Mar 18, 2010

Five things you need to know about: Google Analytics' new features

Google recently announced new web analytics features that help marketers and businesses increase performance and ROI for their websites and online marketing campaigns. Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar (pictured), head of web analytics at Google Southeast Asia, tells us five things we need to know about the latest features in Google Analytics

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Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar head of web analytics Google Southeast Asia

1. New engagement goals.

Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your website with the option to set thresholds for time on site and pages per visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile.

2. Expanded mobile reporting.

Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. 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. iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website.

3. Analytics intelligence.

Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your website metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300 per cent surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Singapore dropped by 70 per cent 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 identifying traffic insights that could affect your business.

4. Custom alerts.

Custom 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 and metrics, and be notified by email or in the user interface when the changes actually occur.

5. Multiple custom variables.

Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. You can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (eg member vs non-member), session attributes (eg logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (eg viewed sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviours on your website.

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