Commune Media | Measurably Effective Digital Marketing™

Google Analytics antes up a powerful new list of features

Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 9:07 PM by Jebadiah Roberts  |  Comments (1)

As analytics consultants, we’ve had little trouble warming even our biggest clients to the benefits of Google Analytics. (Of course, the fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt.)

That said, we still clash with the occasional lonely naysayer, who cites the lack of customized reporting or the limit of only four goals per profile as a reason not to go with Google.

But after today’s announcement from the Google Analytics team, the critics have a lot less to carp about. Clearly, Google has listened to its audience and, in turn, has unveiled some impressive new features that should elicit cheers from even the “power users” (Google’s term for Analytics users who want “fine-grained control over their site tracking and who have a burning desire to understand and manipulate the behavior of Analytics”).

Here’s a quick rundown of what the latest version of Google Analytics brings to the table.

Engagement goals

Once restricted to tracking the loading of specific pages, the Goals report now lets you set customized thresholds for key metrics like Time on Site and Pages Per Visit.

More goals per profile

Ever had to decide which four goals were most important to your site’s success and jettison the rest? Google Analytics now lets you set up to 20 goals per profile—which is a wise move, considering that engagement metrics can now be designated as goal completions.

Improved mobile reporting

Have a mobile-friendly site? A new code snippet (yet to be released) will let you gather data from all web-enabled devices—not just those that support JavaScript.

Advanced table filtering

No one drools over reams of data, but with the addition of Advanced Table Filtering, you can filter thousands of variables in a table according to the specific metrics and percentages that you deem radar-worthy.

Multiple custom variables

You could already track your visitors according to customized segments beyond Google’s preset categories. But with Multiple Custom Variables, you have even more power. Set multiple segments to track according to visitor attributes (are they a member?), session attributes (did they log in?) and page-level attributes (did they view a specific page?) for in-depth reporting with increased flexibility.

Increased sharing

Share a special URL link with anyone who has an Analytics account, and you can automatically import custom templates and segments to their profile.

Automatic intelligence and custom alerts

The above updates are powerful stuff, and most were expected. They’re the necessary culmination of where the market is headed—and what GA users (and detractors) are demanding. But what’s really rousing our interest is the unleashing of Analytics Intelligence. Because more than any other improvement, this one is a potential game changer.

Still in beta, Analytics Intelligence uses an algorithmic-driven engine to automatically record significant shifts in your data and organize them in a new Intelligence report.

Even better, you can customize the major changes that matter to you, and you can use new Custom Alerts to receive automatic notifications with every drastic change. Wondering whether a salacious tweet sent droves of targeted traffic to a goal-centric page? Analytics Intelligence will let you know.

Add to this the option to tweak the level of intensity of your alerts (you can assign a percentage to changes you deem worthwhile—there’s even a nifty slider!) and you’re guaranteed to spend significantly less time sifting through data to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Tags: enterprise web analytics, featured, google analytics