New Google Analytics Features

In the article “Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent” from last Tuesday (yes, I know I’m behind on this) on the Google Analytics Blog, the Analytics team has introduced some interesting new features. Some of the updates:

• Two new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. You can also define up to 20 goals per profile.
  
• A server-side chunk of code is coming to allow tracking on moble sites (since mobile browsers may not be able to run the JavaScript Analytics code on a page).
• Advanced table filtering allows you to filter rows based on assorted conditions. In their sample video they show ho to filter keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30% that referred at least 25 visits (it’s much easier to understand with this video).
  
• You can now select unique visitors as a metric for custom reports.
• You can now have multiple custom variables so you can track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes and page attributes.
• You can now share custom reports and segments with other Analytics users.

There are two items over which the blog post is most excited:

Analytics Intelligence: We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.

Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur. [….]