Simo Ahava’s talk was probably the talk that was most eagerly anticipated by everyone at the Analytics Summit and he did not disappoint the audience. For his only talk in Germany this year, the world-renowned web analytics blogger and expert developer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager chose the topic “You can’t spell MEASURE without COMMUNICATION”. In his talk, Simo suggested that the current approach that organizations are taking with technical issues and problem-solving ad infinitum is a futile effort as problem-solving cannot be scaled effectively. Simo asserted that arising technical issues are in fact the symptoms of a much bigger problem: a lack of communication within the organization. Too often departments are siloed and a waterfall approach is taken in planning and communicating. The lack of involvement and participation across departments enables issues to appear downstream, when it is already nearly too late to make corrections. The solution that Simo suggested to this flawed approach is to create a structured environment where communication flows throughout the whole organization and every stakeholder is included in each step of the project. As a possible approach to improve communication, Simo proposes to use Agile or an even simpler approach of short daily standup meetings where the focus is on the project and each stakeholder can participate. When this is done the right way, the benefits include transparency, involvement of stakeholders, knowledge and skill sharing, as well as constant learning. Simo drew a broader picture of the way organizations should be communicating and the audience really enjoyed listening to him.

Ole Bossdorf is the Head of Business Intelligence at the Berlin based venture capital company Project A. He and his team support founders in identifying opportunities to implement data-driven decision making within their organisations. In his talk, Ole stated that founders need great intuition to get started and to identify the potential value of niches when they start their company. Nevertheless, excellent founders also need to know when it is time to set aside intuition and use data to make decisions moving forward. Therefore, the challenge for Ole and his team is to get the right data to the right people. This often entails using custom dimensions in combination with the out-of-the-box offerings provided by Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Ole recommended using custom dimensions to obtain non-standardized and additional information that are unique to your business and not automatically tracked within Google Analytics. With that information, you can create impactful use cases that enrich decision making within your company. After these valuable insights, Ole closed his talk by urging everyone in the room to think about their data collecting strategies as topics such as Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) or Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) are stirring up the world of analytics.

Fatih Karadeniz is working as a Team Lead in the Business Intelligence of Quandoo and is mainly responsible for tracking and Ad Tech solutions of Quandoo products on both B2C and B2B side. In his talk, Fatih presented some “appetizers” from Quandoo on how to adjust Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to your custom requirements. Quandoo has had 197.078.115 seated dinners until today and, as told by Fatih, has been greatly inspired by Stephen Hawking – drawing parallels from the universe tracking to the exploration of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and perceiving every project and team as its own universe. This was illustrated by Fatih with two cases, where this inspiration had helped Quandoo to find custom solutions for the issues of enabling the chain name referral, challenged by problems of technical and environmental limitations, as well as with the widget pings via measurement protocol of customizable widgets as CTA buttons and calendars in iFrames.

Johanna Czaja ist Product Owner für die Website von Berge & Meer Touristik. Ihre Aufgaben umfassen das digitale Marketing mit Google Analytics und bringen das LEAN Management, Agile Project Management und Google Analytics zusammen. Mit dem Leitsatz „Data has a better idea” startete Johanna ihren Vortrag zur Erläuterung des Hintergrundes für den LEAN Ansatz. Diesen nutzte sie bei ihrer Arbeit als Product Owner zur Optimierung der internen Suche auf der Website. Die Evaluierung und Optimierung des Designs der internen Suche sollte nicht mehr länger auf Bauchentscheidungen basieren, sondern durch eine Datenbasis unterstützt werden. Der Prozess zur strategischen Ausrichtung des hierfür notwendigen Google Analytics Trackings gliederte sich in die Bereiche: Analyse Phase, Hypothese, Experiment und Agieren. Zur Bewertung der definierten Hypothese, dass die neu designten Suchfilter effizienter performen, wurde ein A/B-Testing durchgeführt. Für weitere Optimierungsmaßnahmen und Effizienzanalysen wurden alle Suchfelder der internen Suche mit einem Google Analytics Event-Tracking im Zusammenspiel mit dem Google Tag Manager erfasst. Die dadurch geschaffene Datenbasis ist das Ziel des LEAN Ansatzes und dient als Entscheidungsgrundlage für weitere Schritte.

John Keiller, the Head of Digital Strategy at Canyon Bikes, presented the winning formula for establishing Canyon as the number one global ecommerce bike brand: Data. As key driver of disruptive innovation within the firm, it streamlined the testing of tiny ideas through the demand of constant feedback in order to gradually improve processes and products. Efficient data leverage includes sharing data throughout the whole organization, generating a personalized experience for customers by means of information collection on their previous visits and the creation of tailor-made products, enabled by big-scale data collection. Another performance boost for Canyon was the public brand perception increase through their data-driven customer approach after sales, generating positive Google and Trustpilot reviews.

All in all, Canyon follows the simple but successful principle: Effective and efficient marketing = Product + Happy Customer + Recommendations.

Yuanji Wang is a web analyst of the HolidayPirates Group and responsible for the tracking of their website and online marketing. Being in the market for already seven years, HolidayPirates offers finding the best travel deals and publishing them on channels dedicated to each market. But tracking ecommerce in the travel industry is different than usual ecommerce of for example online shops, as for a not standard ecommerce site, the users are coming from multiple different channels to the website and moving further to the partner’s website where the transaction happens. Thus, no information about the results of marketing campaigns or the potential of performance optimization is available. Therefore, HolidayPirates was confronted with the challenge of tracking the transactions and linking them with the corresponding marketing campaigns. Solution finding underwent three phases: first, partners granting HolidayPirates access to their Google Analytics account; secondly, implementing the cross-domain tracking with measurement protocol hits; and thirdly, creating backend APIs with measurement protocol hits.

In ihrem Vortrag stellten Fabian Schaipp und Lovro Lucic von E.ON Energie vor, wie sie bei E.ON das Enhanced E-Commerce Tracking mit Google Analytics und Google Tag Manager umgesetzt haben. Dabei hatten sie insbesondere die Herausforderung, dass E.ON unterschiedliche Produktgruppen wie z.B. SmartHome Hardware und Energieprodukte vertreibt und diese Produktgruppen sehr unterschiedliche Checkout-Prozesse haben. Trotzdem sollten die Checkout-Prozesse aller Produktgruppen auch in einer übergreifenden Google Analytics View dargestellt werden.

Während für die SmartHome Produkte der Enhanced E-Commerce Prozess weitgehend standardisiert umgesetzt wurde, hat man die zur Verfügung stehenden Events für die Energieprodukte den Bedürfnissen entsprechend angepasst. So wurde zum Beispiel ein „Add to Cart”-Event implementiert, wenn der User in dem Tarifrechner ein Produkt auswählt, da dies am ehesten der Logik entsprach. Wenn die Bestellstrecken in der Analyse betrachtet werden, dann werden stets Segmente angewendet, um die jeweiligen Bestellstrecken unterscheiden zu können. Außerdem wurde der Affiliate Code genutzt, um den Prozesstyp in eine Dimension zu speichern und um die Möglichkeit zu haben, Transaktionen und User einfach nach den Prozessen unterscheiden zu können.

Als zusätzliche Herausforderungen sahen die Vortragenden das Tracking von Stornierungen bzw. Refunds, sowie das Abbilden und Zusammenbringen von weiteren Funnels.

As Google Analytics expert from the headquarter of Google in Mountain View, Anjali Raghavan filled the visitors of the annual Analytics Summit with enthusiasm by sharing insights on a brand new Google Analytics feature: An integration of Firebase in Google Analytics will provide the possibility of measuring web and app data in one property. This feature was long awaited by lots of Google Analytics users as app traffic is increasing constantly and users want to measure it together with their web traffic. Anjali walked the audience through the setup of this new property and demonstrated how this feature will help companies to gain cross-platform insights simple and effectively. 

But this was just one part of her talk. As she mentioned at the beginning, the long existence of Google Analytics, which was launched in 2005, offers a lot of new product opportunities to unlock. Therefore, Anjali presented a roadmap with short-, mid- and long-term developments of the tool. A technical improvement of cross-device tracking, new alerting options or the constantly development of the UI forms are only some examples of what she mentioned.

The shared prospects from Anjali left a curious audience which could be satisfied during the following question-and-answer session.