The days when online shopping excursions began and ended on a single desktop computer are long gone. Today, shoppers often juggle multiple devices prior to placing an order. You can look through a website’s catalog on your desktop, save items to review on your tablet, and finalize your purchase on your phone via a mobile app without missing a beat.
For businesses, monitoring customer behavior across multiple devices can be a challenge, unless you view your desktop website and mobile app as integrated parts of a single marketing system and sync them to provide a comprehensive user experience.
Unified Analytical Tool by Google
In July 2019, Google announced the launch of its new “App + Web” tool in Google Analytics. It provides a plethora of useful options for gauging your brand’s performance across multiple platforms and distinguishing patterns in customer behavior.
In the past, entrepreneurs and marketers used two separate tools: Google Analytics to gauge desktop engagement, and Google Analytics for Firebase to gauge mobile engagement. Even though both tools delivered lots of value, using them separately was less convenient and provided only a vague idea of a brand’s overall performance. The merger of both into the “App + Web” tool reduces the workload for marketers and provides them with data that is more unified and useful.
Apart from scanning both your desktop website and mobile app in a single place, you can take advantage of some new customization features. Let’s take a closer look at the inner workings of “App + Web”.
Web and App Data in a Single Panel
The new tool applies unified dimensions and parameters to both your desktop website and mobile app, allowing you to create comprehensive reposts, pinpoint a marketing campaign’s strongest and weakest elements of your marketing campaigns, and enhance or remove them as needed.
Using the “App + Web” tool, you can retrieve detailed responses to the following questions:
- Which of my promotional channels attracts the largest number of new users for both mobile and web?
- How many conversions took place within a given period of time? On which platform were most orders placed?
- What is the total scope of my audience on both desktop and mobile?
This is only some of the valuable information you can obtain using GA’s new features. Among other things, you can track customers’ shopping journeys, find out how most of them got acquainted with your brand, whether they shopped on a desktop website or app, and where they placed the most orders over time.
Helpful Insights and Customization Features
Many advanced features were previously available exclusively in GA’s web version. Today, they can be used to gauge your app’s performance as well.
Automated Insights
GA has a number of default metrics that are used in standard reports. The technology is underpinned by machine learning, and distinguishes the most prominent trends over the life of your website. For example, if an influx of traffic occurs, you will be notified about it so that you can define the factors that stimulated the traffic boost and use them to your benefit.
The algorithms for automated analysis are constantly getting smarter, and they have learned how to thoroughly scan the processes that take place on your online platforms, to continually keep you updated on important changes.
Custom Insights
If you do not need all the data GA provides and just want to focus on specific metrics related to your business, or to a particular campaign, use customization features to tune analytics to the preferred operating mode. For example, if you have just launched a landing page dedicated to a new service, you can choose to focus on this particular service. Set a rule in GA to alert you when views or conversions on the target landing page increase by 10%.
The frequency of notifications can be set up and received within five minutes of the onset of a prescribed event.
Automated insights and customization are currently available only in English, but Google plans to translate them into all languages traditionally used by GA.
Advanced Analytic Techniques
Every business is unique, so it is natural for companies in different niches to reach their prospects in different ways. For the best results, you need to employ a unique analytical toolkit to help you create marketing tactics that are most successful in promoting your brand.
Going beyond default features, the “App + Web” tool allows you to conduct in-depth research in your own data lab. Use the following techniques to compile customized reports:
- Funnels. To gain better control over customer behavior and drive more sales, you can split your users’ shopping journeys into multiple events that occur before a conversion, determine at which stages customers engage with your brand and find out how quickly they leave, and why.
- Exploration. Utilize convenient drag and drop functionality to select your preferred analysis metrics. The tool is interactive and easy to use. It visualizes data and makes it possible to create a variety of reports for different goals and segments of your target audience.
- User lifetime. Outline the history of customer engagement with your brand. Discover how long the average buyer uses your app and the number of orders that are placed during that time. Also, you can identify the influence of certain events on user activity, for example, a traffic boost driven by your latest PPC campaign.
- Cohort analysis. Compare the activities of different segments of your target audience based on selected metrics. For example, you could segment users by the time periods when they first engaged with your brand. If it turns out that your regulars bring more profits than new clients, you can take a look back to distinguish the marketing tactics that helped you hook well-paying leads.
- Backward pathing. You can set a certain event like order placement, registration, or subscription to your newsletter as a goal and trace the steps taken by users to get to this goal. This will help you find the levers that drive customer engagement, refine your users’ favorite features, and make the path to their shopping goals as smooth as possible.
- Data retention. GA stores your reports for 14 months. You can use this data for long-term research and get a comprehensive picture of your brand’s success. Summarize the changes that took place over a year and compare your current metrics with last year’s performance.
Enhanced Event Management
With new GA features, you can literally spy on your users. Learn how they behave on each of your platforms at every moment in time, see which elements and links they click, what pages are viewed most often and for how long, monitor how often they visit your website, download files, use on-site search, and much more.
You do not need to tag specific events through coding. Just open the automated “Enhanced Management” panel, select your preferred options from the list, and turn on analytics with the flip of a toggle.
Instant Answers to Your Questions
As GA gets smarter, it understands the needs of analysts at a deeper level. If you need certain data, you do not need to search for the necessary features and parameters – just ask GA directly.
When you type in your query, GA’s smart software will provide a brief and straightforward answer. If, for example, you pose the query, “new users over the past month,” you will find your requested data in the search results dropdown. Be as specific and clear as possible when entering your queries, so that GA correctly interprets your intent.
Instant answers are currently available in English, but Google plans to translate them into all languages traditionally used by GA.
Final Thoughts
To succeed in a competitive business environment, you need to have a clear picture of customer behaviors across your desktop and mobile platforms. The importance of a comprehensive performance analysis of your brand cannot be overstated.
Many large companies already use GA’s “App + Web” tool. Check out its useful features in Google’s free software. Discover a vast reservoir of opportunities for tracking customer behavior and pushing your brand to new levels of excellence.