Mountain View, California — Last year, Google Analytics team unveiled a ton of novel features and this year they are at it again. The search engine behemoth today at the annual meeting announced a slew of new features for its Google Analytics service, there are some quite useful features in those updates. These new enhancement gives the Analytics tools more power, flexibility and intelligence.
As part of its upgrade to Google Analytics announced today, Google is introducing a number of useful enhancements, including the ability to track traffic to both mobile sites and applications, and explanations of what device is being used. The company is building a new intelligence engine. This means that marketers will be able to track digital campaigns across web and mobile platforms, with the most significant changes in a site’s metrics when you view its profile in Analytics.
Here is a sample screenshot by Google:
Here are the highlights of the new features of Google Analytics:
Advanced Intelligence and Custom Alerts:
When something unusual happens in your analytics, Google will inform you of such activity via an email alerting you to the change. This feature will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site. For instance, you have a sudden spike in traffic due to some social media site, it will alert you on that. You can set your own parameters for when you get an alert such as daily, weekly and monthly according to your needs using different metrics. It will allow you to see an increase visits from a traffic source and drop in traffic from a region according to Google.
Another is the intelligence aspect, which Google gives the most prominence on, and this comes in the form of a feature called “Analytics Intelligence,” which will inform users with automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of their site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly, and monthly periods. Users can be notified by email or right within the Google Analytics user interface.
Here’s a video explaining Analytics Intelligence and Custom Alerts:
Two New Goals:
Addition of two new goal types will “enable you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site.” With these goals, you can define thresholds for “Time on Site” and “Pages Per Visit”. Also, you can now set up to 4 goals for 5 sets each — up to 20 per profile. For more information, view this video:
Expanded Mobile Reporting:
The search giant is already extending its AdWords network to mobile devices. Now you can get improved tracking of mobile websites and mobile apps on mobile devices even if the device is running Javascript or not. Previously, Google Analytics only tracked traffic from devices that ran Javascript. In the next few weeks, Google will provide code snippets for sites built on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX.
Google Analytics now tracks mobile applications developed for iPhone and Android. Now you can use Google Analytics to track your site usage in mobile devices.
“iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What is more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement.”
Google states that it will be rolling out more detail on the new features in the near future on the Google Analytics Blog. The features will be appearing in Google Analytics accounts step by step over the coming weeks. There are other updates in this release check out the Google blog post for more details.