Understanding your Google Analytics Data

Is Google Analytics your main source of truth, or even just a secondary data source you’re leveraging in conjunction with your MNTN dashboard? We love GA too, which is why we’ll be exploring how to read your MNTN data in Google Analytics in this Knowledge Base article. We’ll walk through our favorite reports, nuances to know, and best practices to evaluate performance with accuracy!

In this article, we'll discuss the following:

• The MNTN x Google Analytics Integration
• Google Analytics Reports
• Evaluating your Google Analytics Data

Google Analytics Integration

All MNTN campaigns can be tracked directly in Google Analytics with our GA integration. There's no complex integration necessary, just place our pixel and the integration is automatic.

For more information on our Google Analytics Integration, please visit our Google Analytics Integration Help Center Article Here!

 

Google Analytics Reports

In this section, we’ll explore our most used reports in Google Analytics and walk through exactly how to leverage them to best evaluate performance.

Source Medium Report

The source/medium report is one of our most used, and our Clients’ most used reports in their account. This gives you a snapshot of performance of your Performance TV campaigns alongside your other marketing efforts.

Getting to your Source Medium Report

• Click on “Acquisition” from the menu bar on the left
• Click on “All Traffic”
• Click on “Source/Medium”
• From here, you can look at MNTN data compared to your other marketing efforts, or you can isolate just MNTN data by leveraging the search bar and typing in “MNTN”

Coming Soon: How to read your Assisted Conversions Report + Path Report!

Evaluating your Google Analytics Data

While you may be familiar with Google Analytics and evaluate performance daily, we do have some nuances to the reported metrics to ensure you're reading your data with accuracy. Since we do utilize the measurement protocol API to share Verified Visit and household data through to GA, GA has their own way of storing and reporting on that data, which is why its important to read below on how you should evaluate the following metics.

• Sessions: This is the main metric we utilize when evaluating visit performance. 
  • ‘Sessions’ is the only metric representing visitors to your site, as our Verified Visit data getting funneled into Google Analytics is recorded only under Sessions.
  • Sessions in GA will typically be higher than Verified Visits in MNTN
    • MNTN only records 1 Verified Visit per impression (by household). Google Analytics records all sessions from all devices
    • GA starts a new session after 30 minutes of inactivity, so if a user has their browser window open but they’re inactive for 30 mins then goes back and browses the site, GA would count that as two sessions, even though only 1 verified visit would record
      

• Users: This metric encompasses devices passed through from MNTN to GA as part of our household cross-device identity graph, and is not indicative of performance or visits to your site
  • The way users are evaluated for MNTN data may be different than what you are used to when working with other partners who do not utilize GA’s Measurement Protocol API.
    • When we identify all devices in a household, we map out our MNTN cross device graph using the GA Measurement Protocol API to support our cross-device attribution model.
    • For each device that we identify in a household, GA registers them as a user. This is to ensure they are able to assign proper credit if they see a device visit your site that falls within a household that was served a MNTN impression.
    • Because not all devices may trigger a session, you may see a higher volume of identified devices compared to sessions.

• New Users: This metric encompasses new users to your site, but is is not fully representative of new users driven by MNTN
  • This boils down to the way we communicate our cross device verified visits to GA using the aforementioned measurement protocol API.
    • For a technical explanation, we drive a new user to the site on the first page view and when the page view occurs, MNTN doesn’t have the GA user ID. 
    • We then grab the GA user ID on the subsequent page view and run our attribution. 
    • We hand Google the user ID and visit via the API. That API call starts a new session using our campaign but because there was a session that existed prior, the user is now considered a repeat user.

• Transactions + Revenue: Google reports on transactions and revenue based on their own internal attribution model favoring last-touch 
  • We always expect a natural discrepancy between GA and MNTN Data due to the differing attribution models
  • The Source/Medium report utilizes a Last-Non Direct Interaction attribution model. In this model, all direct traffic is ignored, and 100% of the credit for the transaction goes to the last channel that the customer interacted with before converting.
  • Since the majority of MNTN ads are served on non-clickable inventory, we can see other marketing channels intercept following the MNTN Impression and subsequent MNTN-driven Verified Visit, in which case Google would assign attribution to the intercepting channel if the client converted off of that interaction.