Small apps, big data - the future is mobile

[daisy]

Technology is changing the way we work - making the world more mobile and moveable than ever before. Trends like BYOD are blurring the division between our home and work lives and this increasing mobility means that business applications are extending beyond the realms of on-premise and into the cloud. This move is essential to ensuring continued business success in an extremely competitive time.

http://bit.ly/T5Oyhb

[Mike-R]

(Not intending to derail the thread off the original focus) It's also changing the way we analyze user data - check out Avinash Kaushik's post on Multi-Channel attribution: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/multi-ch ... ns-models/

It's a big question for marketers: If someone sees your ad on TV, visits your site on their phone, looks at it again on their home desktop, but then converts from their work laptop how do we track that process? It's tough, but not impossible within certain limits.

[christykunjumon]

[christykunjumon]

More ways are as follows:

Using Vanity URLs

we can use a URL as http://www.example1.com in TV ad, then we ca redirect the url to our main URL using domain level forwarder. (Also need to set the campaign/tag management)

Using Voucher coupon

when the ad is displayed in TV, we can show our main url i.e. http://www.exapmle.com also we can show in ad a coupon code(easy to remember like: Gift Me) So when user fill up the contact for there will a field for entering coupon code & in this way in admin side we can calculate how many people converted through the tv ad, I think this can be also tracked in Google analytics by using custom variable in analytics code.

There are many more feasible ways of tracking original lead source. Thanks!

[ibrahim]

Yes, This can be easily implemented through either Segmentation or simple vanity domain tracking using either Google tag Manager or Google URL Builder. Here we should need a specific landing page for the TV ads & we can tracking this in Google Analytics as follows

1. Redirect the specific ad URL to targetted URL with Google URL builder with Source as TV & Medium as either video or CPC like follows

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=TV&u ... 2BCampaign or
http://www.example.com/?utm_source=TV&u ... 2BCampaign

Google-URL-Builder.jpg (95.67 KiB) Viewed 25598 times

Either we can do the redirection through domain forwarder or else can easily do through .htaccess. Once we did this we can see the referral source in Google Analytics under Campaign with referral source & medium.

This has been tested successfully with Radio Ad as below.

Bellwood has a vanity domain http://bellwoodhealthservices.com fully dedicated for Radio Ad. This needs to be redirected to its URL Builder generated URL as http://www.bellwood.ca/?utm_source=Radi ... aign=Radio & once it is implemented we can see the referral source as Radio with medium as CPC under campaign report in Google Analytics. If a user is converted with first visit Radio then obviously we could filter out the goal conversion with source as Radio by extracting the conversion page with secondary dimensional metric as source referral.

Radio-Ad-Tracking.jpg (46.4 KiB) Viewed 25598 times

[ibrahim]

Hello Guys, also we can pull this referral source to third party lead management system,if we are implementing lead tracking in the destination URL of the Ad Campaign & even analyze the visitor activities if we are fetching data from Google Analytics API!!!!

[Mike-R]

UTM parameters and vanity URLs or other redirect techniques are a great way to do this. But of course they're not 100% or might only suffice for tracking one point of contact. Someone might not use the same tracking URL multiple times, or even if they do, if they come through the same URL on multiple devices you can't track the multiple "touches" that finally lead to the conversion as all being the same person. This is where unique coupon codes, getting users to sign in, having sales staff or an online questionnaire ask about source, or drawing conclusions from general trends (among other things) come into play.

[Deepa]

Hi Mike,

I think your question is how to track the same user across multiple devices.
Ibrahim and Christy explained well how to track visitors through different sources.

I have some point here to explain how can we track the same user accross multiple domain as the same person. Currently we dont have any better possible techniques I guess, because the Google Analytics team itself are in the work shop to get this done .

Universal Analytics is designed to help track users across multiple devices, giving a much better picture of user behavior as an individual and not a series of disparate sessions.

Now we can shift from a visit centric view (current Google Analytics) to a real user centric view (Universal Analytics). In the past, we only measured visits by a device, but did not have data about who this person actually was. Now Universal Google Analytics now allows you to track users across devices, mediums, platforms and more!

Suppose the first visit is driven by an email marketing on a tablet. The second visit is on a desktop computer from a direct visit by the same user. In traditional Google Analytics, this would be treated as two different visitors and Direct visits would get the credit for the sale. But that was the old Google Analytics. This ability to track the same user across multiple devices can be a game changer for some businesses.

A ‘standard’ GA relies on cookies to join together the dots, and uses ‘sessions’ as its main building block, ‘universal’ can be all server based, and attempts to make ‘users’ its main building block. You use an anonymous ID to link together all data related to a user.

No longer will visitors to your site receive four first party cookies from GA, but one. This one cookie will contain a unique visitor ID that will enable your website to read and store it when someone logs in, for example. This new “measurement protocol” then allows you connect your information about the anonymous visitor ID in Google Analytics. If that visitor’s ID then logs in again on your site, but this time from an IPhone, Google Analytics understands that it’s the same visitor using your site, but on multiple devices. I think its time for us to say good bye to visit-centric analytics, and hello visitor centric analytics, coz UA is in Beta version now (only for limited users) .

[daisy]

Wow Deepa.....that's a great explanation about avoiding duplication in the number of unique visits.

[Mike-R]

Yeah, I hadn't heard that GA was bringing in cross-platform tracking solutions. Will have to keep an eye on that!

Do take a look at the article I linked up at the start of the thread - it's pretty long, but he talked about a bunch of different ways of looking at the problem.