Washington — In a last ditch with a weakening economy and the holiday retail season, Google on Wednesday, at the eMetric Summit in Washington, D.C., announced a series of enhancements and new enterprise-class features to its free Google Analytics product over the coming weeks, including integration with AdSense.
The Google Analytics upgrade springs up barely two weeks after Yahoo launched its analytics product. Most importantly, you can now integrate your AdSense account with your Analytics account to combine website traffic details and earnings in one easy-to-understand portal.
The Official Google Analytics blog outlined
what they call more “enterprise-class” features to the software. Many new attributes will be released as betas will begin rolling out over the next few weeks, including advanced segmentation, custom reports, a data export API, integrated reporting for AdSense publishers, multi-dimensional data visualizations called “
Motion Charts,
” and an updated user and administrative interface.
Additionally, Google’s offering also happens to influence on more sophisticated tools offered by Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics.
While some alterations are merely simple upgrades to previous functionality, the Analytics interface updated yesterday has a slightly different, more elegant user experience for the end user. The features announced on the Analytics Official Blog, though, are much more significant and may possibly become an essential tool for every webmaster, especially those who are looking to monetize their sites in the best possible way.
“All of these are things our more advanced customers have been asking for, and our enterprise-class customers want and need,” said Brett Crosby, group manager of Google Analytics.
The updates are part of an enterprise-class bundle of features that will be available to all Google Analytics users in the coming weeks are:
Advanced Segmentation: Enables you to create a segment of traffic and see those people in all your reports. Say for instance you wish to see people who visit from AdWords, or from a specific location, or a specific website — you can thus isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic in a specific way thanks to filters such as “paid traffic” or “visits with conversions,” which means that webmasters will be able to implement a true behavioral targeting should they wish to pursue that road. The segment also applies to all historical data and will be visible in custom reports, too.
Custom Reporting: Previously, Google Analytics users only had the ability to run pre-determined reports. But now users can drill down into geographies, the referring source, or other queries with a customize layout and filter your data in the way you wish: you will be able to save and load different, customized views and get all the information you want with just a quick glimpse.
Integration with AdSense: A long-requested feature that will be rolled out over several months, so if you do not see it for sometime, do not panic! Google Analytics will now integrate with not just AdWords (an extant feature) but also AdSense. Users can now see which pages are driving the most revenue and least revenue through AdSense. You can also determine what kind of content on your site that is monetizing the best for you. These reports can also be broken down by geography or referring sites/sources.
Beta version of the API: Developers have done some pretty creative things with Google Analytics from mobile and desktop applications to Grease Monkey scripts. Google is hoping that third party developers will dream up applications that are not currently floating around the offices in Mountain View. Now Google will release a beta version of an API, plus support, to better help developers in extending the usefulness and capabilities of GA.
Motion Charts: This is one of the most prominent and potentially fruitful update in the list, and certainly one of the most attractive visualization features that can show a graphical representation of up to four variables — plus time. As with custom reports, this highly sophisticated tool allows for plotting cross-compiled data into five dimensions — X-Y axis, bubble size and color, and even time. Then you can also watch change over time with animations.
The services and updates are intended to offer customers flexible and free options for ways to view data, as well as methods to integrate Google Analytics data with other data sources. Several years in the making, employees throughout the company — including engineers, marketers, sales, user experience, copywriters, webmasters and designers — had a hand in creating the package.
Other interesting features are currently in a “private beta” stage and will likely be rolled out within a few months: these include a data export API allowing to create programs that can download and manipulate reports from Analytics to extend the platform functionality even beyond the tools provided by Google, and, most importantly, a much-awaited integration with Google AdSense, which offers metrics such as total revenue, eCPM, click-through rate and average impressions/visit over time — by day or even by hour.
“Now, today’s launch, it is not about the breadth. This launch is about the depth of usability, to be able to the deep dives in the data. We have taken what was traditionally the extensive data, and made them easy to use,” Crosby said.
With these latest updates, Google might well be considered the most advanced stats reporting tool available to the general public, and certainly one of the most feature-rich, which will certainly end up driving a new wave of customers to its platform to make the Google dominance clearer even in this market.
As Jeff Gillis explains in his blog post, the Analytics team has been gathering a wish list for over a year now, and investigated other valuable statistics tool in an attempt to understand which features were the most needed or requested. Today, after months of testing and developing, Google unveiled a major upgrade to its platform that make this tool even stronger in the market and, what is even better, also freely available for everyone to use.