A breakthrough in tracking cross-platform journeys

Earlier this year, Google announced a huge change in the way we think about and measure website and mobile apps.

We've been expecting this change for a while, as analysts and marketers try to gain insight into cross-platform journeys. The ability to track a consumer's purchase journey as they travel across the brand's website and app has become a necessary insight. Many brands turned to Firebase for app insights to complement their Google Analytics data only to discover the task to combine the two datasets isn't as straight forward as it should be.

Using Web + App, alongside events (and parameters), we can now measure website and app activity in one unified property with one set of metrics and dimensions - hooray!

To help with the initial setup, 'Enhanced Measurement' has also been introduced. This gives us a number of events that can be automatically captured, lessening the reliance on developers to help track the basics.

Reporting changes

The most exciting changes are reflected in the reporting capabilities. With this new Web +App property, we can now report more effectively on users who move across our website and app, and we have access to advanced analysis reports that had previously been restricted to Analytics 360 until now.

I'd recommend getting to grips with the Exploration view. It gives you a blank canvas with a drag and drop style to quickly build and interpret data relationships. The image below gives you a view on how this works.

Funnels has been my favourite feature within Analytics 360 for years. Funnels lets you build on-the-fly visualisations (choosing at each step whether it should be open or closed) to identify where users drop-off en route to a conversion point. This handy feature now includes time constraints at each step too. Additionally, these can be broken down by segments for even more juicy insights.

The final analysis technique is brand-new (if you exclude the highly sampled ‘Flow’ reports) to Google Analytics - Pathing. This has been available in Adobe Analytics for years, so it’s great to see Google catching up. This report will allow you to click on each node and visualise the top steps in the user journey. This expands to include pathing at a user level, so you can view a journey across multiple sessions and begin with a session start, instead of being forced to select a dimension.

Anything else?

Two other feature callouts are Streamview - a real-time reporting interface that has a lot more depth than the current real-time, and an enhanced audience/segment builder.

We can (finally!) create hit-based segmentation, temporarily excluding users from an audience, and add time constraints. For example, you can choose to only include a user if they performed a sequence of actions within 30 minutes of each other.

In summary

Although this is still only in beta, we’re really excited about what’s available from Web + App measurement and reporting. It won’t replace the traditional analytics reporting just yet (there’s no eCommerce reporting), but we can see it growing more and more over the next year.

Not sure where to start with this? We run a selection of Analytics and Optimisation courses to suit your needs. In particular, our Google Analytics Advanced course or Analytics 360 Private course will answer any questions that you may have.

Drop us a message at hello@jellyfish.com and we’d be more than happy to talk you through these new options and how best to start using them!