Marketing

Marketing strategy, campaigns, measurement, and performance optimization (148 posts)

BigQuery AI.GENERATE tutorial: turn SQL queries into AI-powered insights

BigQuery just got a major upgrade, you can now plug directly into Vertex AI using the new AI.GENERATE function. Translation: your analytics data and generative AI are now best friends, and they’re hanging out right inside SQL. That opens up a whole world of new analysis options for GA4 data, but it also raises some questions: * How do you actually set it up? * What’s it good for (and when should you avoid it)? * Why would you batch the query? Let’s walk through it step by step. Step 1: H

Katie Kaczmarek•3 Sept 2025

Mastering data loading in BigQuery using Dataform

Efficient data loading is crucial for managing and updating tables in Dataform. Various strategies exist to handle different use cases, including truncate and load, appending data, and leveraging incremental tables with unique keys. This blog explores these primary methods and more: Truncate and Load In this method, all existing records in the target table are deleted and replaced with a fresh table. This approach works well when a full table refresh is necessary or if managing slowly changin

Prasanna Venkatesan•7 Feb 2025

What is offline event data import in GA4?

Offline event data import in Google Analytics 4 allows you to upload event data that was acquired outside of your website or app, such as in-store purchases, contact centre interactions, or CRM data. This can be critical for businesses seeking to bridge the gap between online and offline user actions, resulting in a more complete picture of customer behaviour. How to import offline event data into GA4 You can upload event data into GA4 through a process called Data Import. This can be done ma

Nasima Khatun•22 Nov 2024

The modernisation of marketing and the role of marketing analytics

Navigating the ever-evolving landscape of marketing technology, I've come to terms with a key realisation: marketing analytics is marketing. This acknowledgment hasn't always been easy. Years ago, as a humble web analyst, the lines weren't as blurred. However, with the advent of tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), stringent privacy laws such as GDPR, and changing browser policies like those of Safari, the role of a web analyst has transformed significantly. In the old world - us web analysts

Daniel Perry-Reed•19 Jul 2024

GA4 content performance reporting: Howard Kennedy success story

Howard Kennedy LLP is a London based, full-service law firm with nearly 200 lawyers in one location. They specialise in providing straightforward advice to entrepreneurial businesses and individuals on domestic and international matters. The challenge Howard Kennedy creates various ‘Hot Topic’ campaign pages featuring videos, podcasts, and articles. Despite tracking these pages with Google Analytics 4, the performance data was not directly available to campaign managers or lawyers. The object

Mark Rochefort•7 Feb 2024

GA4 app attribution case study: Pret + Adjust integration

Pret a Manger is a brick and mortar chain of coffee shops serving freshly made food and good organic coffee. They have 600+ stores distributed globally and their analytics team is responsible for over 30 million events every month collected across both web and app.  “Measurelab have been a key partner to us as we’ve undertaken a complete overhaul of our app and web analytics. Having access to the wide range of skillsets within the organisation has been invaluable as we’ve embarked on this journ

Mark Rochefort•1 Nov 2023

How to set up GA4’s custom insights and email alerts

What are custom insights? Sometimes the data available in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can seem a bit overwhelming especially if you have a complex site with lots of users coming and going every day. It can often seem difficult to quickly identify the most important trends or anomalies. Thankfully GA4’s Analytics Intelligence is here to help bring some much needed clarity. This is a group of features that uses modelling to help you understand your data. Insights is one such feature and it comes in

Timothy Gorringe•17 Apr 2023

Emergency Analytics Support

It can be tricky judging how to pitch a new offer in times of crisis. There’s a fine line between being genuinely helpful and appearing exploitative. Sometimes you have to just jump in and try things, knowing they may be misinterpreted by the minority. In business, indecision can be crippling. While people’s lives are undoubtedly the most precious thing, livelihoods are worth saving too. A number of our clients - particularly those in the retail sector - have been hit hard by recent events.

Steven Elliott•2 Apr 2020

Audience activation in 5 simple steps

Amidst news of cookies crumbling and third party cookies eventually becoming obsolete, there is even more emphasis on identifying visitors who arrive on websites and providing users with a reason to remain loyal to your brand. Here is a simple user case on how to effectively personalise your customer experience using the Google Marketing Platform. According to Econsultancy: “50% of consumers are likely to engage with a brand when they receive an interesting offer.” So how can you demonstrate

Aimée Hart•4 Feb 2020

Google Tag Manager Basics #1 - What Is A Tag Manager?

This is the first of a new series dedicated to introducing the uninitiated to the wonders and delights of Google Tag Manager. Before we start thinking too closely about GTM itself, though, we'll pull back a bit and ask: What is a tag manager? A tag manager is a service that allows you to remotely insert and manage small pieces of code, or “tags”, onto a site by means of a Javascript snippet placed across the whole site. There are a number of different tag managers out there—Tealium, Ensighte

Adam Englebright•17 Jan 2020

A day in the shoes of an Insight manager: Andrew Fowkes at EDF

For our regular "A Day In The Shoes" feature, Andy - Senior Research Executive at EDF - talks about delivering a fresh insights perspective and tells us about the skills he needs to be effective in his role. Here’s what his day-to-day looks like. Aimée: Can you start by telling me your job title and responsibilities Andy: I manage Customer Insight projects of all types at EDF . My view is that the role of an insight manager in a big organisation has changed massively. It’s moved away from jus

Aimée Hart•6 Jan 2020

A day in the shoes of a Senior Analyst: Will Deschene at EDF

Our first launch into a ‘day in the shoes’ series is spent with Will Deschene, Senior Digital Analyst at EDF. In this interview, he tells us about managing stakeholders and a team, brands that have inspired him lately, and shares some valuable advice for new analysts. Aimée: Please describe your job: what do you do? Will: The majority of my work is stakeholder management, less of the 'doing' in the analytics world, as I now have two analysts in the team. It's more about stakeholder engagement

Aimée Hart•6 Nov 2019

Expanding on optimisation: effective strategies for digital success

Recently I ran a workshop with a leading International luxury fashion retailer. The purpose was to structure thoughts between disparate teams around purpose and definition of an optimisation workstream. Initially we talked about short term imminent goals, with the festive season fast approaching these were not surprisingly highly tactical and focused around maximising peak performance. Setting the scene At this stage I introduced more broader notions around decoupling the shopping journey or

Aimée Hart•17 Sept 2019

What is a Data Strategy and do I need one?

Let’s assume you’ve been using Google Analytics in your organisation for some time and your digital marketing endeavours at least are data-driven. More and more people are starting to see the benefit in using data to get their jobs done and now everyone’s talking about Data Science or Big Data or whatever. To be clear - when we say “data” we are not talking about just Google Analytics but the proliferation of this tool means that it is very likely a starting point for your data analytics. Alongs

Mark Rochefort•13 Dec 2018

Knead that CRO dough into shape, ‘tis the season for the perfect prove

Whether you’re starting on your CRO journey or have been at it for years, chances are you’re after opportunities to give your bottom line a boost during the festive season. Taking some time to plan and carefully curate those optimisation journeys will not only go some way to making sure the additional traffic works better for you, it’ll result in a meaningful set of results and maximise learnings for the post-Christmas wash ups. Having worked 5 years for a well-known UK health and beauty re

Aimée Hart•29 Oct 2018

Goodbye DoubleClick, hello Google Marketing Platform!

Last week, Google announced they were unifying their analytics and advertising platforms under a single new name: Google Marketing Platform. The Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick brands are being replaced with this single name. What does this mean for DoubleClick? If anything this is a change that has needed to happen for years. DoubleClick always sat rather clumsily alongside other tools from Google and this shift heralds the beginning of a more unified approach. Search Ads 360 wil

Mark Rochefort•17 Jul 2018

Bounce rate vs. Exit rate part one

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Many companies consider a high bounce rate an issue that needs to be addressed quickly. Others support a high bounce rate. The truth is that most people don’t understand what “bounce rate” really means.</span> So what is a Bounce rate? According to Google: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). A better definition would be: Bounce Ra

Alex Cirstea•12 Sept 2016

Google Analytics 360 Suite: what it is & why it matters

So it's finally happened, Google has brought their enterprise-level analytics offerings together in one neat package: the Google Analytics 360 Suite! What they have done is re-branded Google Analytics Premium as Google Analytics 360 and Adometry as Google Attribution 360, and released 4 all new tools. What’s included in the suite: Google Audience Center 360 (beta) A data management platform (DMP) that helps understand and identify customers across channels, devices, campaigns, etc. Google

Daniel Perry-Reed•15 Mar 2016

GAIQ: How I prepared...and passed it!

It’s been exactly a month since I started to work at Measurelab, and so far it has been an amazing experience. Much of the industry jargon and tools are starting to sound familiar and I can make tea or coffee for almost anyone in the team without having to ask how they take it. In order to celebrate the fact that I had survived for a whole month, Mark suggested me to have a go at the Google Analytics Individual Qualification, (which I did..and passed!) For those of you that are not familia

Juan Barros•2 Dec 2014

Google Analytics health check – Part 1: second week guide

Diving into GA health checks Right, now that some of the basic concepts and industry jargon are starting to sound a bit more familiar, things are starting to get interesting – not that last week was boring but this week I’ve been having a go at one of the most important parts of a piece of “initial discovery” for a client: A Google Analytics Health Check. Our approach to health checks In this document, which the team creates for every single one of our clients, we run a detailed audit of the

Juan Barros•17 Nov 2014

Adam's Analytics Adventure: Week 1

<h1>Day One</h1> Upon alighting from the bus as I arrived for my first day of work, I found myself crossing the road next to a group with whom I immediately felt a degree of kinship – casually dressed (but not overly so), a scattering of black-plastic-rimmed glasses – the sort of people who, upon immediate visual inspection, you might peg as the employees of some kind of dotcom, web 2.0 startup. Such proved to be the case, in fact, as they all funneled into the shared office space where I w

Adam Englebright•4 Jul 2014

Import your Cost Data to GA with our new (Free!) Uploader

<blockquote>Please note that this app is no longer relevant as Google have provided their own cost uploader tool!</blockquote> GA has long since allowed you to import AdWords cost data with a few simple button clicks. However other cost data - Bing/Yahoo paid search activity, affiliate marketing, email, Facebook advertising, etc. - were not catered for until about 18 months ago when GA released the Cost Data Import tool in beta. This Cost Data Import tool, which feeds data into a new repor

Dara Fitzgerald•4 Apr 2014

GA Summit 2013: Key Google Analytics updates & insights

The theme of this years summit is a focus on helping customers in three areas: Access, Empower, Act. The slide above was shown by the GA team to summarise the 3 part theme. Babak Pahlavan (Director of Product Management, Google Analytics) let the crowd know that GA have made 70+ releases in 2013 so far, which makes sense on reflection given how busy the year has been. This has included major updates such as the global roll out of Universal Analytics, the introduction of the Attribution Modellin

Dara Fitzgerald•2 Oct 2013