New Features In Google Analytics!

October 20, 2009

Google Analytics has just introduced a gaggle of new features at eMetrics today. Some you’ll already find in your account, and some are being rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

Analytics Intelligence & Custom Alerts

The most exciting of these new features is a set of reports called “Analytics Intelligence”. They look for patterns in your daily, weekly, and monthly data and call out significant changes and anomalies. This makes it a lot easier to separate what’s really new and interesting from the mountain of data you have about your site.

Here’s an example Intelligence report:

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You can see it calls out alerts for changes in the patterns of your traffic. (You can adjust the sensitivity level with which these show up.) The specific alerts look like this:

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You can see here that referral traffic was up from what’s expected (visits up 66%, pageviews up 54%) These really help call out changes in your traffic that might otherwise be hard to see without digging through lots of reports.

In addition to all of this happening automatically, you can also create custom alerts. Say I want to know when my organic search traffic is up 10% from last week:

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And, you can even have GA email you when that happens.

But Wait, There’s More!

There is a slew of other features, too. We’ll be covering all of these in more depth in the coming weeks.

Goals:

  • If you’ve ever created yet another profile to have four more goals, you’ll be relieved to hear that profiles will now be allowed 20 goals each.
  • You can now set goals based on Pages/Visit and Time on Site!

Advanced Analysis Features:

  • New, easier-to-use filters for reports. In addition to the existing, “contains/excludes,” filter you can use a nice interface to build multiple conditions for filtering, and also allow you to filter based on metrics.
  • Previously-announced secondary dimensions and pivots are rolling out to everyone.
  • The unique visitors metric will now be available in custom reports.

New Tracking Features:

  • Multiple custom variables. Previously, you could use the user-defined variable, but you only got one and had to resort to workarounds to get multiple values. Now you get multiple values out of the box, and you can specify whether to track them at the page, visit, or visitor level.
  • Expanded mobile tracking, including tracking for iPhone and Android apps and tracking websites for mobile devices that do not run JavaScript.

You’ll hear lots more about these in blog posts coming soon, and you should see the features rolled out into your accounts over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!