In the opening presentation, Paul Muret (Vice President of Engineering at Google Analytics) described the analytics framework employed by Google that drove the 70+ innovative updates in 2013. Google stressed that the pace of improvements will only increase in 2014 – they delivered immediately by unveiling 14 new updates to the data driven world over the next 45 minutes. The updates were categorized into the three key areas highlighted in the theme:

Access – Connecting the right data to the right people

  • This means making it easy to install and manage Tags to collect our data
  • The biggest update was in Google Tag Manager – Automation of Event tracking without touching the html
  • Other notable updates discussed the turnkey options now available to merge tracking Universal Analytics and Google Analytics Classic

Empower – Empower all members of an organization to contribute to the analysis of the data

  • Data visualization, report configurations and user interface updates to advanced segmentation have all seen significant improvements
  • Help videos will now be made available on all future updates
  • Google Academy launch will make GA more familiar not only to analysts but also to business users

Act – Drive the organization forward by taking action on these insights

  • Google has been making some interesting references to two types of improvements
  • Aggregate – one off optimizations that have an effect site-wide
  • Automate – continuous automated optimizations- typically via mass customization (right message at the right time to the right visitor)

Stay tuned to our blog for more updates from the 2013 Google Analytics Summit!