Meet AskGA — The simplest way to get straight answers to your marketing questions

What makes your Google Analytics reports valuable? Numbers? Or how those numbers are presented?

Frankly speaking, few people get pleasure by simply observing bottomless tables of information. And even fewer can get insights in the blink of an eye from rigid blocks of reports. That’s what machines do for us more or less successfully.

To make effective use of all your data, you need to use an analytics tool to present it in a way that it can easily be perceived. Google Analytics has taught marketers to expect reporting to be a pleasure. But complicated reports or massive volumes of data shatter that dream.

That’s why OWOX is presenting a solution that increases the value of Google Analytics reports for every marketer. We made this tool for ourselves, and now we’re ready to share it with the world.

Put simply, reporting is the one way to find out what’s going on in your marketing. Nothing but an essential report will help you do that.

In modern marketing, everything changes fast. Having the possibility to perform at least retrospective analysis will save you from making similar mistakes in the future (though you might make other mistakes). But when retrospective analysis isn’t enough, you’re tired of analyzing only past events, and you want to get closer to real-time analytics or catch all errors and anomalies in near real time before they hurt your budgets, then you’ll need predictive analytics with reporting on possible accidents.

Whoa! Is that even possible? Yes, and that’s the reason marketers fall in love with analytics. It makes your life less stressful and your marketing more controllable.

Modern marketing reports have to be extra fast and easy to build. A report should tell a story that leads to simple conclusions and answers a simple question: What do we have to do next in light of what we know? We built AskGA because we thought it would be cool to have a tool that made these kinds of reports automatically.

When marketers can’t get the right answers with the help of data or apply the results of marketing analytics in their day-to-day work, they avoid data altogether. According to research by Gartner, 27% of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization. But if data isn’t the solution, then what is?

How deep you should dive in your analytics is really a matter for each individual marketer. But at any rate, reporting shouldn’t be overwhelming.

• You can spend 10, 100, or 1,000 hours more on your Google Analytics dashboard, but it will be hard to get a noticeable return on that investment.
• Dashboards in Google Analytics are quite useful for analyzing user behavior, SEO, and Google advertising, but they won’t become your central business intelligence center — and you shouldn’t expect that from Google Analytics, as even Google Analytics 360 might be not enough to meet your demands for raw and full marketing data.
• Are the questions your CMO and CEO are asking you the same questions your Google Analytics dashboard or Google Analytics reports answer? In fact, they’re probably quite different. And to find the answers to questions typically asked of marketers, such as Where do we lose the most users? and How did our customers’ behavior change in comparison to the previous month? you need to spend even more time in the Google Analytics interface.

That’s why we created AskGA — to give answers to these questions quickly, in a familiar interface, based on the data you already have but by presenting that data in a 100% convenient view.

The AskGA landing screen presents a set of marketing questions like these (the current version might have a different set of questions):

• Which sources and campaigns work more efficiently than others?
• Where do I lose most of my visitors/users?
• What type of users (new or returned) does each channel attract?
• What are the most popular pages and how does page popularity correlate with page loading speed?
• Who are my customers? Who are my new visitors?

Each question has a corresponding dashboard packed with interactive graphs, tables, and diagrams that answer it. When you choose a question, an empty dashboard requests data available in Google Analytics and fills those graphs, tables, and diagrams with data and insights. This happens in less than a minute.

You can choose a period for your reporting and a view to present, then handpick the rows and metrics to include. Additionally, if you use non-Google ad services, we’ll help you add data from those sources to Google Analytics with the help of OWOX BI Pipeline.

How to run AskGA on your Google Analytics data:

1. Choose your Google Analytics property that contains data you’d like to feed to AskGA.
2. Choose a question from the list.
3. Get a dashboard in less than a minute that answers your question based on your data.

General overview dashboard

Traffic dashboard

General metrics dashboard

Let us know what you think of the AskGA tool. Specifically, send us your ideas of what reports we should include in the next pack of 30+ reports.

We hope that AskGA simplifies your marketing analytics reporting!