The latest from the world of analytics

Several new products that we remember in the last month of the year.


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Advertising costs in Metric

In early December, it became possible to view the cost of advertising in Direct.
This makes it easy to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns. If you select a goal in the report, you will see not only the conversion for that goal, but also the average cost of achieving it. At the same time, the effectiveness of advertising can be assessed in any sections: from the campaign to the search phrase for which the ad was shown.
You can find the report in the following way:



How does the metric work?

In December, Yandex shared its secrets: talked about how Metric collects, stores, and processes data from sites.
The material is very extensive, and we recommend that you read it here: Yandex



Training

In December, Russian-language webinars came out to prepare for Google Analytics certification. You can find them in the corresponding playlist: YouTube

Smart goals



In mid-December, it became possible to use Smart Targets in Google Anaytics.
They allow you to identify visits with the best metrics that you can use as conversions to optimize your AdWords campaigns. Each visit is evaluated, and Google Analytics identifies “best visits” using machine learning technologies. To assess the quality of the visit, many factors are used, for example, the duration of the session, the depth of viewing, information about the location, device, browser.
This function is appropriate to use for sites that do not have explicit target actions, as well as to optimize campaigns in AdWords.
To start using Smart Targets, you need the following: Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts must be linked, at least 1000 clicks on ads from a linked AdWords account must be recorded in the last 30 days in the Google Analytics view.
How to use this feature: Create a goal in Google Analytics



By activating Smart Targets in Analytics, we can import them into AdWords and use them to optimize bids in ad campaigns.



For some of our clients, we have already added a “smart target”. Here is the standard report:



Google really highlights the most interested and loyal audience, and also gives you the opportunity to customize your campaign in Google Adwords CPA model.
Read more: Analytics Blog

A / B testing



In December, we tested various titles on the Free Market Market Month page. The goal was to determine the most appropriate title and get as many applications as possible.
The heading of “Month.Market” was decided to be compared with the options “New Year offer. Yandex.Market Month ”and“ Yandex.Market Month ”, since the initial title caused controversy.

As a result, received:

It is worth noting that when conducting A / B testing it is possible to choose a traffic distribution strategy.


Since our goal was to get as many bids as possible, we gave Google Analytics the will to distribute users. And it worked!
The most conversion page brought the most applications, we achieved our goals.
Using the built-in A / B testing tool in Google Analytics, you can compare different page layouts. This may be especially true for testing the basket / forms / home page.

Duckduckgo

In America, a new search engine is gaining popularity, positioning itself as "A search engine that does not track you."



His statistics are much more modest than those of the global giant Google, but the growth of the audience of the private search engine is impressive.
What is this about? Meet:



If the growth of this startup continues in the same spirit, Google and Yandex (including Search.Mail) will be forced to move in the Russian market.
We advise you to look at this search engine, because it collects a lot of positive feedback in the geek communities.



It is already possible to advertise on DuckDuckGo, but the search engine allows the user to disable it.


We tried to find at least one advertisement for many queries in Russian, but failed. Maybe we should be the first?
Already, some of our clients can find transitions from this search engine. So far their number is small, but the growth dynamics of the search engine audience as a whole suggests that in the coming years (and maybe even months) we will increasingly see transitions from DuckDuckGo.
We believe that with increasing popularity, the ability to disable advertising will be removed, and we have to work with the new platform.
Follow the interesting search engine!