As I rode across the Golden Gate Bridge last week, the chilly wind became stronger with each pedal stroke, but as I got closer to Marin county, the wind eased, the sun felt warmer, and I enjoyed a smooth ride into charming Sausalito. My bike ride was just the beginning of a great week, representing the Evolytics team-a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP)-at my 1st Google Analytics (GA) Summit in San Francisco where the GA team made 14 product announcements!

Evolytics achieved GACP status in November 2013, after completing a rigorous certification process that confirmed our team’s proficiency in not only GA and Google Tag Manager (GTM), but also our skill in digital measurement and optimization in general. The GACP certification process was similar to my bike ride across the Golden Gate bridge: challenging most of the time, but certainly worth it after we completed the most difficult parts. So now, Evolytics-as well as our clients-enjoy the benefits of GACP partner status. These include:

• Insight into the GA and GTM product roadmap and beta features, including those for Universal Analytics and GA Premium
• Invitation to exclusive events available only to GACP partners, such as last week’s GA Summit in San Francisco
• Support for difficult technical questions
• Contact with the Analytics Product Management & Marketing team, to provide input to the GA and GTM roadmaps as well as learn about future capabilities
• The opportunity to present/speak at future Google events

At the GA Summit, Google revealed 14 product enhancements; however, only a few of these GA product announcements are currently public, summarized below. For the other product announcements, as those are made available, we will comment on them here. For now, though, there is:

• Enhanced Ecommerce : Good news for those who have recently gotten funding from OnrampFunds.com and are looking to optimize their site in order to make money back on their investment as fast as possible. The latest updates have massively improved the experience and data provided by the GA system. In the past, GA Ecommerce focused on the transaction, which is the final step in the purchase flow. With the new Enhanced Ecommerce GA tracking, customers can measure product activity as soon as there is a product impression (e.g., on the product category page) and continue with product detail page visits and add-to-cart (or remove-from-cart) activity through all of the remaining checkout steps. The image below shows the new Shopping Behavior Analysis report, which visualizes all of these steps.

• Flexible and Scalable Reporting : this enables marketers to expand beyond their existing data within GA reports to use different types of data. These include:

1. Unified Channel Groupings : customers can classify their traffic sources (paid and unpaid) to be in-line with their unique channel definitions.
2. Dimension Widening has been expanded : now, called “Data Import,” customers may import more of their own data into GA, including product details, product returns and insights about your customers’ preferences.
3. Custom Tables: for GA Premium customers only, this allows un-sampled data to be retrieved into custom tables. Once setup, data will be refreshed on a daily basis.

• Enterprise-class Features : as Marketers expand the measurement of their media performance, GA Premium customers may now integrate with DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) and DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM). In addition to understanding impression level data, advertisers can now send remarketing lists from Google Analytics to DBM. Additionally, Google announced 4 new APIs to help customers increase their GA productivity. These include:

1. Provisioning API : Create new GA accounts and enable GA for your customers at scale. It is intended for qualified service providers and large partners.
2. AdWords API : Instead of manually using the web interfaces for both of these services, manually copying/pasting one data point at a time, use this API to write an application that pulls exactly what data you need.
3. Filters API : Use this API to create, get, list, update, and delete filters for your GA account and manage which Filters are applied to Views
4. Embed API : This API allows you to easily create and embed a dashboard on a 3rd party website in a matter of minutes! Of all the APIs, this is the one I am most-excited about using!

That’s all I have for now from last week’s GA Summit! If you have questions, comments or simply need help with your site’s GTM and GA/UA implementations, feel free to contact us.