This past year has been a big one for analytics, with some revolutionary advances in terms of how we track users as well as how we reach them. It’s not just the technology that has changed, either. The way that users engage with content has changed too, and people are now ditching their desktops to use mobile devices.

Google has been gradually rolling out Universal Analytics since 2012, and it has only been in the last year that the transfer from Classic to Universal Analytics was finished.

Facebook Pixel is an interesting new tool that Facebook launched earlier this year. It allows advertisers to track and monitor customer activity and re-target to a customer’s Facebook feed.

Google recently added a new tool to its analytics suite which allows users to create custom metrics based upon the existing information in the software.

Data is, by itself, just a mass of zeros and ones that is displayed to us by a computer or in some other form. Data by itself is not very useful - it is what we do with it that makes a difference to our business.

Google’s analytics and trends data can provide some interesting information about shopping, searching and even which stores people are visiting when - not just online, but in real life too.