Design. SEO. PPC.

Here in Detroit there are plenty of people embracing new technologies, which is a great thing to see. Unfortunately, it means that if you have an online business, then you have to understand what this means for the online side of your venture. Thankfully, Google announced last October that they were going to launch a new initiative which would help companies to understand site visitors coming from different platforms, such as mobile sites. This tracking program launched in beta mode, and at the time was offered purely to Google Analytics premium clients.

This was of course great news for people who were already paying out, but not much good to your average Joe’s, who can’t necessarily afford such things. Thankfully, Google has now agreed to roll out the full version of Universal Analytics to everyone using Google analytics. If you are under any doubt about what this excellent program can do for you, Google highlighted a few key benefits at the point of announcement:

• The ability to understand how your customers interact with your businesses across all sorts of devices and touch points.
• Useful insights into the performance of your mobile applications.
• Improvements in terms of the performance of any mobile apps you have invested in.
• Better latency on your website through the reduction of client-side demands.

So if you are currently using Google analytics, then there’s every chance that this is going to help you. However, at the moment there aren’t any instructions in place to help you to convert your current property into a Universal Analytics user. At the moment, there’s not much choice but to create a new property within your account and put in place new tracking codes. Simply, it’s down to the new measurement protocol that Google are bringing in. Google are not relying on the standard Google analytics tracking Ids and cookies that have been used in the past.

This is slightly irritating at first, but the new measurement protocol means that web dev enthusiasts can send raw user interaction data straight through to analytics servers by using HTTP requests. The new Universal Analytics program uses analytics.js rather than the original ga.js file. We’ve also found that the tracking code is rather different in Universal mode. We are expecting a migration relatively soon, but at the moment, we think that there might be quite a few problems for people who have been operating their own analytics campaigns.

With all these changes going on, it’s a great chance to approach SEO experts in your area to ask them to take on board your analytics work. While there’s still plenty of information out there to help you get the most out of your own work, there’s no doubt that passing things onto a well established SEO company can only help you. You get to focus on your website content and your related work, while you allow your SEO Company to focus on what they do best – everyone wins!