Never one to rest on their laurels, the Google Analytics team have launched a huge range of new features recently.Here is a very quick summary of what these are:
- More goals – you are no longer limited to just four
- Engagement goals – use time on site or pages per visit as a goal metric instead of a single page visit
- Mobile OS reporting (for non JS supporting mobiles) does need dynamic web pages your end
- Advanced filtering in table views – cross checking one type of data with another becomes much easier
- Unique visitor metric – use this against any other metric for real visitor numbers
- More custom variables – allowing you to track things specific to your own site and adding dramatically to the power of the program for larger organisations or those with very specific tracking requirements
- Sharing of custom reports – what it says really, share custom reporting with specific people
- Analytics intelligence (automatic) – weird this one, it pulls out unusual blips in the traffic to your site and it automatically tells you anything it thinks is important.
- Analytics intelligence (custom) tell Google what to watch out for. This makes more sense – you might know there is something specific that you want to track (like increases in organic traffic to your site generated by SEO) and being able to look this up quickly (or even have it emailed to you) is a great feature.
The Analytics Intelligence features haven’t yet made it to my account yet, but I will be interested to see how Google picks out the peaks ad troughs in the data. The automatic feature is going to alert you to a lot of things you didn’t even know were important, so it might be a bit of a data overload screen! On the other hand, picking out these oddities is something that I do automatically when looking at a client’s analytics account, so it may take some of the work out for me…
For instance, I might see a jump in traffic for one day, and I spend time tracking down if that was down to organic search or if they just sent out an email newsletter, or got featured on the BBC website. The automatic intelligence feature should pick these out and give me short cut to the right screen in Google Analytics to get the answer quickly. We’ll see.
Some of the other features have shown up in my Analytics account, and I have played with them a bit. I like the double segmentation in the tables, it helps a lot when tracking, particularly when you want to know own to the keyword level. In the last couple of weeks, two of my clients have implemented full conversion tracking, and it is allowing me insights into the successes of their optimisation that I didn’t have before. So knowing that natural search drives e.g. 75% of the traffic to the site, but only 50% of the sales gives me something to investigate more deeply.
As always with extra features, there is a big danger of information overload, but some of these will help distil the data down without having to crunch through reports or export to a spreadsheet, and others extend the reach of Google Analytics into new markets.
Perhaps what is most astonishing is that this product is still free, because in many ways it is hard to see what benefit Google is getting by giving all this away. I know there is some benefit to them in the cross over with proving Adwords ROI, but even so the resources it uses must be considerable.
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