Universal Analytics Now in Public Beta – Should you switch?

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April 16, 2013

One of the major challenges of any business analytics tool is combining and matching data from several sources. E.g., in Google Analytics, if a visitor interacts with your business via multiple devices (work PC, personal laptop, smartphone and tablet), each device is identified as a separate visitor, rather than a single user with multiple touch-points.

A few months back, we covered Google’s announcement of Universal Analytics, which enables integrating all of a user’s activity through various interfaces.

Now that Google has recently made Universal Analytics publicly available, we’d like to point out some of the key improvements it offers in measuring your online marketing performance:

  • For B2B companies – measure ROI of online campaigns, from website lead to offline sale.
  • For software download providers – track users’ lifecycle from click and sign-up through to download and use of software client.
  • Measure migration from website to mobile app and vice versa. Count the real number of users, and how many of them are using multiple platforms.
  • Attribute customer support calls to online activity (e.g. does a video tutorial reduce support tickets?)
  • Measure customer life-time-value combining multiple purchases made via different online and offline channels.

Like any change, it comes at the cost of extra labor, and necessary adjustments. Switching to Universal Analytics should be considered by businesses that have a multi-step sales cycle spanning across multiple touch points (website, software, phone, store, etc.), or businesses that maintain a long-term relationship with recurring transactions by customers.

Note that even though Universal Analytics has been made public, it is still in beta, and it is recommended at this stage to use it alongside, rather than replace, the legacy Google Analytics implementation. Here’s how to get started.