While I write about many facets of the digital marketing space I readily admit when I am out of my league and truly understanding Google Analytics is one of them. For all of my good intentions I have not gotten the training necessary to truly get the most from the tool.

As a business person though I can appreciate when anyone talks about tracking ROI more effectively. That is what a new feature of Google Analytics, the beta Cost Data Import tool, is helping analytics users to do.

The Google Analytics blog reported yesterday

Google Analytics has been a great place to analyze the performance of your Google advertising programs, but a piece of the puzzle has been missing: analyzing return on investment across all your digital channels. That’s why we’re happy to announce our new Cost Data Import tool, now available in public beta. This tool allows Google Analytics users to import their cost data from any digital source — such as paid search providers, display providers, affiliates, email, social and even organic traffic.

Your imported cost data can be viewed in two places: in a new report called Cost Analysis in Traffic Sources, and in the newly publicly available Attribution Modeling Tool. These reports show you how all your digital marketing channels are performing compared to each other, so you can make better decisions about your marketing programs.

In the data frantic world we live in the quickest access to reports will always get the attention of the online marketer.

Google Analytics has announced a beta called Shortcuts which according to the Analytics blog

Shortcuts help you get to the exact view you want of your data in GA in record time. Rather than having to go through the “find report, add segment, change, sort” process daily, with Shortcuts you can do it once, save it, and come back to it in a single click.

The blog takes you through the process to set up your shortcuts then adds this most important piece of information

The following information is saved as part of a Shortcut:

The talk for many marketers is about big data.

There is so much data to be had and it seems that the volume of this data is not going to slow down any time soon. In fact, it is likely that its collection will accelerate. What needs to catch up, though, is the ability of businesses to take action with this data. Otherwise, this is all just an exercise in ‘getting ready to get ready’.

Oracle is one of, if not the, biggest players in big data and they recently reached out to C level executives to find out what the trouble is with big data (repackaged via eMarketer). Looking at the leading response there is a lot of work to be done here.

We talk a lot about analytics.

We collect a lot of data.

We know that there is business value in data.

If we know all of this why is it that marketers are finding it so hard to truly use analytics?

There are many reasons and a recent study by eConsultancy and Lynchpin (repackaged by eMarketer) gave some of them. The first relates to the sheer volume and data and finding how much is actually useful to marketers.

Over 50% of the respondents said that only 50% of the data collected is useful to their business. So why is it being collected? Good question. One way that marketers can make their lives easier is to collect only the pertinent data rather than collecting everything under the sun and thus creating an opportunity to miss valuable in formation in the clutter.