Marzo, 2022

The travel industry has faced steep challenges since the pandemic began two years ago. But now, there are signs of real recovery. Search interest in “spring vacation” and “flights to hawaii,” for example, is close to what it was in 2019.

As travel interest rebounds, businesses need easy ways to connect with potential customers. So today, we’re announcing new tools to help hoteliers find people who are ready to book their next trip.

Drive more bookings on Google for free

Launched last year on google.com/travel, free hotel booking links will now show up on the Search results page and Google Maps — helping travel partners extend their reach, and giving consumers a more comprehensive set of options. After clicking on these links, travelers can complete their booking directly on the partner’s website.

Since the introduction of free booking links, partners of all kinds have seen the benefits of increased user engagement, from individual hotels to large online travel agencies. For example, the booking engine myhotelshop used free booking links to drive 30% incremental bookings for their hotel clients during the summer of 2021.

Now, new click reporting in Hotel Center shows partners how many people clicked on their free booking links. We will expand the report to include other insights, like free booking link impressions and booking value, in the coming weeks.

Hotels interested in using free booking links can visit our website for more information, including a list of our integration partners and how to extend your reach even further with Hotel Ads.

Easily onboard to reach new customers

We’re also making it easier for hoteliers to share their rates and availability on Google — without complex technical requirements. Beginning next month, individual hotels that meet eligibility requirements can manually input their rates through their Google Business Profile to participate in free hotel booking links.

Complete our interest form if you’d like to learn more about adding your rates and availability directly to your Google Business Profile.

Highlight your unique hotel offerings

Health concerns, flexibility and availability are top of mind for today’s travelers. It’s important for hoteliers to pay attention to new signals and remain agile. Local Posts for Google Business Profile allow owners to share timely updates about their hotels, such as:

• Changes due to COVID-19, including whether the hotel is open or closed, and updates made to amenities or policies
• Descriptions of special features that are uniquely available at the hotel
• Compelling images and videos

The world looks different than it did a few years ago, but our mission to be a trusted source of travel information hasn’t changed. To learn more about our solutions for hotels and to keep up with our latest news, visit our website.

In today’s measurement landscape, businesses need to navigate new challenges to understand the complex, multi-platform journeys of their customers — all while prioritizing user privacy.

Two and a half years ago, we introduced Google Analytics 4 to address these evolving measurement standards and help businesses succeed. Google Analytics 4 has the flexibility to measure many different kinds of data, delivering a strong analytics experience that’s designed for the future. It allows businesses to see unified user journeys across their websites and apps, use Google’s machine learning technology to surface and predict new insights, and most importantly, it’s built to keep up with a changing ecosystem.

Without a modern measurement solution, you leave essential insights on the table that can impact your business. So now is the time to make Google Analytics 4 your cross-platform Analytics solution. We will begin sunsetting Universal Analytics — the previous generation of Analytics — next year. All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. Given the new Analytics 360 experience was recently introduced, Universal Analytics 360 properties will receive an additional three months of new hit processing, ending on October 1, 2023.

Moving on from Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics was built for a generation of online measurement that was anchored in the desktop web, independent sessions and more easily observable data from cookies. This measurement methodology is quickly becoming obsolete. Meanwhile, Google Analytics 4 operates across platforms, does not rely exclusively on cookies and uses an event-based data model to deliver user-centric measurement.

And though Universal Analytics offers a variety of privacy controls, Google Analytics 4 is designed with privacy at its core to provide a better experience for both our customers and their users. It helps businesses meet evolving needs and user expectations, with more comprehensive and granular controls for data collection and usage. Importantly, Google Analytics 4 will also no longer store IP addresses. These solutions and controls are especially necessary in today’s international data privacy landscape, where users are increasingly expecting more privacy protections and control over their data.

Starting your measurement with Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is designed with your key objectives in mind — like driving sales or app installs, generating leads or connecting online and offline customer engagement.

Here are just a few ways Google Analytics 4 can support your business.

Understand your customers across touchpoints
Get a complete view of the customer lifecycle with an event-based measurement model that isn’t fragmented by platform or organized into independent sessions.

For example, UK-based fitness apparel and accessories brand Gymshark used Google Analytics 4 to measure across its website and app, allowing the Gymshark team to better understand how users moved through the purchase funnel. As a result, they reduced user drop off by 9%, increased product page clickthroughs by 5% and cut down their own time spent on user journey analysis by 30%.

Improve ROI with data-driven attribution
Use data-driven attribution to analyze the full impact of your marketing across the customer journey. It assigns attribution credit to more than just the last click using your Analytics data, and helps you understand how your marketing activities collectively influence your conversions. You can export that analysis to Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform media tools to optimize campaigns.

Measure engagement and conversions with business and compliance needs in mind
With new country-level privacy controls, you can manage and minimize the collection of user-level data — like cookies and metadata — while preserving key measurement functionality.

Get greater value from your data
Machine learning generates sophisticated predictive insights about user behavior and conversions, creates new audiences of users likely to purchase or churn and automatically surfaces critical insights to improve your marketing.

Easily activate your insights
Expanded integrations with other Google products, like Google Ads, work across your combined web and app data, making it easy to use Analytics insights to optimize your campaigns.

McDonald’s Hong Kong met its goal to grow mobile orders using a predictive audience of “likely seven-day purchasers” and exporting it to Google Ads — increasing app orders more than six times. The team saw a 2.3 times stronger ROI, a 5.6 times increase in revenue, and a 63% reduction in cost per action.

“Google Analytics 4 has equipped us with a strong measurement foundation. We are able to get valuable insights from our first-party data with machine learning and utilize them in our marketing, driving impressive results to future-proof our business.”
— Tina Chao, McDonald’s Hong Kong Chief Marketing and Digital Customer Experience Officer

And now, Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360 integrations are available for all customers. This means that any Google Analytics 4 property — standard or 360 — can activate its Analytics data, like conversions and audiences, in Google Marketing Platform buying tools to strengthen campaign performance.

Address your enterprise measurement needs
New sub and roll-up properties in Analytics 360 allow you to customize the structure of your Google Analytics 4 properties to meet data governance needs. This ensures that different teams or partners, like advertising agencies, can access the data they need in accordance with your policies.

Analytics 360 also offers higher limits to meet increasing demand — up to 125 custom dimensions, 400 audiences and 50 conversion types per property. And you’ll have peace of mind with service legal agreements (SLAs) across most core functionality, including data collection, processing, reporting and attribution.

“As a large enterprise business with a wide product portfolio, the new Analytics 360 has unlocked insights for our teams to make data-driven decisions, while providing the ability to meet our complex data governance needs with ease and flexibility.”
— Rashi Kacker, Director of Marketing Technology Innovation, Constellation Brands

What happens next?

All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months. Learn more about what to expect.

Make the move over to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible to build the necessary historical data before Universal Analytics stops processing new hits. For guidance, check out our Help Center resources.

With African entrepreneurs raising more than $4 billion in funding in 2021, more than double the $1.5 billion raised in 2020, it’s clear investors around the globe are waking up to the continent’s potential. For some, like philanthropist Tony Elumelu, this growth is the validation of a long track record of backing African entrepreneurship.

Through the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), he has helped empower African entrepreneurs from across the continent. To date, TEF has distributed more than $85 million in grants for seed capital, and supported more than 1.5 million entrepreneurs from all 54 African countries through its proprietary digital platform, TEFConnect.net. Google is similarly enthusiastic about African startups and has supported them with funding, mentorship and skills development, among other things. That’s what makes it so exciting that TEF and Google’s paths are once again converging in 2022.

Last year, Google.org committed $3 million to the TEF to support an additional 500 female entrepreneurs across the continent. To further support the effort, this year, nine Google employees from Africa and Europe will devote six months of their time and expertise to TEF as part of the first Google.org Fellowship in Sub-Saharan Africa. Composed of engineers, user experience (UX) specialists and business and marketing managers, these Googlers will work with TEF full-time, pro bono, to build a new TEFConnect platform, equipped with new tools to help entrepreneurs access the resources they need to succeed.

We hope to support TEF in reaching one million more African entrepreneurs through the new TEFConnect, expected to launch later this year. The improved, more mobile-friendly TEFConnect platform will give those entrepreneurs access to a catalog of more curated educational resources, and more avenues for funding.

Additionally, as the world kicks off a month of celebration for International Women’s Day, Google.org and The Tony Elumelu Foundation want to mark the occasion. As part of these collective celebrations, we will convene policymakers, private sector and entrepreneurs to engage in a discussion about entrepreneurship on the continent. We will hear from female entrepreneurs who have benefited from the Tony Elumelu Foundation’s support, as well as from notable leaders.

As the year 2022 progresses, we want to play a larger role in supporting the world’s next generation of entrepreneurs. Africa’s citizenry is youthful, optimistic and enterprising. There is so much to be gained by leveling the digital playing field and creating possibilities that will raise the ceiling for the continent’s population.

By bringing together people from the private and public sector and supporting entrepreneurs in areas that will make the most difference, we can go a long way to helping Africa’s entrepreneurs reach their full potential.