Google Analytics, the free web analytics solution that generates detailed statistics and reports about visitors to a website, recently announced a set of powerful new features that build on last year’s enterprise-class launch. Google says that the features – which will gradually be incorporated into Google Analytics accounts over the coming weeks – focus on three key areas:
Intelligence: Google has made significant changes that enable users to understand their data better. It has launched the first phase of an algorithm-driven engine – Analytics Intelligence – that provides users with automatic alerts whenever significant changes happen in their data patterns (metric or dimension). Moreover, users can customize these alerts, so that they can tell Google Analytics what to watch for. The automatically combed data saves users time and brings to light traffic insights that users may find most crucial.
Powerful options: One previous limitation of Google Analytics involved collecting visitor information for websites browsed through mobile phones. This was due to the fact that not all phones are able to run JavaScript or set cookies. With Google Analytics’ expanded mobile reporting, however, users can now track mobile websites and mobile apps and better measure their mobile marketing efforts. A new server side script does the job of capturing data from all web-enabled devices, regardless of whether it has JavaScript or not.
Furthermore, Google added advanced analysis and data manipulation features to expand Google Analytics’ enterprise-class capabilities. Users now have enhanced goal-setting options: parameters can be customized for time-on-site and pages-per-visit goals. Moreover, as much as 20 goals can be defined per profile. The Advanced Table Filtering Feature, meanwhile, allows users to filter rows in a table based on different metric conditions – for example, keywords – and analyze data on the fly, and without having to export them to separate spreadsheet tools.
Flexibility: The addition of multiple custom variables now allows users to customize Google Analytics and collect unique site usage information defined according to different attributes: visitor, session, and page-level. This feature helps individual users and enterprises classify any number of interactions and behaviors on their site. Moreover, reports are more flexible and customizable than ever. With new Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates, users can now choose which profiles to share – and which ones to hide.
More details on the new features will be announced by Google in the following days via the Google Analytics Blog.
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