Google Analytics Social Media Feature Taxonomy

In June of 2011, Google acquired a social analytics company, whose technology and team were absorbed into the Google Analytics product team and roadmap. That fall, I was invited by their lead user experience designer and product marketing manager to offer perspective on how enterprise Web analytics users thought about and discussed social media.

The team felt that their new features offered a great way to begin a broad discussion about what really matters to a business, how to make and scale investments in social, and determine which sources of traffic are worth more in real dollars. At the heart of the new capability was a component called Social ROI, which attacked the universal problem of marketing attribution for site and business owners.

I guided the team on how to talk about the new features as a way to improve market share among enterprise users, where GA lagged competitively. Perhaps the most gratifying experience was collaborating with the lead designer on taxonomies for the new capabilities. 

Together we crafted a position for the new social measurement features that grabbed the attention of business analytics professionals, as well as technology and marketing press when they launched in March of 2012.

Bloggers and the press picked up on the story with a high degree of favor.