Audience Sharing in Google Analytics 360 Brings New Insights for Publishers

Google Analytics made headlines earlier this year when the team behind it announced their enterprise grade solution—the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

Native integration with Google products, particularly DFP, enables publishers to serve ads more effectively and monetize better by providing enhanced display ad metrics.

Last month, GA360 and DFP integration hit another milestone with the release of the Audience Sharing feature. The team released a case study about AccuWeather to demo the product and generate buzz.

Steve Mummey, Director of Ad Strategy & Audience Development, AccuWeather, sums it up:

Now that two somewhat different worlds have merged ― ad sales with ops and product analytics ― it’s important that both sides understand the metrics in each platform.

That’s what this integration does—bring content and audience data from Google Analytics 360 and DFP metrics on a single table to allow for deeper, more accurate reporting and insights.

So What is GA360 Audience Sharing Anyway?

As you know, Google Analytics lets you build audience segments to get direct insights about their visitors and target specifically based on info like source, medium, device type, conversion goal completed, et al.

Google Analytics 360 does the same and takes it a step further, thanks to all the available first and third party integrations you can share your audience data with (particularly DFP and DoubleClick AdX).

Google Analytics 360 Audience Sharing

In a nutshell, the integrations brought two great improvements at that point:

Data accuracy and completeness: a user that left the website through a click on a DFP or AdX unit, in the past, was considered a simple abandonment, but with the integration they are “seen” as ads clicked. This also allows a multitude of new analyses using metrics that couldn’t be merged before.

Reporting: having all the data in one centralized place can save a lot of time. The GA360 interface can be used to create custom reports, dashboards and emails.

— Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate at Google and founder of Online-Behavior.com

Use Cases for GA 360 Audience Sharing

> Decreasing impression waste

Daniel optimized ad serving to decrease impression waste of ads on which users had already converted and filled them up with backfilled AdX ads to increase display ad revenue instead.

How? He created a custom audience on Google Analytics for Goal completion: “Clicked on book purchase.” Then he edited the line item targeting criteria in DFP.

It is very common to use DFP to serve house ads, which are intended to promote an action inside your website (as opposed to promoting an advertiser); this could be, for example, a registration for a membership or a page where you are trying to sell something. For Online Behavior, I used house ads to promote my book, showing an ad unit below every post on the website.

However, if a user had already visited the book page and clicked on one of the links to purchase it, I was wasting those impressions, and it would be more profitable for me to show Backfilled AdX ads instead of the book promotion to that group of users. Easy peasy!

> Sell inventory more effectively

Accuweather blew all the stops to monetize their website better, with the new Google Analytics 360 and DFP integration, their team:

• Tailored advertising packages based on “high-value unique audience segments” to be sold directly or through DoubleClick AdX.


• Delivered enhanced campaign reports to advertiser. An Accuweather advertiser wanted to survey the audience that had seen its ads on that website. Accuweather, in turn, created a custom audience (“has viewed ad”), refined it with geolocation data, and pushed the survey to this audience with DFP.

The integration of DoubleClick for Publishers and Analytics 360 gives AccuWeather real-time visibility to the next level of campaign performance insights and is helping us make better advertising decisions. We’re now creating new behavior-based ad products that are being very well received by our advertisers.

— Steve Mummey, Director of Ad Strategy & Audience Development, AccuWeather

What’s Next?

The Suite tool (Audience Center 360) and feature itself (Audience Sharing beta) are still in the works.

Preliminary testing with enterprise-level companies (L’oreal, Nest, AccuWeather, BT, Intuit, Lenovo, et al) have revealed great results—good enough to help solidify GA360’s status as a comprehensive data management platform (DMP)

GA 360 promises to be the complete analytics stack integration marketers in all industry verticals have been asking for—all the data under one roof for every team in the company; to glean clear, accurate insights that help make cohesive, data-driven decisions.

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How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Content Strategy

So you’ve spent countless hours analyzing traffic, channels, and conversions on Google Analytics; well done. Now it’s time to take a step back from everything and take an objective look at your content and its audience to see where they find the most value.

Jay Castro, part of the Mobile Content Marketing team @ Google, has some great tips to get you started. Here’s what he says about refining up your content strategy with Google Analytics:

Understand Who Your Audience Is

If your website has been live long enough (without being de-indexed or blocked for malicious practices), you will have some visitors.

That’s your famous “15 minutes of fame” right there.

No matter how bad your content is, someone somewhere will be sifting through it for any reason under the sun (good or bad).

But do you know who that guy is?

Knowing who your audience is and what they like is key to creating better content that actually succeeds in converting visitors into loyal readers.

The first thing you see on Google Analytics is audience overview. If you take the time to dig a little deeper than the sessions, you can unearth some tasty bits of insights about your audience.

And I’m not talking about individual user reports in User Explorer. I am talking ‘broad spectrum’ audience analysis — age group, gender, and most importantly, interests based on browsing, search, and purchase activity.

Once enabled, Demographics and Interests reports are a goldmine of information about your audience.

In Audience reports, go to Interests (1) >> Other Categories (2) (yup, the very same used in AdWords targeting!). Select a goal (3) and get cracking. For instance, here’s Google Merchandise Store’s Audience Interest Report (Goal: Engaged Users):

The granular category (News > Business News > Company News > Company Earnings) has some good numbers! But there’s more to be found when you click on the category name. You’ll see the audience with this interest segmented by age…

Wait, 18-24 year-olds are into News?!

…followed by gender…

Oh. It’s just the men, apparently. (FML)

And if I add a primary dimension for affinity categories, I will get to the gold:

Ha! Paydirt!

Credit for data goes to Google Analytics Demo Account (covered here).

From this series of (increasingly specific) reports, you can tell that 18-24-year-old males looking for Business News constitute a significant portion of Google Merchandise Store’s engaged audience.

The last report (affinity categories) can be used to identify what this audience segment likes and responds to in general. See what I mean about delving deep?

Publishers with better things to do with their time than know their audience can get a broader view with interests overview. Here’s one based on avg. session duration (poor man’s substitute for ‘Engaged Users’ goal).

What can you do with this information?

Why, find out ways to incorporate these interest categories within your content strategy to increase your reach and engagement. Obviously.

Analyze Your Content for Performance

Content Grouping is, by far, the best (and most underrated) Analytics feature for publishers and bloggers everywhere. It lets you divide and bundle your published content in ways that make sense to you.

Once you’ve bundled your content in groups, you get a simplified look at reports in every page and audience report, including Behaviour Flow (more on that in a moment). You can still drill down to individual pages (by page title or URL) for in-depth analysis.

Castro suggests you use this incredibly nifty feature to simplify content analysis so you can find, focus, and improve on:

> Identify slow loading web pages

Page speed == User Experience is practically indisputable. And some of your content (for instance, posts with more images than general, infographics, video content, etc.) may be lagging behind.

An easy way to identify these slow-pokes is: Group your content (here’s how) by type, author, topic/category, or any other parameter that seems logical to you. Then go to Behavior >> Site Speed >> Page Timings (1). You can segment the report by content groups as primary dimension (2).

Here’s an example from demo account that shows avg. page load time and bounce rate for content group: Product categories. Note how the group with highest avg. page load time (Brands) also has the highest bounce rate (16.07%):

You don’t say?

Hone in on these pages with everything you’ve got and improve their performance.

> Identify pages with low AdSense CTRs

Group content by topic (WordPress users can go with categories taxonomy) and use the AdSense Pages Report (here’s how you link AdSense with Google Analytics). Use the AdSense Pages metric to compare content groups with lowest click-through-rates.

Tip: Drill down to individual pages within lowest CTR pages. Focus on increasing acquisition with SEO and Social shares directed specifically to these pages.

We also suggest you find out and monetize upon content groups that have:

Learn How Visitors Navigate Your Site

Your visitors enter, navigate, and leave your site in ways you probably never thought about. Here’s how you can decode the navigation patterns on your site.

> Landing Page Report

To Google Analytics, ‘landing page’ means a visitor’s point of entry to your site. Go to Behaviour >> Site Content >> Landing Pages (1). Here’s what Demo Account landing page report says about Google Merchandise store (primary dimension — content group: clothing by gender(2))

Women’s clothing: Top conversion rate (purchase completion goal) but dismal number of sessions.

You can see these divided by content groups and drill down further to individual pages…

Like so.

Your aim: Identify content groups/ pages with highest bounce rates and fix them. Another aim: Identify pages that convert best and figure out why.

We also love the following GA features:

• Reverse Goal Path: Analyse content that helps conversions (2nd and 3rd landing pages) and use it to funnel audience towards completion of primary website/blog goals with internal linking

• Behaviour Flow: Find out how visitors arrive and move across your website.

Wrapping Up

The data in Google Analytics can give you some startling insight into the weaknesses and strengths of your current content strategy. The key, as Castro eloquently puts it, is “to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment”.

Good advice, all things considered.

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How to Use Google Analytics Demo Account to Get Hands-On With Data Analysis

How are you going to learn Google Analytics when you have no data to analyze?

This is the situation most new bloggers find themselves in:

• They know that data reports from are vital to a blog’s success.


• They know Google Analytics is the “Holy Grail” of all analytics tools.

By that logic, the obvious next step is to integrate Google Analytics with their up-and-coming blog. Since most bloggers are not data analysts, they hope that with enough practice they’ll learn to make sense of the mountains of graphs, charts, and whatnot.

But a new blog also means you have little to no traffic, and without traffic and related data, there is nothing to analyze.

Or maybe you thought you would study the tool first, in order to see what the fuss was about?

That’s a Catch-22 here: Without Google Analytics, you can’t study website data. Without website data, you can’t learn how to work with Google Analytics.

Without actual website traffic and data to analyze, pick apart, and consolidate in a coherent manner by yourself, you’re just going to end up stumbling around in the labyrinth of features within Google Analytics, unable to understand its full potential.

Luckily for you, Google Analytics just came up with an answer to these troubles. Read on to find out.

About Google Analytics Demo Account

What is it?

The Google Analytics Demo Account is an account provided by Google filled with real website data. If you have a Google account (any Google product — Gmail, Drive, YouTube…), you can use that to gain access to the Demo Account.

Where’s the data from?

The Demo Account pulls data from an actual eCommerce store by the name of Google Merchandise Store. Google is practically handing you all the information of its branded online store (traffic, content, and transactions) on a silver platter. Go nuts. (Seriously!)

How to access

Sign in to your Google Account and opt in for the demo account.

Keep in mind that if you already have a Google Analytics (standard) account, the Demo Account will simply become one of the free 100 accounts available to you.

Once you’re done with it, you can remove the demo account whenever you like by following the instructions given here.

What You Can Do With the Demo Account

Every single reporting feature within GA comes alive with data. With demo account, you can play with those reports and data to your heart’s content — manipulation, segmentation, custom reports, and dashboards… just all of it. You can share everything you create as well.

To the brilliant bloggers who will have half-a-dozen tabs open on their browsers for actionable insights about GA, I suggest heading straight to:

• Search Console Data (landing pages, queries, and demographics by country and device), and;


• Attribution Modeling (to understand profits from various channels / sources via different models, and even create your own)

What You Can’t Do With the Demo Account

Nothing’s perfect. Here are few things you can’t do with the demo account:

You can’t collaborate

You can share your assets (custom reports, segments, etc.) and you can see the assets shared with you by others, but you can’t collaborate — which means learning this remotely from an analytics-whiz (in real time) is out of the equation.

You can’t extract the data

It’s impossible to extract this data using API (for further study in a different analytics tool). You’re stuck with Google Analytics.

Looking Ahead

Deepak Aujla, Global Analytics Platform Manager at Google, announced Google’s intention to add more live data for Enhanced eCommerce features (custom dimensions, campaigns, coupons, et al) and AdWords reports to Demo Account within this year. If you’ve got ideas (Content Grouping anyone?), you can pitch in a request here.

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