Google Analytics Conference – Oracle Digital’s Wrap

A little over two weeks ago I attended the annual Google Analytics conference in Melbourne.

Speaking at the conference were some of the brightest minds from the Google Analytics team who were also accompanied by some of Australia’s top experts in digital marketing analytics.

It was an intense eight hour conference and as you can imagine each speaker had a bucket load of tips and hints on how to improve one’s digital marketing efforts.

It would be quite difficult to summarise the whole conference but I would just like to touch on a few topics which stood out to me the most without getting too technical.

Improvements In Demographic Reporting

As we all know Google is huge and very successful organisation and their success is based heavily upon their intelligence and innovation.

Google Analytics continues to improve and provide more information that can be used to fine tune your marketing and get the best return from your investment.

Whilst at the conference Google presented improvements in their demographic reporting within Analytics.

This has huge implications for the future of online and, in fact, all marketing.

Kirk talks more about this in his latest article that gives you a sneak peak at what is just around the corner for our clients. The article is called The Future of Marketing – Spend Less Get Better Results.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager was the most mentioned phrase at the conference and throughout the day each speaker strongly recommended that anyone who is not using it, to start.

Google Tag Manager is free tool that makes it easier for you to add and update tags in your website including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing tags and more in just a few clicks.

It will generate one piece of code, which needs to be put in your website one time and saves you future hassle of constantly editing the code in your website or bothering your IT department to do so.

Google Tag Manager is the key to better and more comprehensive measuring of website analytics and Oracle Digital will be progressively updating sites under management to realise the benefits for our clients moving forward.

The key benefit to this is that as a marketer you have more control on how quickly you can start a new online marketing campaign or re-position your existing campaigns to take advantage of new opportunities or to react to fluctuations in the market without having to wait for a developer to modify code in your website! Reaction speed is a key component in today’s digital marketing environment.

Last Click Attribution

The second topic which stood out to me the most was a discussion on something called “last click attribution”.

In my opinion anyone who is serious about measuring their marketing efforts needs to pay close attention to this topic.

Last click attribution basically suggests that the last action by the site visitor is the one that is credited with selling the product or creating the lead.

The problem with this assumption is that this negates all other customer interactions that have contributed to gaining that sale or lead along the way.

This may have included a first point of interaction via social media or an email newsletter. Perhaps a Google or Bing Search ad or display ad.

And what about offline advertising campaigns that have created online traffic such as print or TV advertising or a telemarketing campaign or even a good old referral?

Ignoring the part that those initiatives have played in gaining that sale or lead is reducing their importance. In a worse case scenario you may even decide to discontinue one of them without ever knowing how effective it has been.

Having the power to look beyond the final click to analyse the source and steps as the customer progresses towards that final click allows for accurate measurement of the performance of all of your marketing initiatives and, as we all know, measurement leads to improvement.

The bigger picture to me is measure as much of your marketing efforts as possible both online and off, because what you don’t measure you can’t improve!