Google Analytics new features: What we learnt in Mountain View
- October 30, 2009
- by Latitude
One misunderstanding we often hear about Google Analytics is that it just can’t be as powerful as some of its more expensive counterparts. How can something be any good if it’s free right?
Wrong.
With the achievement of the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant and now a Google Conversion Professional accreditations - we were invited to attend the 2009 Google Analytics Authorized Consultant Summit at the Google Head Office in Mountain View for an insight into the new features and how we can take Google Analytics to the next level. It kicked off with an excellent Keynote by Dan Siroker the Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign entitled “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election”. Leveraging the power of just Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser Dan’s team were able to help raise a campaign war chest of over $656 million compared to McCain’s $201 million. Powerful stuff.
Well that powerful stuff just got even more powerful, intelligent, and flexible with a suite of new enterprise features that once again closes the gap on the paid for analytics packages on the market. We were lucky enough to be there as they were announced to the summit. Here are our thoughts.
The new features include multiple goals, engagement goals, mobile tracking and reporting, advanced analysis, multiple custom variables, analytics intelligence and custom alerts.
20 Goals!
It has always been quite common that websites have more than 4 primary and secondary objectives which meant that many profiles must be created to manage conversion rates of these objectives. Google Analytics now allows 20 goals per profile, each separated into 4 goal sets. 5 goals per set now allows easier aggregation of specific goal sets. You might like to group similar or related goals in each of the 4 sets for your reporting.
Engagement Goals
This is an awesome new feature that includes 2 new ways of measuring a goal, pages per visit and time on site. There are any number of ways this may be useful but blog sites have for a long time suffered from poor methods of measuring or defining a conversion – time on site is an excellent new feature that I am sure we will see many bloggers utilise and now utilise this in analysis to improve user engagement and increased ‘conversions’.
Websites that do not follow a specific call to action model have been waiting a long time for this powerful new tool.
Mobile Tracking/Reporting
PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX are now supported methods for data collection in Google Analytics which can now be utilised by Mobile Platforms. Mobile has often been an that marketers fail to account for, but with over 1.2 billion handsets expected to be sold in 2009 alone this feature has come along at the right time.
Advanced Analysis
The new advanced analysis features in GA will allow users to report on more advanced metric combinations including additional pivoting options. GA have also included better table filtering which will reduce data exports and allow more on the fly analysis. These may also allow embedding within your custom reports and may alleviate your tedious weekly data crunching tasks which could previously only be done through your Excel spreadsheets with large elements of manual labour.
Multiple Custom Variables
A long awaited feature from Google Analytics and really adding to the sophistication of the tool. Previously GA only allowed for a single custom variable which could be used to segment your users. With the addition of multiple variables, we will start to see more advanced segmentation and no doubt we will start to see some creativity in how they can be applied. The feature will bring increased flexibility and proof that Google Analytics is certainly a powerful enterprise class web analytics package.
Analytics Intelligence
Many of you might have already seen this feature pop up in your account. Finally we have automated intelligent alerts in our reporting.
As an agency, Latitude have already started to implement automated alerts for 100’s of profiles - normally quite manual and difficult to detect. You can start to flag fluctuations in traffic, increased referrals domains etc. Get creative! Google Analytics will now have the capability to auto-detect various fluctuations that might have otherwise been missed.
As you can see below, a feature has been added to set to a varying degree of deviation/sensitivity on your data allowing you to flag reporting to your own specific needs. Brilliant!
Custom Alerts
Custom Alerts also allow you to set trigger emails to users to flag activity that may be of importance – another excellent feature when dealing with multiple account/profiles.
There will be a staggered release of these features in the next few weeks. If you have not already got hold of the features in your account yet, keep checking - they shouldn’t be too far away.
While you wait - I would highly recommend reading further into these features on the Official Google Analytics Blog, and remember, you cant improve what you don’t measure.
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