.

Step 3. Implement A New Platform

This step involves setting up the tracking code that collects data about visitors to your website or app and making any necessary modifications. Remember to set up tags to gather more detailed data through events or connect third-party tools.

Speed Up The Transition: If you switch to Piwik PRO, you can use a migration tool to easily transfer your settings from Universal Analytics (GA3) and Google Tag Manager.

Step 4. Evaluate Tour New Data

Once you’re done implementing your new platform, you should run it parallel to your existing tool for a few months before finalizing the migration. During this time, you can audit your new data and correct any errors. In this manner, you can retain your historical data while simultaneously generating new data segments on the new platform.

Step 5. Provide Training For Your Team

All end users need training to comprehend the platform’s operations, retrieve necessary data, and generate reports. This step is frequently missed as it falls at the end of the project.

Upon finishing this step, you will be set to switch to your new platform fully. If you find the migration process challenging, consider getting help from outside sources. Some analytics vendors offer hands-on onboarding and user training, which accelerates product adoption.

Is Switching To Google Analytics 360 Worth The Hassle?

You might be thinking, “Migrating to the successor of UA 360 won’t be a walk in the park,” especially if you work for a large organization.

In addition to subscription and data migration costs, you may also need to train your staff or increase fees for external marketing agencies that will face new challenges.

While Analytics 360 has incredible use cases, there may be other tools that better suit your needs.

Switching to alternative solutions may be a good option for you.

How To Pick A Replacement For Universal Analytics 360

To decide whether to choose a new platform or stick with Google, consider a few important factors:

Because GA 360 is a different software, your marketing and analytics departments will need to allocate extra resources to learn the new platform. You will also need the support of analysts, developers, and data architects to help you reconstruct reports based on the data architecture of the chosen platform. Choosing a solution with similar features and user experience to UA 360 can be a good option, because it saves resources, making onboarding faster and easier.
You will also need to redesign your entire customer journey, because the data model in GA360 has changed from sessions to events. This process can be more challenging and costly than choosing a session-based platform or one that offers you freedom of choice.
Another important consideration is the level of support offered by the vendor. This can greatly affect the quality of the migration and onboarding to a new platform. Although Google Analytics is currently the most popular tool for analyzing web traffic, the level of support it provides is limited. Other companies like Piwik PRO can offer more in this area, including personalized onboarding, product implementation, training, and dedicated customer support at every step.

Consideration 1: Think About Privacy & Compliance

Organizations around the world are increasingly concerned with data privacy and compliance. A 2023 Thomson survey found that 80% of business professionals acknowledge the importance of compliance as a crucial advisory function for their organizations. Gartner, on the other hand, predicts that, by 2025, 60% of large enterprises will use at least one privacy-enhancing computing (PEC) technique in analytics, business intelligence, and/or cloud computing.

This is due to a growing number of new regulations that place greater control over personal data at the forefront. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are two of the most prominent examples. The landscape has been further complicated by events such as the Schrems II case, Brexit, and China’s Personal Data Protection Law. Data protection is also increasingly important in some sectors, such as healthcare, where regulations like HIPAA are mandatory.

If your company operates globally or has ambitions to do so, the first thing to consider is who has full ownership of the data, where the servers hosting the data are located, and who owns them. Google Analytics 360 only offers cloud deployment in an unknown location, which means that data might be transferred between data centers in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. This makes it difficult to know exactly where the data is stored and ownership is unclear. For now, the issue of data transfers between the US and the EU has been resolved by the EU-US Privacy Shield framework agreement, but the future stays unclear. Last year, NOYB, led by Max Schrems, announced that it would soon appeal this decision to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

To meet privacy and compliance requirements in different countries and industries, choose a platform that allows you to customize your hosting plan and set specific parameters for data collection and analysis. Platforms like Piwik PRO Analytics Suite enable you to store your data on servers in Europe, the US, and Asia, based on your preferences. This translates into flexibility and security of your data.

Consideration 2: Ease Of Use & Integration

This may sound counterintuitive, but the new GA 360 might be too complex for many. While it offers numerous advanced functions for data analysts, it lacks features specifically designed for marketers. As a result, marketers may need help in configuring the system to efficiently use the data.

On the other hand, in GA 360, the data model shifts from session-based to event-based. This is especially important if your teams depend on UA 360 behavioral reporting, benchmarking, and e-commerce flow reports, as these features are unavailable in the new release. You also need to revise all the reports for all the stakeholders.

Conversely, Piwik PRO strongly emphasizes simplicity and enables marketers to quickly access the necessary data. Additionally, the data model combines both session-based and event-based structures. This approach ensures that you can start working with the data faster and deliver the reports that stakeholders are used to. Another big advantage of Piwik PRO is its model for working with raw data, which is a valuable source of knowledge about users and provides richer reporting in more contexts. Google Analytics does not provide raw data exports, so you have to use various services and tools to accomplish this. To be fair, however, exporting large raw data packets with Piwik PRO software may take longer than with Google solutions.

The new GA 360 is most effective when used mainly with products from the Google ecosystem. When considering data activation, Google Ads is the most suitable option. When it comes to Piwik PRO, you still have this option, but integrating with other solutions is much easier. The platform offers four modules: Analytics, Tag Manager, Consent Manager and Customer Data Platform (CDP). The CDP module, available in the paid plan, lets you create detailed customer profiles and categorize your data into various audience segments. You can activate them to provide a personalized experience and run effective campaigns across multiple channels.

The landscape of modern analytics is constantly changing. On the one hand, there are ongoing discussions about privacy and compliance regulations, while on the other, companies are trying out various methods to collect and analyze data. In the end, your choice of analytics platform will impact the performance of your marketing and sales efforts. So take the time to explore, and you may find other solutions that better suit your organization’s needs.

Piwik PRO is a solid choice to explore for your next primary analytics solution. Book a personalized demo of the Enterprise version and see the benefits of introducing Piwik PRO Analytics Suite in your organization.

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Featured Image: Image by Piwik PRO Used with permission.

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