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SARA RADIN: Hi, everyone.
Thank you for being here with us today.
My name is Sara Radin, and I am the Global Head of Analytics
and Measurement Platforms.
As part of my day-to-day job, I spend
time understanding marketers' needs
when it comes to measurement.
While needs might be different, everyone
I talk to agrees analytics is a key priority
in digital transformation.
In particular, Analytics gives you
the essential insights you need to be ready for what's next.
This is why last week, we announced the new Google
Analytics, known as Google Analytics 4.
We think we've built the best version of Analytics yet,
and it represents the future of our platform.
Google Analytics 4 properties are the evolution
of App + Web properties which we announced last year.
The new experience is completely cross-platform,
meaning that everything we're going to talk about today
applies both to apps and to websites.
Today we'll spend some time covering
the most exciting features on Google Analytics 4
and give you a sneak peek into what's coming down
the pike in the future.
I'm joined today by Russ Ketchum,
who I'll let introduce himself.
RUSSELL KETCHUM: Thanks, Sara.
I'm really excited to be here today.
As you said, I'm Russ Ketchum.
I lead product management for Google Analytics.
And I can't wait to share with you and the audience
all of the exciting things that we have
planned for Google Analytics.
SARA RADIN: All right.
So, you and I have had the pleasure of working together
on Analytics for a few years now,
and I know we're both really excited about this new version.
So for those people who are not familiar with what
Google Analytics 4 is going to offer them,
can you give us a high-level overview
of why you're so excited about it
and what the new experience is like, compared to the Google
Analytics they know and love today?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: Absolutely.
I think it's fair to say that we've
reimagined almost everything when
it comes to Google Analytics 4.
And hopefully, by doing so, we'll
have made it that much more intuitive
for our customers to understand how their customers are
engaging with them.
Particularly today, when things seem
to be changing more rapidly than ever.
There's probably three areas I'd highlight
the most in terms of how the new Google Analytics 4 is
different.
The first is we've really based the product around machine
learning and making it easy for our customers to take action
based on the insights that the machine learning is
capable of producing.
And so that is the first.
The second is we've centered the entire experience
around the customer journey.
And this is true as the customer is interacting
across the business, not just from a single device
or a single platform, but truly across multiple devices
and multiple platforms.
And most importantly, I think we've designed the platform
to be durable so that by investing in Google Analytics,
our customers really are investing
in a product that will last them for the long term.
SARA RADIN: So it feels like machine learning comes up
in almost every conversation that we have
with partners and advertisers.
I know it came up in a conversation
I had this morning.
So can you help me understand how the machine learning
capabilities in Google Analytics 4
will help marketers get better and faster insights?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: Yeah.
Machine learning is one of those phrases that
can be a little bit ethereal, and so maybe the best way
to talk about it is from a couple of quick examples.
So the first is with a feature that we're
calling automated insights.
And here we have machine learning
that's able to look across all of our primary and secondary
dimensions for all of the most important metrics.
And it's looking for significant changes
to those values for each of those metrics combinations.
And when it finds them, it surfaces it right there
on the home screen, so that a customer
doesn't have to dig and look across all of this data
to find interesting or unexpected changes.
It's right there front and center.
Another example is it allows us to bring an entirely new class
of data to Google Analytics, and these
are our predicted metrics.
The first two that we're introducing are predicted churn
and predicted conversion.
And these-- as they sound-- are trying to predict user behavior
before it actually happens.
And you can use these signals both with audiences
and with conversions, so that you can take action in response
to them-- either to, if it's likely that a customer is going
to churn you can take action to hopefully stop that before it
happens, or if a customer is about to do something highly
desirable you could perhaps reach out
to them using an audience list.
SARA RADIN: So, those sound like pretty awesome capabilities.
I know when I-- before I joined Google,
I was a big Google Analytics user
and I spent a long time digging into data
to try to figure out what was driving anomalies
and what the anomalies were.
So very interesting to be able to detect
those in an automated fashion.
And it sounds like we're also making headway
in predicting the future.
So, pretty cool capability from an Analytics standpoint.
So I know sometimes predictions are great and really powerful,
but I also talk to marketers who want
to find their own insights based on their unique customer
knowledge.
So how does someone bring their special sauce
to the Google Analytics 4 property type?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: So when we started our App + Web
beta last year, we really erred on the side of less
as being more, with reporting.
So Google Analytics, Universal Analytics,
has something like 150 reports that are accessible directly
from the left nav.
And with Google Analytics 4 we wanted
to simplify that overall experience.
And as we've gone through the data,
we've collected more than 150--
I would say line item pieces of feedback about the reporting.
In some areas we got really strong signals
that we did well, in other areas there
were opportunities to improve.
And so what we've done with the overall reporting experience
is we've organized it primarily around a customer lifecycle.
And so here we drew heavy inspiration
from the game-specific reporting that we
introduced earlier this year.
And so that, coupled with some changes
we've made to the left nav itself,
to make the most important reports easier to access,
we really do think it will enable
our customers to get to their own insights
that much more quickly.
Discover the types of information
they need more quickly without the same level of search
that maybe they would have had to do if they
were participating in the data.
SARA RADIN: Yeah, that's great.
I think one of the most exciting parts for me
about the new reporting structure
is how easy it is for marketers to dig
into the data along the entire customer journey.
And for many customers, that journey
ends with an online purchase, and I
know we've seen in the past few months
an acceleration in e-commerce adoption
and digital transformation.
And I would say in the last six months for both of us,
this has probably come up in every partner and advertiser
conversation we've had together.
So how have we responded to the growing
demand for e-commerce solutions in Google Analytics,
and how are we enabling marketers
to move quickly online and make critical decisions
about online sales?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: So e-commerce has always
been a large investment area for Google Analytics.
That was particularly true in Universal Analytics
and now continues to be true with Google Analytics 4.
I think now that type of investment
is just more important than ever.
And so with Google Analytics 4, we
have the opportunity to be more expressive in terms
of the data that's being collected.
And this allows our customers to be more specific,
take advantage of increased categories,
and really describe the transactions that
are happening with a level of specificity and granularity
that they couldn't do with Universal Analytics.
At the same time, though, we want
to make the e-commerce reporting that much more approachable.
And so we've really taken a step back there,
as well as we were looking at the customer
lifecycle reporting overall, and tried
to simplify as much as we can.
Just to reduce some of that intimidation factor
that maybe someone who's relatively
new to the e-commerce space might
experience when they come to the set of reports
for the first time.
So hopefully those two things together--
the fact that we're making it more powerful while also
simplifying reporting experience--
will go a long way for customers who
are both new to the e-commerce space and are well-established.
SARA RADIN: Yeah.
And I think one of the things I love
about Google Analytics is it can really
grow alongside your business.
So we have small businesses, medium businesses,
large businesses, and many businesses
who have come along on the journey with us
and grown their business alongside us.
So how are you thinking about Analytics
growing along side businesses going forward and meeting
future customer needs?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: So, I talked about this a little bit
at the beginning.
But we wanted to make sure that the Google Analytics 4
property was going to be something that lasts,
so that the investment makes sense
over the long run for our customers.
If you compare that to Universal Analytics, which really grew up
in the age of the desktop web, the way
that users interact with businesses today
is very different.
There's countless platforms, devices,
all of these additional challenges.
And so we've responded to that in two key ways.
The first is by having a more descriptive event model, which
makes it easy for marketers to literally measure what's
happening-- rather than trying to focus
on page use in sessions.
The other is we've made the platform radically more
scalable, because as users engage
with the business across all of these touch points,
some of those interactions are really sticky
and that can create a lot of data.
And the Google Analytics 4 property
is there to catch all that so that marketers
are able to make sense of these longer term engagements.
SARA RADIN: Yeah.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
And one of the things you touched on in your answer
was the end user.
And I know protecting user privacy is really important
both for Google but also for all the businesses that we
work with as a product team.
So can you help me understand how
we're making it easy for businesses
to protect user privacy in Google Analytics?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: End user privacy
is, I think, something that we all
have top of mind at this point.
And with the Google Analytics 4 property,
we're committed to making sure that our customers have
the controls that they need to take user privacy seriously.
And we're making sure that those sets of controls
are easy to use.
And so you're going to see this in a number of places
across Google Analytics 4.
You'll see it with the Consent APIs, which show themselves
when you're doing your instrumentation using gtag.js.
You'll see them in our next generation
of ads personalization controls, where you can tune these things
by geography and event type.
Or another big place you'll see them is with our data deletion
controls.
We've made these much more surgical
so customers can delete only the exact data that they need to.
And at the same time, we're going
to provide a live preview of those changes,
because deleting data can always be scary.
And this way, before any of those changes
go into effect permanently, customers
can make sure that they're happy with the result
before locking in those changes.
So there's a wide range of places where
end user privacy surfaces.
SARA RADIN: Yeah, those are really exciting changes.
And I love that we're still helping businesses
to gain the valuable insights that they
need to run their business from an analytic standpoint
while protecting user privacy in a really
thoughtful and thorough way.
So we've talked about what's available today,
but I know there is a whole lot to come on the roadmap,
so I wanted to switch gears a little bit
and talk about the future.
So what can marketers expect in the next few months
and quarters when we think about this new property type?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: I mean, there's a lot of great things
on the roadmap, to be fair.
But if I had to really focus on one theme,
the one I would choose is customization.
And so customization was more like a feature that
existed in Universal Analytics, where there was a customization
section and there you could build custom reports.
With the approach we've taken for the new Google Analytics 4
property type, customization will
be pervasive across the experience.
It will allow our customers to actually curate
all of their reporting to meet the specific needs
of their businesses.
And so while I'm really excited about the lifecycle reporting,
I think there is an opportunity to think of that just as a
jumping off point and when customization capabilities come
online, our customers are going to be
able to tune that experience that much more to meet
their specific needs.
I think it's a pretty big upgrade
from the type of reporting capabilities
that Google Analytics has had to this point.
SARA RADIN: I know we touched briefly on the ads platform,
and I think one of the things that
is most powerful about Google Analytics
is our deep integrations with other Google products as well.
I know for me personally, one of the things
I'm most excited about is a deeper and broader integration
with YouTube and Google Analytics 4,
and specifically YouTube EBC is coming online.
What is available today and what can users look forward
to as they think about integrations with other Google
products?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: So I would say the set of ads integrations
that exist today start from a similar place of what's
in Universal Analytics.
So you have your conversion tracking
and you have your ability to create audiences.
So that's the starting point.
But as we look forward, in addition
to this focus on consistency that I mentioned,
we're also focused on making these integrations
that much more comprehensive.
And comprehensive can mean a couple different things.
The first you alluded to with YouTube EBCs.
Here, we're talking about making the channel coverage of our ads
integrations that much more comprehensive in Google
Analytics 4.
So that's one example.
Another is we want to be that much more
comprehensive in terms of the products
that we integrate with.
And that includes making the Google Marketing Platform
set of products available for all of our customers,
even those outside of our Google Analytics 360 tier.
So both the channel coverage comprehensiveness,
the product coverage comprehensiveness--
all of this against this underlying
drive towards consistency-- should really
supercharge our ads integrations going forward.
SARA RADIN: And one of the things you mentioned
is Google Analytics 360.
And I know you and I have spent a lot of time reimagining
what an enterprise offering for Google Analytics 4
should look like in the future.
So maybe you can give people a quick preview
on some of the exciting things coming down
the roadmap for the enterprise users of the 360 product.
RUSSELL KETCHUM: So this is something, as you know,
that we're actively testing now.
So there is a version of an enterprise solution
for the Google Analytics 4 property.
We're testing it with customers right now.
And we should be making it available--
generally available-- relatively soon here.
And once it is, in addition to the SLAs
that customers expect of an enterprise product,
we're also going to see higher limits, increased performance,
and additional features-- things like real-time and intra-day
export to BigQuery, and a whole bunch more.
So there's a lot of exciting things.
Not quite ready to talk about them all in detail today,
but the enterprise version will be here soon.
SARA RADIN: All right, well, you sold me
on Google Analytics 4 and all of the exciting features.
And hopefully we have sold all of you.
So assuming yes, how can people get
started with the new property type today?
RUSSELL KETCHUM: Yeah.
It's really easy.
It's always been easy to get started with Google Analytics,
and hopefully with Google Analytics 4 it's even easier.
So if you're a user of Universal Analytics already,
you can just jump into the Admin section for your property
and you'll find an area right there
that makes it very easy to get started on your upgrade.
Or, if you're starting fresh with Google Analytics,
simply create a new account.
That'll create a Google Analytics 4 property for you.
You add the measurement code to the header on every page.
And as soon as you do, the data will start flowing,
and you're able to dive in and start trying out for yourself
all these great possibilities and capabilities.
SARA RADIN: So, thank you so much, Russ, for being here
and for sharing more on Google Analytics.
RUSSELL KETCHUM: Yeah, thanks so much for having me
and for giving me this opportunity
to share all the exciting things that
are coming with Google Analytics 4.
SARA RADIN: Yeah.
So thanks to all of you for tuning in.
It was great to be able to spend time
with you virtually and talk about Google Analytics with you
today.
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