December 04, 2008 | Thursday

Google Analytics steps it up a gear!

By Ben Sidebottom - Technical Integration Consultant in Consultancy |Analytics

With Yahoo’s recent takeover of IndexTools, and subsequent name change to Yahoo! Web Analytics, it seems some of the analytics providers are starting to feel the burn. Yahoo! Web Analytics provides very accurate and insightful data with the ability to fully customise your reports and the data you see. Since Yahoo! have released this as a ‘free’ tool (available through partners only) Google Analytics has responded with some pretty neat updates.

With social networking, e-commerce and web application sites taking full advantage of technologies such as Ajax, SilverLight and Flash it is becoming increasingly important that the analytics providers are able to monitor all of the users’ interactions. Using standard analytics methods, monitoring user behaviour is not possible or at the very best, limited. Therefore providers are having to get smarter with how they can capture and analyse the users behaviour and with other analytics providers already offering this, Google are now in line to do this very task!

Google have released a new “Event Tracker” to their analytics package allowing the capture and analysis of user interaction with Web 2.0 features. The event tracker is similar to the one used by Yahoo! Web Analytics but this is fine as they both use simple and very effective means to capture data. Google Analytics can now be used to monitor Flash websites, video plays/pause and a whole host of Web 2.0 actions.

Whilst this update is only available to limited accounts at the moment it will be released soon to all Google Analytics accounts along with some of the other cool features they are yet to announce…