Google community, in July 2018, started beta testing a new feature called Google Signals that offered cross-device reporting and remarketing capabilities.
This new feature helped businesses understand the customer journey & their behavior across different devices that they used and gave a complete view of marketing campaigns along with the results.
By enabling these signals into your account, you get access to cross-device reports in Google Analytics. These reports show the different devices people use before converting on your website.
Working with Google Signals
Google Signals lets you track signed in users across devices, be it multiple browsers, mobile apps, mobile devices, etc.
We know that, Google Analytics track sessions and device type of the users that visited your website or got converted. But once the Google signals are activated, Google Analytics recognises the device from which the first click was recorded.
For example, a user first clicks on your ad from mobile and then clicks on second ad on a tablet and finally completes the conversion on a desktop.
With this information, a dashboard of the cross-device interactions of the users & conversions is documented to enhance remarketing and reporting.
After enabling this feature,
1. You can get more insights into google data.
2. You can accurately analyse how many unique visitors are coming to your site
3. Include all existing advertising Features such as Display & Video 360 impression reporting and remarketing, Google Display Network.
Activation-
Setting up google signals is a very easy 3-step process.
At first, take an edit permission from relevant property so you can perform administrative and report-related functions like add/edit/delete accounts, properties, views, filters, goals, etc. and see report data.
Then, either Click ‘Get Started’ in the blue notification banner at the top of the page or navigate to Property column and select data Collection.
You will then, reach this page with information about Google signals and its benefits.
Read the information and click CONTINUE.
Once you do that, you will be brought the authorisation page (shown below) where you may need to review and update your privacy policy. Choose the properties for which you want to activate Google signals, or you can also select all the properties.
Click ACTIVATE if you want to activate Google signals immediately.
After you activate Google signals, the switch for the feature is set to ON like this-
The new data retrieved is from the date you activate Google signals.
You are now all set to see new user-based data in the Cross-Device reports.
What is Cross device reporting?
The Cross-Device reporting give you the tools to organize data across multiple devices into a cohesive analysis, so you get a better idea of how seemingly unrelated touch points, sessions, and interactions are connected.
Traditionally, the cross-device reports were only available in the user-ID view. But now with Google signals, the cross-device reports are available in the non-user ID view too. Data from the Cross-Device Reports shouldn’t be compared directly to other GA reports, as deduplication across devices is not performed.
For an instance, if user first visits your website through mobile and then visits through desktop, in cross device report he would be considered a new user on mobile and a returning visitor on desktop.
Cross device reporting helps you to-
1. Gain better insights into features of mobile, tablet and desktop.
2. Inform about marketing strategy, including budgets and bids.
3. Tailor messaging and call-to-action to acquisition and conversion devices.
4. Identify pain-points for particular devices and their categories.
5. Target messages & landing pages to different device categories
There are three reports in the cross-device section of GA account-
● Device Overlap
● Device Paths
● Acquisition Device
Device Overlap Report
The device overlap report features a Venn diagram that displays the percentage of users who used one or multiple devices. It can’t display more than three categories though like mobile, tablet and desktop at a time.
In this report, you can also segment the users by device type to compare the ROI. Each Segment appears as a separate diagram and row in the data table.
With help of this data, you can decide if you want to retarget the users on mobile devices or target the ones who have already visited from the desktop.
Device Paths Report
A device path report shows in which order did the users use different devices to interact with your website or ad.
By default, the report shows data the last 5 device interactions with at least 1 transition.
With this report, you might find that a specific segment of users with a User ID engage with your content on multiple device types before converting, while another segment only uses one device type.
Acquisition Device Report
The acquisition device report determines whether a user converted on the originating device or on some other device.
Originating device is the one user uses when he first interacts with your website after being assigned with a user ID.
The Revenue for Originating Device metric shows you how much revenue was generated on the same device type on which you acquired those users.
Revenue from Other Devices displays how much revenue is generated on devices in a different category than the one on which you acquired those users.
Conclusion-
With Google signals & cross device reporting you will get a new dimension to your data analysis, target the right channels, audience, devices, etc. and take right business decisions based on the most accurate data.
Leave a comment below, and share what you understand about cross-device reports.
