Posted By Industrial Web Solutions Marketing Team on February 4, 2010

At the end of last year Google announced seven new features added to its analytics program designed to provide website owners with greater control and more in-depth, granular reporting capabilities. A great application to begin with, Google Analytics just keeps evolving to meet the demanding needs of its users. Here is a summary of the changes:

Analytics Intelligence: Designed to provide you and your professional analyst with key information “so that your team can focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless sea of data.” The only significant difference here is the presentation of the information as Daily Alerts. The algorithm is designed to detect and report on anomalies as they occur. This summary alerts you to occurrences that may or may not require your immediate attention. You can even create your own custom alerts.

Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals: This expanded feature allows you to set up to 4 sets of five goals to track a total of up to 20 different conversion goals per profile. There are 3 goal types available including:

• URL Destination: Conversion is triggered when user visits a specified page after completing a desired action such as “Thank you for submitting your RFQ.”
• Time on Site: Conversion is triggered when visitor spends more or less time on your site than the threshold you specify. For example, you can measure the percentage of visits that are longer than 3 minutes. This information will tell you how interesting your web pages are to your visitors or how much time they spend on a page before they convert, for example.
• Pages/ Visit: Conversion is triggered when visitor visits more or fewer pages on your site than the threshold you specify. This statistic, like Time On Site, is helpful for measuring visitor engagement.

Although this isn’t exactly new, the Goal Value feature allows you to set a Goal Value in dollars and cents in order to help you determine the estimated monetary value the specified goal offers you.

Expanded Mobile Reporting: This feature allows for the same tracking and reporting capabilities for mobile websites.

Unique Visitors Metric: Include this metric in your Reports to learn how many unduplicated (counted only once and determined by cookies) visitors you get to your website over a specified time period.

Advanced Analysis Features: A) Pivoting, Secondary Dimensions – by selecting a secondary dimension such as “city” (in relation to the primary dimension of say “keywords”), you are able to gather performance statistics that take both dimensions into consideration when calculating results. For example, when looking at Pages/Visit relative to the site average, you can determine whether a keyword in relation to a particular city underperformed or beat the site average. B) Advanced Filters: “Now, you can set a filter while looking at a certain report to get the information you want, without having to exit and create a filter or advanced segment. Within seconds, you can whittle down a massive data table to look at a subset that is important to you.” Great for honing in on a particular aspect of reporting that is important to understanding your site activity or marketing campaign.

Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates: Now you can share with your team the customizations you have made to your reports simply by sharing a URL. You can email the link to the URL that takes them to the template you have created.

Multiple Custom Variables: Allows you to set up a variety of custom variables to track user activity for your site. The visitor interaction model used by Google defines the visitor (browser or mobile phone operated by a person), the session (period of time visitor is active on site) and the pages visited (pageview and event such as a click).  For example, to learn the number of sessions where visitors removed an item from their shopping cart, you would define the custom variable to the session level, so that the entire session for that visitor is flagged as one in which items were removed from online carts.

Need Google Analytics on your websites, including your mobile websites? Give us a call (800) 399-9859.

Categories: Technology, Websites, industrial marketing, mobile web marketing, online marketing, search
Tags: google, google analytics, reporting, results tracking