Yesterday our colleagues in the US announced a range of new features for Google Analytics. Just in case you missed their announcement, we wanted to highlight these new features on the Conversion Room too.

Each feature will offer you increased flexibility to customise and adapt Google Analytics for your business. We are also really excited about Analytics Intelligence - but you can find out more about this later in the post!


Check out the overview of each new feature below, written by Dai Pham from our US Google Analytics team in yesterday's announcement on analytics.blogspot.com.


Powerful.


Power users have asked us to add even more data manipulation and analysis features to Google Analytics. We've been listening, and are adding the latest power features to expand Google Analytics enterprise-class capabilities.

• Engagement Goals...and more of them! Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Watch this short video on goals to learn more.


• Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can measure your mobile marketing efforts more effectively. If you're optimising content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks. (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your normal website coming from high-end, Javascript-enabled phones.

iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Take a look at the SDKs (software development kits) and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you'll be able to see breakdown data on mobile devices and operators in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!

• Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools that you can use to perform advanced data analysis. Earlier this year, we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. So, you could see how much revenue your site received from visitors in London who searched for "bean bag". You could then "pivot" by source and see revenue by search engine for each of these city+keyword combinations. Here's a quick tutorial video.


Now we're adding Advanced Table Filtering. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Watch this video to see an example of how you could filter thousands of keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30%, and that referred at least 25 visits.

Together, these three power features let you perform in-depth, on-the-fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.

• Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment.

Flexible.

Every enterprise has unique web analytics tracking and reporting needs. Today, we're enhancing two of the tools that organisations use to adapt and customise Google Analytics. We're adding multiple customised variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom reports and Advanced Segments.

• Multiple Customised Variables: Multiple Customised Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customise Google Analytics and collect the unique site data most important to your business. If you've used the _setVar() function, the concept of customised variables will be familiar, but we've taken it a step further and added visitor, session and page-level scoping. You can use customised variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviours on your site. For example, you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged in or not logged in) and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). This incredibly powerful customisation capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple customised variables will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks but you can start learning more about them now.

• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features that we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report that you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account, and a pre-formatted Sales report template will be imported automatically. You can also now select the profiles with which you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports.

Intelligent.

Wouldn't it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Starting today, it can!

• 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 that bounce rates of visitors from Manchester 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.

• Customised 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 directly in the user interface when the changes actually occur.

Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then keep an eye out for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!





We hope you're looking forward to trying out these new features in your account. We will focus on some of these features in more detail on the Conversion Room in our upcoming posts, showing examples of how and when to use each feature. In the meantime, let us know what you think of our Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent new features - leave a comment or send a mail.

Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team