Search Discovery Makes Google Universal Analytics Easily Accessible
Atlanta, Georgia (PRWEB) December 04, 2013 -- Search Discovery (SDI) announced today the release of Airlock, a new tool that will allow companies to seamlessly transition from the legacy version of Google Analytics to the new Google Universal Analytics without the need to re-tag a site. Search Discovery is offering Airlock free of charge.
“With the enhanced reporting and data collection benefits of Google’s Universal Analytics, we wanted to provide a way for organizations to upgrade without the hassle or cost often associated with re-tagging a site,” said Lee Blankenship, CEO of Search Discovery. “Airlock provides this capability, as well as a safeguard for companies that don’t initiate a transfer and are auto-upgraded by Google in the future.
Search Discovery is known in the industry for its development of Satellite, a tag management product, which was purchased by Adobe earlier this year. It was also one of the first Google Analytics Premium resellers in the industry. Because of the company’s deep knowledge and experience related to analytics technology, Blankenship’s team knew that helping companies transition to the new Universal Analytics (UA) was an opportunity to assist the broader analytics community.
“Google has made available a tool that will help Google Analytics profiles transition to the new Universal Analytics, and we would definitely recommend that companies re-tag their sites using the newest UA tags,” Blankenship said. “However, re-tagging can be a big financial roadblock for many companies; Airlock will help those companies that are using more sophisticated implementations of GA avoid re-tagging or re-coding their sites until they’re better prepared for these changes.”
Switching over to the new Universal Analytics is a two-step process using the Google tool, but one that may necessitate website code changes. Because the “tags” for UA are significantly different from the tags currently utilized for GA, companies tracking events in GA will need to replace existing event “calls” when switching to UA. Additionally, the upgrade will require changing ecommerce tracking, recoding virtual pages (pages that track conversions when using dynamic tools like Ajax or Flash), migrating custom variables to dimensions, as well as modifying all social listening tracking.
Airlock.js is a JavaScript library developed by the Search Discovery team that automatically converts asynchronous Google Analytics calls into Universal Analytics calls, lifting the burden of having to re-implement a site when upgrading to Universal Analytics. With Airlock, the only change that needs to be made to a site is adding the Airlock.js code, while leaving existing Google Analytics tags in place.
SDI developed Airlock to help its existing customers, but Blankenship and his team also saw it as a way to give something back to the industry.
“We’ve decided to offer Airlock free of charge to anyone interested, no strings attached,” said Blankenship. “This year has been an incredible year for Search Discovery. We sold our tag management product, Satellite, to Adobe, where it is now Adobe DTM; we’ve added a number of talented resources and company officers, greatly expanding our analytics offering; and we’ve moved into new, larger offices to accommodate this exciting growth. We felt that Airlock was a great opportunity to show our thanks.”
To learn more about Airlock, and to download the code, visit: http://www.searchdiscovery.com/airlock.
About Search Discovery
Search Discovery (SDI) is a digital services and software development agency headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. SDI specializes in tackling unique challenges related to integrating, optimizing and understanding big data, analytics, and paid and organic search. In 2013, SDI sold its tag management product, Satellite, to Adobe, where it is now Adobe Dynamic Tag Management.
Roy Bielewicz, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Search Discovery, http://www.searchdiscovery.com, +1 440-334-6851, [email protected]
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