Better understand and reach your customers with new Cross
Device capabilities in Google Analytics
Today, we’re introducing
new Cross Device features to Google Analytics. Analytics will now help you
understand the journey your customers are taking across their devices as they
interact with your website, giving you a complete view of the impact of your marketing
so you can run smarter campaigns that deliver more tailored experiences to your
customers.
Piecing together a more complete
picture
Cross Device
reporting in Analytics takes into account people who visit your website
multiple times from different devices. Now, instead of seeing metrics in
Analytics that show two separate sessions (e.g., one on desktop and the other
on mobile), you’ll be able to see when users visited your website from two
different devices. By understanding these device interactions as part of a
broader customer experience, you can make more informed product and marketing
decisions.
Say you’re a marketer for
a travel company. With the new Acquisition Device report, you may find that a
lot of your customers first come to your website on mobile to do their initial
research before booking a trip later on desktop. Based on that insight, you
might choose to prioritize mobile ad campaigns to reach people as they start to
plan their trip.
In addition to the
Acquisition Device report, you’ll soon have access to other Cross Device
reports like Device Overlap, Device Paths and Channels. Our Cross Device
reports only display aggregated and anonymized data from people who have opted
in to personalized advertising (as always users can opt out at any time).
Reaching the right customers along the way
Analytics will
also now help you create smarter audiences based on the actions people take on
various devices. That way you can deliver more relevant and useful experiences.
Let’s say you’re a shoe
retailer and you want to share a special promotion with your most loyal
customers. You decide this means people who have purchased more than $500 in
shoes on your website in the last 12 months using any of their devices. If a
group of customers buy $300 worth of shoes on their phone and another $300 on
their desktop, they’re just as valuable as another group who spend $600 on a
single device, right?
Analytics now understands
that these two groups of customers actually spent the same amount on your
website, helping you create a more accurate audience list to reach the right
customers. And spend isn’t the only way to segment and build audiences. You can
also create remarketing campaigns to reach audiences based on how many times
they visit your website across multiple devices.
Get started
To use these
new Cross Device features, start by visiting the Admin section of your
Analytics account and choose the setting to activate
Google signals. (If you don’t see this setting, you will soon—we’ll
roll it out to all Analytics accounts over the coming weeks.) There’s no need
to update your website code or get additional assistance from a developer.
With these new beta
features in Analytics, we hope you’ll quickly see that by better understanding
the customer journey across devices, you can create more relevant and useful
experiences for your customers.