New Google Analytics Features

Happy Holidays! A short time ago, Google delivered some early Christmas presents for users, in the form of new features for Google Analytics.  They’ve recently built on that, adding a few more treats – some of these might be features you’ve been crying out for, adding extra functionality to some existing features, as well the addition of some unexpected new fangled toys to play with over Christmas.

In this article I’m going to cover off each of these new features in turn; and not just outline what they do, but also provide real business examples of how these can be used to your advantage – something that I find to be usually missing when new feature announcements are made for analytics products.

Annotations

The latest addition to the feature family, annotations is fairly simple and straightforward enhancement; something that typically features in many paid analytics applications today.

It’s not a feature that you might find critical to making business decisions, but can really help out when reviewing historical analytics information.

If you’re working in Google Analytics daily, you can soon be fully accustomed to significant changes; the increase in conversion over 4 days last July when you ran free delivery, the drop of traffic by a third as your server went down for 3 days mid May, etc.  But being able to annotate all these occurrences mean you or anyone else won’t have to go searching through old reports to find out why things happened – you can add this information directly into Google Analytics for all users to view.

The launch of new website sections, marketing campaigns (both on and offline), emails, server downtime, etc, can now all be annotated within the system – making it much easier to chart the impact of activity without have to trawl back and forth between campaign plans and analytics results to determine reasons for why changes may occur.  This functionality should make web analytics more accessible to new users, as well as saving you analysis time and giving you a much more rounded picture of your site performance.

Intelligence & Custom Alerts

One of the more funkier features added to the system is an entirely new section labelled ‘Intelligence’.  This aims to cut the searching time of your web analytics, by highlighting instances where there have been significant changes in your site metrics.

If a section sees a large fall in visitors, or an increase in conversion rate, average order value, or any other associated significant metric change, it will be displayed under this report.

Custom alerts are an extension of this – allowing you to setup your own personal intelligence alerts that occur when a specific set of requirements are met.  If you wish to monitor a particular set of variables, such as the bounce rate of a landing page, you can setup an alert to send you a notification by email to let you know if your values have fallen below your threshold – useful!

More of a time saver than anything, it should help you easily identify time periods for review, as well as notifying you of any large changes which you may have missed.  All in all, a nice little help.

Engagement Goals

The limit on the amount of Goals you can have in a profile has been increased from 4 to 20, and the triggers for goals have also been extended out – allowing goal tracking to be used to a wider range of conversion actions.

Previously, it was only really possible to trigger goals through url calls; whether it be a thank you page, landing page, or specific url string that was required.  Only 4 goals could be added, and all had to be triggered through tracking the url.

With the addition of time on site and pages/visit goals, engagement of visitors can be measured and used as performance targets.  Visitors who view more than say, 6 pages, can be monitored & measured – if you are adding more engagement content to your site (such as video and audio) in an effort to get visitors to stay online longer (and thus more likely to make a purchase) you can measure how successful your efforts are.  The same goes for time on site – these are useful to measure if you are dedicated to increasing visitor engagement on your site.

You may, for example, measure this extra goal information when new content goes live, and the effects that result.  Adding some new sections or irrelevant content may reduce both these values as visitors deem your extra content irrelevant to them, so it is worth keeping an eye on in an effort to improve ongoing conversion and visitor engagement levels.

Advanced Table Filtering (Unique Visitor Metric)

An extension of functionality already present within the system, advanced filters add more options when viewing and processing information.  I’ve been using this type of filtering in paid web analytics apps for many years, but I believe this is the first time such detailed filtering has been added to a free analytics app.

Personally, I think filtering is one of the most useful functions the system provides, closely followed by segmentation.  It allows you to really slice up your data, and run detailed analysis on small groups of visitors instead of just looking at the overall (which is ok for benchmarking but not for finding answers).

In terms of business, though advanced filtering will not give you instant answers, it is great analysis method which allows you to analyse many different groups and visitor types.  Through this filtering you can identify stronger and weaker visitor groups and sources.

There’s a good example of how it might be used in the video above – the parameters are generally unique to what you may be analysing for, but you can easily filter low quality or high quality visitors by using a combination of filters.  Once you have your filtered information, you can then use it to drive future activity.

For example, you might be running a PPC campaign to a tailored landing page which is not performing to a profitable conversion rate.  Through advanced filtering, you may view the keywords driving traffic on this campaign (through AdWords/Analytics linking) and then analyse this keyword information in more detail.  You could easily filter to show keywords in which time on site and pages/visit are low – allowing you to remove these keywords easily.  You would then be able to identify ‘high quality’ keywords (by looking at the opposite end of this analysis) and work to improve these – enhancing the ad text, landing proposition, and budget.  It ensures that your improvement efforts are only focused in those areas most likely to see profitability.

‘Unique Visitors’ as a measure has also been extended across more reports – allowing it to be used as a metric in the generation of custom reports.  A small change, but should help – I know some site owners that prefer to use this metric as a base for conversion and measurement over the standard ‘visit’ used.

Multiple Custom Variables, Segment Sharing & Report Templates – API Addition

If you’re a web analyst, it’s likely these changes won’t affect you directly but it’s worthwhile to be aware of them for their potential.

Developers can now add in extra ‘custom variables’ for metrics they would like systems to track through the Google Analytics API.  In a similar vein to how some of the larger systems operate, if you are developing you own analytics solution through the API, you can now add custom variables into the mix to be tracked, based upon visitor attributes.

These might be measurements such as registered vs. non-registered user, or you might like to group visitors into interest groups depending on which website sections they spend their time in most (womens, mens, kids, outdoors, indoors, etc).  You could almost take it was far as categorising them in men & women based on their site interest, allowing separate analysis of these groups – as well as issuing relevant marketing material based on their browsing preferences.  I haven’t had the chance to use this function myself yet, but it has a lot of potential.

Expanded Mobile Reporting

Not a change to the interface itself, but Google have added extra tracking functionality for mobile devices across mobile friendly websites and applications.  By taking advantage of an extra tracking code offered, Google Analytics can track views, clicks, downloads, session length, bounces and more of both mobile website and application use.