Google releases their Universal Analytics product

Google Opens Universal Analytics Beta To All, Brings Analytics To More Devices And Online/Offline Interactions

Last October, Google announced the limited beta of Universal Analytics, an effort to bring new features like cross-platform and mobile app analytics, as well as the ability to incorporate data from offline sources, to Google Analytics. Today, it is opening up Universal Analytics to all Google Analytics customers.

Many people use multiple devices throughout the day, like laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. This new version lets businesses track their customers across all of these platforms instead of registering them all as different visitors. Now Google will actually recognize that the person who visited your site yesterday on his laptop is the same one who just visited your site today on his iPhone. They can give you data on how that person interacted with your site differently on each of those devices.

Universal Analytics uses universal tracking IDs instead of tracking cookies. “…this means a business can now follow customers from the first time they visit the store’s website all the way to their first purchase and beyond.”

Universal Analytics also lets businesses upload their own customer data so they can incorporate information from offline sources into their analytics and see which marketing channels are the most effective. For example, you could upload information about flyer promotions, store visits (or for hostels, walk-in data), or call center logs so you could see if there are relationships between the channels that are driving sales.

The article (and Google’s releases about the product) are quite hard to understand, because they throw in a lot of buzzwords and technology marketing lingo.

Numbers and analytics are not my strongpoint. Are there any statistics lovers in the crowd who successfully market your hostel based on Google Analytics data? Have you tried Universal Analytics? How would you use it differently from the original version, given the additional metrics that you can incorporate now?