How to use Google Signals and the Cross Device Tracking Reports

his past July Google announced and released an epic new analytics innovation - Google Signals.

Signals is a built-in Google Analytics (GA) feature that allows you to enable cross-device tracking in your Analytics account, without any manual tracking code adjustments.

When Google announced the addition of automatic cross-device tracking to GA, my mind was bit blown. I knew Google had the data to create this feature, but I never imagined that they would share that data with us.

Well, they did! And now every Google Analytics admin can add cross-device tracking to their account with just a couple button clicks in their analytics interface.

How do we use Google Signals?

Google Signals represents some exciting new measurement and tracking possibilities. But as cool as this feature could be, right now it's still a beta. And at the moment, there are some significant glitches in the cross-device reports. There are also a few critical intricacies you should be aware of if you're going to test this feature out.

In this video, we’ll look at how to get started using Google Signals. Then we’ll go inside my Google Analytics account, check out the cross-device tracking reports, and learn about how Google Signals works.

Is Google Signals available in your Analytics account?

When Google Signals first launched, there was a lot of confusion about how to enable this feature. The problem wasn’t that Google Signals is challenging to set up, but rather that it did a brief disappearing act.

Disappearing Signals

Google introduced Signals at the 2018 Marketing Live presentation. I was so excited about this feature that I wrote about a week after it launched. And I advised everyone to look for Google Signals in their accounts.

But when many of readers logged into their GA Accounts, Signals was nowhere to be found.

Possibly Google didn't release Signals to every account. Or Google briefly removed it to work out some post-launch problems. I am not sure why Signals vanished for a short period. But this new technology is for real. And by now, the beta version is hopefully available again in your account.

Why Google Signals is so innovative

There are a few reasons why Google Signals is capable of having a massive impact on the analytics community.

Could Signals be the end of manual cross-device tracking installations?

Google Signals may be capable of saving us from the complicated and often dysfunctional job of manually configuring cross-device tracking. Before the release of Signals, if you wanted to do cross-device tracking in Google Analytics, you had to implement custom javascript to replace you users’ Google Analytics client ID with your own unique non-personally identifiable user value.

Cross-device tracking for everyone!

As you may be well aware, implementing custom javascript to setup cross-device tracking is not a job for novice analysts or beginner programmers. This barrier to execution meant that only Google Analytics user with advanced skills, or companies with enough money to hire an adept Google Analytics programmer, could configure cross-device tracking.

But the average Google Analytics account owner doesn't have the ability or budget to set up cross-device tracking manually. So those account owners were resigned to relying on data that was inflated by users visiting their site from multiple devices.

The release of Google Signals allows all Google Analytics account
owners to put cross-device tracking in place. And in turn, Signals should increase the accuracy of everyone's user data.

Google has more access and better data than you do

Another reason Signals is such a big development is that Google is better suited to match users across their devices than anyone else.

Google’s fully integrated domination of the search eco-system puts them in a better position than anyone to identify who we are on any device we use. This means that Google’s cross-device tracking technology is going to (eventually) be more accurate than any custom solution the rest of us can put in place.

Where does Google Analytic's cross-device data come from?

So what portion of Google’s massive data supply are they sharing with us in our cross-device reports? Google’s documentation states that the data in your cross-device reports originates from the segment of your users that -

1) Are signed into their Google account in their browser

2) And have Ads Personalization turned on in their settings.

By default, Ad Personalization is turned on in everyone’s Google account settings. So just about every user that's logged into their Google account can be tracked using Google Signals.

[elhampazhakh]

Thanks for the video. I have one question, should we do any additional setting regarding our user privacy prior to enabling this feature on GA account?

[amauryguenant]

interesting stuff starts at 3:05 in case you want to skip the introduction

[DanielPirciu]

thanks for sharing your feedback on Signals ... I don't see anything great either, it's just "for fun" kind of report