Google Analytics unveils its new features and shakes its competitors

They are here, they are waiting for you, they are all hot! Google has once again outdone itself and made available to everyone a series of  super hot new features  that should delight more than one but also make some people tremble...

Some of these new features will be available today, October 20, 2009, the others will be available during the week. The least that can be said is that Google has literally beefed up its measurement tool to the point of making it increasingly a real performance measurement tool for the largest sites.

As a GAAC (Google Analytics Authorized Consultant), Adviso already had access to many features in private access. We can therefore finally share them with you and confirm the significant progress made by Google in terms of performance measurement.

In bulk, Google Analytics now comes with the following features:

1.  INTELLIGENCE

Google Analytics offers a section entirely dedicated to significant changes that have occurred during visits to your site, such as an abnormal drop in visits, an explosion in the conversion rate or even an increase in visits from a particular source. For example, Google Analytics will tell us that an increase of 180% has taken place for visits from Quebec.

Note that this feature is only in its phase 1 and that many improvements will be made. Anyway, it will be particularly appreciated by novices and is part of Google's desire to present the most interesting data clearly and quickly while avoiding too many manipulations.

2.  PERSONALIZED ALERTS

Besides that, GA also allows us to create personalized alerts that will be sent by email and for which we will have previously defined the threshold that will trigger the alert. For example, I want to be notified daily when my conversion rate drops to zero. Finally, we can even share these alerts with other Google accounts!

3.  MULTIPLE CUSTOM VARIABLES

Here is THE long-awaited feature that brings Google Analytics a little closer to its paid competitors. It will now be possible to define 5 visitor segments whose value may change during the session, depending on their journey on the site. Until now, GA only offered a  custom value  which was difficult to manage when its value changed during the visit (setVar function). Knowledge of the profile of visitors will therefore be increased since it will be possible to reliably identify "normal" visitors who have become members and then buyers during the same session or even distinguish men from women according to the information that the visitor will have left on the site.

4.  MORE AND MORE VARIED GOALS

Google has listened to its users and finally offers the possibility of creating more than four goals per profile. From now on, we will be able to create twenty objectives per profile. These will be divided into 4 groups of 5 objectives, which will allow them to be grouped according to their characteristics (conversions, micro-conversions, etc.). Finally, it will no longer be possible to create goals only from URLs but also from metrics such as time spent on the site or page views per visit. For example, I want a conversion to be recorded each time a visit records more than 4 pages. Interesting for optimizing the sources of traffic for content sites…

5.  AN ADVANCED FILTER FOR TABULAR DATA

You will agree that it was not always easy to manipulate the data present in the tables of Google Analytics. Now we can decide from what threshold we want to see the data displayed (for example, only visits of more than 100 interest me) and which entries we want to see and not to see (for example, I want to see all URLs containing “/category1/” but not those containing “/category1/product2”). Very convenient!

6.  SHARE ADVANCED SEGMENTS AND CUSTOM REPORTS

I would be tempted to say “finally! ". Finally Google gives us the ability to share advanced segments and custom reports. These are specific to each Google user account (and not Google Analytics account), which prevented our customers from quickly benefiting from the reports created in our Google account. Now you can share your best segments and reports with your Google friends.

7.  UNIQUE VISITORS IN CUSTOM REPORTS

Its users often lose sight of it, but Google Analytics gives us metrics based on visits and not visitors. The standard reports only display the visits and not the visitors. Now, marketers who swear by unique visitors will be able to view reports using this metric. This will not be visible in standard reports but in custom reports.

8.  MOBILE SITE MEASUREMENT

Google has decided to make it easier to track sites only intended for cellphones. It will now be possible to measure sites as well as iPhone and Android applications even if javascript is not supported, thanks to a piece of code placed on the server side (supported for the moment by sites in PHP, ASPX, Perl , and JSP).

Be patient if your account does not yet include all these new features, it will come. I let you discover all this this week and await your comments on these significant advances in Google Analytics!