Google Analytics Solutions: Related Products

Data Studio: Search Console Connector

February 8, 2017

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps webmasters monitor and maintain their site's presence in Google Search results. Search Console helps users understand how Google views their site and allows them to optimize their performance in search results.

Search Console’s Search Analytics feature shows webmasters how often their site appears in Google search results for various keywords. This data is extremely powerful but currently lives in Search Console’s Search Analytics Report and is hard to combine with other data sources.

Today we are announcing a new Data Studio connector for Search Console. With this launch users can pull their data into Data Studio to build reports that include impressions, clicks, and average position broken out by keyword, date, country, and device.

Search Console users can now build Data Studio reports to understand how their search traffic changes over time, where traffic is coming from, and what search queries are most likely to drive traffic to their sites. Users can also filter reports for mobile traffic to improve mobile targeting, and to analyze clickthrough rates for various organic search terms.

As always, Data Studio report creators can add components from other data sources into a single report. With this new connector, users can use the Search Console and AdWords connectors to compare performance across paid and organic search, or add Google Analytics data to analyze site-side performance.

Note that Search Console metrics can be aggregated by either site or by page (URL). This is configured in the Data Source creation flow, where users can select either “Site Impression” or “URL Impression”. To learn more about the distinction between these two methods please see the Search Analytics Report Help Center article.

Want to learn more? Looking for a new connector in Data Studio?

To learn more about the new Search Console connector, please visit our Help Center or post your questions in the Data Studio community forums.

Is there a specific data service you wish to be able to access and visualize through Data Studio? We welcome your feedback via the connector feedback form — we read all responses and use them to prioritize new connectors.

Happy reporting!

Posted by The Data Studio team

Introducing Firebase Analytics

May 18, 2016

We’re excited to highlight Google’s next step in mobile app development: Firebase, a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. It comes with new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. The Firebase platform also comes with Firebase Analytics, a free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps.

Firebase Analytics is now Google’s recommended solution for mobile app analytics. It’s user and event-centric and comes with unlimited app event reporting, cross-network attribution, and postbacks. If you’re using Google Analytics for mobile app reporting today, you may want to consider adding Firebase and Firebase Analytics to your app to take advantage of some of its powerful new capabilities.

Google Analytics will continue to support our mobile app analytics functionality and we’ve built a number of ways for clients to use Firebase Analytics with Google Analytics or with Analytics 360 for best-in-class analytics capabilities. If you have both web and app properties, we recommend using Google Analytics for your web analytics and Firebase Analytics for your app analytics.

Many clients may want to keep the app analytics functionality they currently enjoy with Google Analytics in addition to implementing Firebase Analytics. This type of dual implementation is made easy with Tag Manager - allowing you to implement Firebase and then use Tag Manager to send your app data into Google Analytics.

Stay tuned for more detail on Firebase Analytics and enhancements to Google Tag Manager that make mobile app analytics faster and easier than ever.

Happy mobile app analyzing!

Posted by Russ Ketchum, Group Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics and Firebase teams

Enable better decisions with Data-Driven Attribution

February 17, 2016

The following was originally posted on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

Consumers see a lot of different ads as they make buying decisions. Some ads have a huge impact on the final purchase, others help the process along, and still others contribute absolutely zero. The trick, of course, is knowing which ad does what.

Today we’re introducing Data-Driven Attribution to all DoubleClick accounts. It's a new tool that helps you give the right credit to each and every advertising touch point ― and shows you the optimal combination for your marketing.

Powered by Adometry, Data-Driven Attribution uses a modeling methodology developed by Google engineers and grounded in advanced statistics and economic principles. It assigns credit accurately and automatically to all your digital media ads served through DoubleClick.

Click image for full-size version

Turbocharge your campaigns

DoubleClick Digital Marketing already has a strong attribution foundation with Multi-Channel Funnels and the Attribution Modeling Tool. Now it's even easier to make decisions about how to best allocate your digital media budget. Data-Driven Attribution is:

Actionable: The contribution made by each marketing channel is clear (in both converting and non-converting paths), so you can make better data-driven marketing decisions.
Accessible: Just choose your goals (such as e-commerce transaction or email signups) and Data-Driven Attribution will show you the contribution made by each of your digital campaigns.
Comprehensive: No need for new tags, just turn on the feature and you’ll see data for your campaigns.

There’s no room for guesswork in attribution ― and when you’re not guessing, you’ll see greater ROIs and better performances.

“Mindshare helps brands get the most of their digital marketing. To do that we need meaningful insights on the consumer path to purchase across both display and search. We have been testing Data Driven Attribution in DoubleClick and we have seen tailored recommendations that allow us to take fast action for greater impact and better ROI. In some campaigns we have been able to improve budget allocation and have seen CPA improve by 25%.”

-Karen Nayler, CEO, Mindshare Canada

How to get started

You'll find the Attribution interface in the Reporting and Attribution section of your DoubleClick account. You can activate Data-Driven Attribution for all your floodlight tags and once you start collecting data, you'll see a new recommended model appear after seven days.

Learn more about Data-Driven Attribution.

Posted by Luke Hedrick, Product Manager, DoubleClick

Programmatic helps brands make the most of micro-moments

September 16, 2015

The following was originally posted to the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

Solutions Guide for Implementing Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager

March 26, 2015

Marketers, developers, and practitioners of analytics depend on having the right data at the right time - but implementing analytics code or AdWords pixels can be a less than fun (or easy) experience. Google Tag Manager makes tagging simple and fast by letting you add tags with a simple UI instead of code, while also offering advanced tracking features used by some of the web’s top sites.

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the Solutions Guide section on the Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager Help Centers. The Solutions Guide area is focused on providing actionable, hands on, step-by-step instructions for implementing Google Analytics, AdWords, DoubleClick, and other third party tags via Google Tag Manager.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

When and why to use Google Tag Manager
Best practices for naming conventions and setup tips
When to choose the Data Layer or the Tag Manager UI
How to implement GA event tracking, custom dimensions & cross-domain tracking
How to setup AdWords, Doubleclick, and Dynamic Remarketing tags in GTM

We’re thrilled to share this with you and hope you find it helpful as you implement Google Tag Manager.

Check out the new GTM Solutions Guide today!

Happy Tagging.

Posted by Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate

Broader views and faster action for marketers: Google Analytics Premium integrates with DoubleClick Digital Marketing

May 30, 2014

“With Google, we’re getting actionable insights, whereas before we were just getting a lot of data.”

- Lee Pinnington, Multi-Channel Marketing Director, Matalan

As we announced earlier this week, Google Analytics Premium is now integrated with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This enhancement is now available for Google Analytics Premium customers.

Today's consumers move easily across many channels and devices on their journey to a purchase. Top marketers rely on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to run the sophisticated cross-channel ad campaigns that can reach their customers every step of the way. This new step gives Google Analytics Premium users even better ways to see the full customer journey, so they can adjust and make the most of marketing dollars across all channels and devices.

The integration is providing a whole new level of visibility for display advertising by reporting on view-through visits in addition to click-through visits. We're now reporting detailed post-view and post-click engagement and conversion metrics to offer a better view of your strongest opportunities.

1. A clearer view of the customer journey

Display campaigns are typically used in the upper funnel, so they don't get credit in simplistic last-click attribution models. But better attribution models can give full credit to display and other top-of-funnel marketing tools. With the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration you can link your DoubleClick Campaign Manager campaign information into Google Analytics Premium reports, Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) and/or Data-Driven Attribution (DDA), and as a result, you'll see a much more holistic view of how display works together with other channels to drive site engagement and conversions.

“This gives us the ability to see the hidden power of different channels. One of the most interesting things about the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration has been around assisted conversions. It’s really helpful to see how one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel.”

- Adam McCann, Online Search & Affiliate Assistant, Matalan

2. Better investment decisions

With a complete view of the customer journey, you can make smarter decisions on how to allocate your marketing spend. This change helps Google Analytics Premium customers analyze campaigns and ROI at the level that matters to them most, even down to specific versions of creative. It's even easier now to act on this data in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, since Google Analytics Premium uses the same campaign hierarchy and dimensions as DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

3. Greater speed

The integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager means you can spend less time merging campaign data and more time planning winning strategies. We've also made this integration easier, starting with new automatic campaign tagging within DoubleClick for Google Analytics Premium. In the past you had to manually tag every single campaign, creative and landing page URL for them to be recognized in Google Analytics Premium. Now, in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, a simple checkbox makes it incredibly easy to accurately track those campaigns in Google Analytics Premium.

4. Automated and customized marketing

Advertisers are seeing great results with Google Analytics remarketing, for example, Watchfinder revealed a 1300% return on their campaign investment. We’re improving these tools by enabling you to create granular remarketing lists from your Google Analytics Premium account and then share the lists with a DoubleClick Bid Manager advertiser account for real-time remarketing. Plus, Google Analytics Smart Lists feature also works with this integration, allowing you to generate a remarketing list of your best users automatically, based on machine learning from their conversion data.

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.

- Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

The amazing changes in customer journeys are opening up real opportunities for businesses. Making the most of those opportunities starts with seeing the journey more clearly, then reacting quickly to reach the right customers at the right moments with messages that are designed just for them. This new integration is designed to help Google Analytics Premium customers do all those things. We’re just getting started as we’re planning deeper integrations within DoubleClick Digital Marketing in the coming months so stay tuned!

Learn more today and get started

Find out more about the Google Analytics Premium integrations with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. And download a case study.

Posted by: Ravi Mruthyunjaya, Product Manager, Google Analytics

On your phone, tablet or laptop: Your results front and center with AdWords Express

March 5, 2014

The following was originally posted on the Inside AdWords blog.

When you log in to AdWords Express today, you’ll notice that it’s now easier to find the information that’s important to you, whether you’re on your phone, tablet or laptop. After gathering feedback from AdWords Express users, we’ve redesigned the dashboard with ad performance stats front and center.

See how many views, clicks and calls your ad has received from customers on different devices

Check your ad’s performance on the go

It’s easy to manage your advertising, even when you’re away from the office. For example, to check how many customers have seen your ad from their tablet (while using your own phone) just look under the “Views” graph.

Check your ad’s performance on the go

Go beyond the click with Google Analytics

Now you can see more details about how users interact with your website after clicking your ad by linking your Google Analytics and AdWords Express accounts. Once you connect your accounts, you’ll see a new card on the AdWords Express dashboard (as well as in your Analytics account).

Google Analytics information in AdWords Express

To learn how to link Analytics and AdWords Express, visit the help center.

If you have additional feedback on this new design, please let us know. And if you haven’t yet started using AdWords Express, you can sign up today.

Posted by Francisco Uribe, Product Manager

Insights on the fly: Introducing executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

November 20, 2013

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.

DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster -- and we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.

With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.

Click image for full-sized version

As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.

“Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.”

Three ways to get started with executive reporting

Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.

High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.

Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track.

Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “Success with DS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don’t see the ‘Executive Reports’ tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open allowlist.

Posted by the DoubleClick Team

Introducing Mobile App Indexing on Search: a better experience for mobile search users

October 31, 2013

Here's some great news from Google’s search team: In-app content is now becoming visible in Google search. Starting today, users on Android devices can jump straight from Google search results to pages inside an app.

For Google Analytics for mobile apps users, this opens up a new world of insights into areas like revenues, engagement and overall app usage.

We've reposted the original blog post below. And if you haven't already, try Google Analytics for mobile apps for powerful insights into how users engage with your app.

There are many reasons to build or not to build a mobile app as part of your broader mobile strategy. For instance, while apps offer a rich user experience, users can’t access them through Google Search like they do websites. Today, we’re announcing a new Google Search capability, app indexing, that will start to make apps more accessible through Google on Android.

Let’s say that a user is searching for a movie. With app indexing, Google will begin to include deep links to apps in Android search results. When the user taps on the “Open in app” deep links, the app opens up directly to the movie in question.

In this example, in order for the app deep links to appear in search results,

The Flixster app supports deep linking
The Rotten Tomatoes website has specified that the Flixster app page is an alternate for the web page
Google has indexed the Flixster app to determine relevance
The user has installed the Flixster app

The end result is that users will have a seamless search experience when accessing your app content through Google.

Google is currently testing app indexing with an initial group of developers including AllTheCooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy,Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDb, moviefone, newegg, OpenTable, Trulia, and Wikipedia. Deep links for these applications will start to appear in Google search results on Android, in the US, in a few weeks.

How to get started

If you are interested in enabling indexing for your Android app, you can learn more about our developer guidelines at developers.google.com/app-indexing and sign up. We are expanding our app indexing efforts and will gradually include more developers over time.

Posted by Chaesang Jung, Software Engineer

No Code Required: Auto-Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager

October 10, 2013

We’re excited to announce that Google Tag Manager has publicly launched Auto-Event Tracking, which lets you measure events happening on the page without writing HTML or Javascript. Those of you measuring events in Tag Manager today will already have minds racing with the possibilities - skip ahead to the screenshot. Everyone else, read on.

As sites become more dynamic and want to understand users’ site experiences in more detail, business owners need to know more: how long are visitors staying on a particular page? How are they interacting with interactive elements like image carousels? How many are clicking the Contact Me button? How many are clicking outbound links? Increasingly, site analytics are incomplete without answers to questions like these.

Unfortunately, until now, answering these questions required adding custom Javascript code to your website to tell Google Analytics when the event occurred. Google Tag Manager users also needed to modify the HTML of each page where they wanted to track an event. That means every time you want to track something new, or change the way you track something, you need to modify site code directly (or, in some cases, ask another colleague to do it for you.) And slower deployment of measurement campaigns directly impacts your ROI.

With Google Tag Manager’s launch of Auto-Event Tracking, we’re excited to announce a solution that provides the power of event tracking without needing to write code. By using the new Event Listener tag, you can tell Tag Manager when you want to listen for events, and then write detailed rules for what to do when an event happens. See an example of listening for form submits here:

Once you have your event listener set up, you can have tags fire based on form submits using a rule that looks for the event gtm.formSubmit. (Of course, Tag Manager supports more than form submits: it also includes clicks and timer events.) You can also make sure you’re getting the right form by using our Auto-Event Variable macros that let you narrow things down with attributes like the element ID and the form target.

The end result: you can deploy event tracking to your site and send event tracking data to Google Analytics without adding any code to your site. You can deploy measurement campaigns faster, and not writing custom code makes your solutions more robust.

Of course, it’s easiest to see the whole picture by walking through a full example. Check out the following resources for more:

Tracking Google Analytics events with Tag Manager in our Help Center
Auto event tracking with Google Tag Manager at Justin Cutroni’s Analytics Talk blog
Event Listener documentation and Event Tracking Macros documentation in our Help Center

We’re looking forward to getting your feedback - let us know what you think!

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Google Tag Manager PM

Introducing an all-new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager

September 25, 2013

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

The phase of adolescence is a transitional one, and this year, on the 15th anniversary of DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) we find ourselves celebrating a big milestone: an entirely rebuilt campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, the coming of age of DFA. In June, we announced that DoubleClick Campaign Manager would be available to all advertisers in the coming months, and today I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched globally.

DoubleClick Campaign Manager is at the core of our DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. It re-imagines how marketers and agencies manage the entire scope of their digital marketing efforts - from planning and executing, to measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

Intuitive workflows that give you back time. With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we started by building new, time-saving features into a noticeably more beautiful and responsive user interface. This means the time gained from speeding things up can free up opportunities for you and your team to work on higher-value activities.

A new trafficking interface loads up to 5 times faster than before, and ads and ad changes now go live in just 2 minutes. You can also view campaign information centrally from a single page, rather than flipping across tabs. With in-line and bulk editing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks.

Easy tagging. Floodlight, DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag is integrated with Google Tag Manager. Now, you can push Floodlight tags directly from DoubleClick Campaign Manager to Google Tag Manager (and your site), reducing the time it takes to implement tags from weeks, to minutes.

Programmatic and reservations in one place. With one unified UI and reporting system across DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, you get access to accurate, de-duplicated conversion data. Creatives and tags are shared, and remarketing lists are synced so you can engage your audience seamlessly across every part of your buy.

Seamless support for mobile/HTML5, video, and rich media formats. DoubleClick Campaign Manager makes it easier to produce, scale, and traffic creative formats - from mobile and video, to rich media and dynamic.

A mobile-first approach. Mobile is built into the fabric of our platform. Support for IAB-compliant HTML5 creatives means a single creative can render on any device and help you take advantage of the engaging, rich-media capabilities of HTML5. We’ve ensured that your tags work everywhere too. There is no longer a separate mobile tag, and mobile targeting and reporting dimensions are automatically available in all served tags.

Powerful video features. An intuitive approach to video trafficking allows you to share and re-use companion ads across videos, and get a detailed performance breakdown. And support for the next wave of video formats - including interactive video and dynamic VPAID - helps you deliver more engaging videos. Additionally, you can now track your YouTube TrueView campaigns alongside all your other placements, allowing for more holistic insights.

Easier Rich Media. Integration with DoubleClick Studio allows you to easily sync creatives into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, saving you time and effort. New preview functionality allows you to test and QA creatives without relying on your creative agency. And you can create ads that are tailored to your audience with dynamic creative that optimizes the best combination of variables to serve the “perfect ad” for every impression.

New audience features help you surface key insights and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Create powerful remarketing lists based on custom Floodlight variables. Your lists are automatically shared with DoubleClick Bid Manager and updated in real-time, helping you establish second contact with your audience quickly.

New audience reporting gives you strategic insights. Audience is now a new dimension in standard reporting, so you can understand the segments with which your message best resonated. If you use DoubleClick Bid Manager, audience composition reporting shows you how your first party lists overlap with your third party lists. We will be bringing this capability to all customers soon.

Enhancements in reporting for better decisions. Reporting has always been the backbone of the DoubleClick platform, with de-duplicated reporting across channels. We built on this foundation last year with Report Builder, Multi-Channel Funnels, and DoubleClick Verification. Now, with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we bring you even more insightful reporting tools:

Powerful attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels helps you better understand your customers’ journey from initial interaction to final conversion and more accurately credit the channels and touchpoints that contributed to your conversions. With the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can choose from several basic models of assigning credit for impressions and clicks, or you can create your own model in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

Integration of Wildfire’s social technology platform with the DoubleClick attribution suite means you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving social conversions. Additionally, social ad impressions and clicks can be tracked directly in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, allowing you to measure your social programs alongside the rest of your efforts.

When DoubleClick for Advertisers was founded in 1998, we invested in the promise that digital can forge connections and bring value to advertisers, publishers and users. Today, as we celebrate its 15th anniversary, we’re excited to be investing in the next wave of digital marketing where we are even more connected than ever before.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Choose AdSense: Make Money from Your Content

August 26, 2013

Not using AdSense yet?

In the last ten years, AdSense has helped over 2 million partners grow their businesses. Be sure to tune in on Wednesday September 11, at 11:00AM, when we’ll be hosting a special 10th Anniversary Hangout on Air for prospective publishers. If you haven’t yet signed up for Google AdSense or would like to learn more, you should join us. We’ll demonstrate how AdSense helps you earn money from your website, allowing you focus on creating great content. Learn how AdSense:

Earns you extra revenue
Shows your users relevant and useful ads
Lets you control which ads show up on your site
Helps you understand what’s working and what’s not with robust reporting tools

Several publishers will also be joining us to share their AdSense experiences. Hear why they chose AdSense and how it’s helped them grow.

Join this event page to live stream the Hangout on Air on September 11 from 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT.

Posted by Bola Akinsanya - AdSense Strategic Partnerships Team

Creating a Standard Data Layer for the Tag Management Industry

July 11, 2013

It’s been an exciting few months for Google Tag Manager. As referenced in our previous post this morning, Google Tag Manager is now serving twice the amount of traffic it was in April 2013 and we have been steadily adding features. Recently, at Google I/O, we announced that Google Tag Manager will also work with mobile applications.

This week, a consortium of companies, including IBM, Accenture and more, along with the W3C, announced they are collaborating to create a standard Data Layer.

The data layer is a core component of Google Tag Manager and a common way for all businesses to implement tag management tools. It’s a standard way to format data within a web page. Think of the data layer as a central way for analytics and marketing tools to communicate and share data on a web page.

It's typically used in two ways: 1. to store data and provide a clear separation between the data and presentation layer of the page and 2. to store data when some type of user activity occurs. The information in the data layer can then be consumed by different web technologies, like analytics tools or marketing tools, through a tag management platform.

Through the W3C community group we’re supporting the effort to standardize the format and syntax of the data layer. This will make it a lot easier for businesses to add data to HTML and access it with different tools. An industry-wide standard will create a common way that websites and tag management tools can interact - thus making it easier on site owners.

Standards can not exist in a vacuum. They need adoption. Please take some time to learn about this effort and the specification. You can learn more about the work at the W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Standard Community Group site where you can also review the first draft of the Specification. If you’re interested in participating please join the group and help us test and refine the spec.

Posted by Brian Kuhn, Lukas Bergstrom & Justin Cutroni, Google Tag Manager Team