The Last Ten Days in Search: Part 3 - 7 New Google Analytics Features
- December 18, 2009
- by Dave Freeman
Last but not least we move on to part three and look at the new features that have been added to beef up Google Analytics. Analytics is a vital part of any online marketing campaign, it allows you to see the impact of the campaign and measure its ROI. Analytics packages are still way behind where they need to be, but they’re catching up fast and the seven new Google Analytics features help to place Google Analytics firmly back in the driving seat when it comes to web analytics (although not showing users referring URLs is still a major downside).
If you’ve missed part one and two, be sure to read about Real-time search and Personalised Search and then in part two Google Image Swirl and Google Goggles.
1) Custom Alerts
When the alerts feature first launched the alerts you could set-up were quite limited. As of last week this has been expanded so you can create custom alerts based on a multitude of metrics. So you can now tailor alerts to the metrics that really matter to you, whether this is visits to a specific page or the number of email subscriptions in one day.
I see the custom alerts functionality becoming extremely useful when sites go through re-designs or launch a new ordering/checkout process as within the space of a day Google Analytics will for example automatically alert you to any major decreases in conversions or visits.
2) New and Expanded Measurement Goals
The Google Analytics team has increased the number of Goals that can be set to 20 goals per profile.
3) Enhanced Mobile Reporting
I view this as probably the most important new feature as it shows that the Google Analytics team are taking notice of the mobile web and the tracking issues that arise from mobiles phones that can’t process JavaScript. This new feature coincides with Google’s acquisition of Ad-Mob a few months ago.
The Ad-Mob technology has enabled Google to integrate mobile application tracking for the iPhone and Android alongside a piece of server-side tracking code to enable tracking from ALL non-JavaScript enabled devices.
For full detail see the Google Analytics blog.
4) Unique Visitor Metric
You can now include the unique visitors metric in your custom reports and advanced segments to see how many actual unique visitors come to your site. The unique visitors metric can be applied against any dimensions in Google Analytics so you can really drill down to see unique visitor activity.
5) Advanced Analysis Features
In short this enables you to dig deeper into your data using pivoting, secondary dimensions, and advanced table filtering. The only downside is that you can save the reports for next-time time, so you’ll need to keep applying the advanced filtering each time you run a report.
For more details on advanced table filtering see the Google Analytics Blog.
6) Share Advanced Segment and Custom Reporting Templates
This feature allows you to share an advanced segment or custom report with anyone who has a Google Analytics account. Upon clicking the link the pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into the users account. This could be a great time saving feature as an advanced user can quickly and easily share reporting templates.
7) Multiple Custom Variables
Multiple custom variables are something that other analytics packages such as Yahoo Web Analytics have had for a long time. These custom variables provide you with the opportunity to track additional information such as, whether the user is signed-in, a user ID and level of membership. You can use custom variables to really help you with advanced tracking; for instance they tend to be very useful in the travel sector.
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