Last week, Precis Digital’s Measurement team spend a few, exciting days in Dublin, surrounded by specialists from Google and certified Google Analytics Premium partners from other agencies around EMEA.
One of the very positive outcomes of events like this is that we can share our thoughts directly with the involved people at Google. We get the opportunity to discuss problems and feature requests with the responsible product teams and get a response immediately. This gives us the opportunity to bring all the topics we discuss internally and with our customers right to the source. Even though Google is always very open to receiving feedback from us and their other partners, meeting them eye to eye now and then is really valuable.
Another great thing is that we get an insight of what’s going on – Google’s plans, future updates, and product releases. As always, we, unfortunately, can’t tell you much about this, but let’s just say: there is a lot of exciting stuff around the corner! Things that will help us help our customers perform even better.
The days spent in Dublin also included some hands-on workshops, with existing services and features like BigQuery, DoubleClick, Google Analytics Measurement Protocol, and Google Tag Manager. Although these are products we use on a daily basis, seeing a product specialist at Google in action is always rewarding.
User-Defined Functions in BigQuery
One BigQuery session we want to highlight was surrounding the topic – User-Defined Functions in BigQuery.
Some types of computations can be hard or impossible to write in SQL. User-Defined Functions helps you solve this with the option to combine SQL, with a familiar programming language as JavaScript.
User-Defined Functions was released last year and is similar to map functions on MapReduce. If you are a frequent user of BigQuery, this is definitely something you should look deeper into.
Summary
The Google Analytics Premium workshop was very focused on how to use the data you collect. The existing possibilities with Google Analytics data in Google BigQuery, DoubleClick and other cloud services. How to get data into Google Analytics through Measurement Protocol and App-tracking and then analyzing it in a deeper way. Getting rid of the “last-click” attribution model and instead listen to what the data really has to say.
Some off-topic craic
Did you know that the word craic, which is pronounced “crack” in Irish, means fun? This can potentially be quite an awkward misunderstanding for a fellow tourist…
