A Recap of the 2018 Google Analytics Partner Summit

My name is Courtney Clark and I am a Senior Analytics Specialist on TopSpot’s Analytics team, which I have been fortunate to be part of for almost 5 years now. As a Senior Analytics Specialist, I often deal with more complex analytics setups along with the testing & implementation of new features introduced by Google Analytics. Since TopSpot is a Google Marketing Platform Certified Partner, we were invited to attend Google’s yearly Analytics Partner Summit. This year, I was given the exciting opportunity to represent TopSpot at the summit along with Anita Perez-Valdez, who you might know as our VP of Operations (and as a huge data lover as well).

The Google Analytics Partner Summit is a two-day conference that Google uses to announce new features and products before they launch as well as offer product demos and an open forum discussion to their partners. This year the theme was “Forward as One,” indicative of their recent move to combine their analytics and ad services all under the “Google Marketing Platform” back in June. The summit was held in San Francisco – which I was super excited about (being this was my first time visiting California). Anita was a great guide and made sure to take me sightseeing before our Google activities began.

Here are a few highlights from our day of sightseeing:

After seeing some of the sights and getting a tour of Google’s Spear Street offices, we headed to our first event of the week, Google’s Women’s Leadership Reception. 

That evening’s Leadership Reception was not only inspiring but also empowering to see how Women at Google take on their roles and challenges. My favorite exercise of the night was called #IAmRemarkable which challenges women and men alike to share an accomplishment in their personal or professional lives. You can learn more about it, here, but the idea is that accomplishments do not always speak for themselves and you should feel comfortable celebrating yourself. This could be as simple as saying “I am remarkable because I learned how to parallel park” to “I am remarkable because I trained a staff of 100 employees”. I loved this exercise so much that I brought it back to Houston! We now share these ‘I am remarkable’ statements during our weekly Analytics Team Meetings!

The Partner Summit began the following day and consisted of two days of sessions. Most of the sessions were centered around new analytics releases so our team can begin planning and strategizing how we to best utilize each new release to improve our reporting offerings for our clients. 

In addition to the two keynotes (one each morning), the sessions were broken out into 4 main categories (Measurement, Advertising, Integrations, and Foundations) as well as by level (Foundational, Intermediate, Advanced). Being part of the Analytics team, I was most interested in the Measurement sessions which focus on data and reporting as well as a few of the other categories that focused on tools we utilize in our day-to-day. 

I learned so much throughout each session and am very excited about the future of Google Analytics. I can’t wait to see these product updates come to fruition! 

Overall my experience at Google’s Partner Summit was amazing and I am so glad I was given the chance to see how Google operates in theiroffices as well as the speakers at the event who represent Google.

Here’s to another year as a Partner with Google: “Forward as One!”