The Growing Google Analytics Ecosystem

Google Analytics is not simply a product but also a growing ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. Today at the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, Brett Crosby made several announcements that highlight this ecosystem.

All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants). And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform. Today, we’re announcing the Google Analytics App Gallery. Among the current list of 32 apps, you’ll find tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site. There are many more applications in the gallery, so go take a look. And if you’re a developer, you can learn how to publish apps in the App Gallery here.

Google AdWords is another important part of the ecosystem. Website owners drive traffic using AdWords, and use Google Analytics to understand the performance of that traffic. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. For a 3-minute overview of what you can accomplish with the new reports, check out this video.

Also, developers can now access AdWords information via the Google Analytics APIs. This makes it much easier to combine your AdWords and Google Analytics data for both analysis and automation. We’re very excited to see third party applications that use this capability to offer new functionality to advertisers. For details, check out this article, which includes a code sample and more, on Google Code.

Also part of the AdWords/Analytics ecosystem, AdWords Search Funnels was announced one month ago, and today is available in all AdWords accounts. We’re also making two short tips videos available (tip 1 and tip 2) that illustrate just a couple of the ways you can use Search Funnels.

Finally, supporting the ecosystem of all websites using Google Analytics, the new faster page tag comes out of beta. The asynchronous tracking snippet will soon be the default snippet when you set up a new profile. This new page tag will speed up your site and every site that uses Google Analytics across the web. If you want to upgrade from your existing tag (which we highly recommend), you can learn how to do that here.

We'll follow up with deep dive posts on each of these topics next week. Thanks for being part of the ecosystem.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team