So it isn’t surprising we’ve received requests from many of you to participate on Google+. We’re excited to fulfill that expectation with a brand new Google+ page for Google Analytics. 

Check out our Google+ pageand add us to your analytics, marketing or related circle. We’ll be sharing the latest and greatest about Google Analytics and digital marketing overall to help you become a better practitioner and achieve more with your efforts. 

Expect everything from how-to’s/tips, technical advice, interesting stats, plus some fun mixed in for good measure. In addition to useful updates, we’re planning to give you the opportunity to hang out live with some of the team members behind Google Analytics. If there’s anything else you’d like to see, pleaseadd a comment to this threadon Google+ and we’ll be happy to consider it. 

In many ways, brand measurement thus far has been an article of faith - but it doesn’t have to be.I think that soon you’ll be able to optimize for brand like you do for performance today with concrete results, in real time. This will help brand marketers make smarter decisions while a campaign is still in flight, rather than serving as a static report card given after the fact. To do all of this, we need to bridge the online and offline gap with brand equivalency metrics that translateGRPandTRPinto online reach and audience targeting.

Recently we announced ourBrand Activate Initiativeas a first step, which gives metrics like Active GRP to assess online brand impact using reach and frequency, in the same way marketers are all already measuring GRP for TV. Active GRP is being built into the ad serving tools that our publishers and marketers already use, with the goal of making these metrics immediately actionable. This digital brand equivalency metric for GRP is the first in a series of exciting steps we’re going to see to improve measurement for brand marketers. 

Over the last few years, we’ve made great leaps in the art of single channel measurement - identifying the right metrics in isolation for channels like TV, display, search and mobile. It’s time now to bring the channels together and figure out how they impact each other. In other words, we have to move from silo to portfolio.

At Google Analytics, we’re finding that on average, customers interact with a brand 4.3 times over a two day period before they finally make a purchase. We’re also seeing channels like mobile grow tremendously. For instance, mobile is now 8% of all conversions that we’re seeing in Google Analytics, and mobile conversions have grown by about 180% in just the last year. So you can’t afford not to know what paths customers are taking before they ultimately buy from you.

But in a recentstudy, more than 40% of marketers said that their main struggle with attribution is choosing the right model to even get started. We hear these struggles every day, and provide tools likeMulti-Channel FunnelsandAttribution Modelingto help marketers get started. Though there isn’t a one size fits all model, what we’ll begin to see in the industry is empirically-derived attribution models customized by industry and marketing objectives, which marketers can use as a base for experimentation. 

It’s an exciting time in measurement, where data and marketing are finally getting married. I’m genuinely excited about what’s in front of us, and I hope you are too!