New Ecommerce tracking and validation in the Analytics SDK for Android

Increasingly, mobile applications allow you to purchase products and virtual goods. For that reason, it’s important to track these mobile transactions in order to understand which products perform well.

So today we’ve added Ecommerce tracking functionality to the Google Analytics SDK for Android.

Ecommerce Tracking
With Ecommerce mobile tracking, you can capture transaction and product information, send the data to Google Analytics, and then analyze which products performed best. Of course, because this is all within Google Analytics, you can also tie transaction data back to app usage behavior. For example, you can now compare the referral that generated an app download by the revenue it generated. See the Google Analytics SDK for Android developer docs to learn how to implement this feature.

Debug and Validation
In addition to Ecommerce, we’ve added new debug and dry run modes to make it easier to validate your Google Analytics implementation.

Debug Mode:

tracker.setDebug(true);

With debug mode, all data requests to Google Analytics are sent to the Android log, allowing you to validate that your app is sending data properly. You can view the Android log using the adb logcat command.

Dry Run:

tracker.setDryRun(true);

The dry run mode sends all tracking data locally so that you don’t corrupt your production data.

See Us At Google IO
We’ll be demoing all this new functionality this year Google IO, so stop by the Optimizing Android Apps With Google Analytics session on May 11, 12:30PM – 01:30PM / Room 9.

Posted by Jim Cotugno, Google Analytics Tracking Team

The New Google Analytics Available to Everyone

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

I’m very excited to announce that the new version of Google Analytics is now available to all Google Analytics users in all languages. When you sign into Google Analytics you’ll see a link to the new version in the top right of your account.

If you haven’t, we encourage you to try the new version today. There’s a host of new features to help you do better analysis. These new features are only the beginning of what's coming to the new Google Analytics platform over the next few months.

Here are five things you can try in Google Analytics v5 today:

• Create an additional dashboard to focus on your important metrics
• Set up an Event Goal to track interactions like downloads and video engagement
• Graph and compare any two rows over time with Plot Rows
• Check out your favorite report (Did it move? Our Report Finder can help)
• Flip between your different profiles and sites while staying focused on the same report

So what happens next? You’ll continue to have access to both versions of Google Analytics, and you can switch between them at any time. If you find anything that doesn’t work or could be better, let us know. We especially want to hear about issues that force you back to the current version. We’re still hard at work on enabling a few features from the old version including PDF export and email scheduling, and they’ll be coming soon.

Take some time this week to try the new Google Analytics, and let us know what you think. We’ll continue making improvements and adding functionality. Next week, we’ll be covering how to use custom reports in the new version.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Leading The Industry with Tracking Code Improvements

Last year, Google Analytics launched asynchronous JavaScript tracking. This was a vast improvement over conventional JavaScript, since it reduced interference with other site scripting and allowed HTML pages to fully load even if the tracking code hasn’t yet loaded.

Today we’re announcing another ground-breaking web analytics feature: client side POST support. This new feature further improves the accuracy of Google Analytics, especially for sites with very long URLs and long event tracking parameters.

Traditionally, client-side tracking code beacons have been sent via HTTP GET requests, which are limited to 2048 bytes by some browsers and proxies. Requests sent to Analytics that exceeded this limit were dropped, and the data never reached Google Analytics. Starting with this release, requests longer than 2048 bytes will be sent via HTTP POST, which has no such limit. The tracking code will now support beacons up to 8192 bytes!

This feature requires no user configuration and has been pushed in the latest version of the JavaScript tracking code. With this new capability we hope to bring you even more innovative features in the coming months.

Posted by Brian Kuhn, Jim Wogulis, & Jonathan Owen, Tracking Code Team

Looking towards the future of Google Analytics

Today at the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco, we shared a look at a new version of Google Analytics. We’ve also reached out to a small group of Analytics users to participate in the testing. If you’re part of this group you’ll see a link to the new version in your Analytics account. We’re starting small, and we’ll gradually roll the new version out to everyone.

Our goals for the new version are to make it easier and faster to get to the data you want and to enhance the Google Analytics platform to bring you major new functionality. Many of the changes in the new version are the result of your feedback. For example, you can now view multiple advanced segments without needing to also use All Visits. You’ll find some of the other most requested features like multiple dashboards in the new version as well.

We’ll be sharing many more details about what’s new along the way with a new series on the blog focused exclusively on the new Analytics. In the meantime, if you want to be considered for the test, visit the beta sign-up page. Using the new version won’t change how Google Analytics reports your website traffic, and you can continue to use the current version while testing the new Analytics.

As you start using the new Google Analytics, you should also check out the updated Google Analytics Help Center and the Report Finder, which will show you where to find your favorite reports in the new version. We’ve also set up a new category in the Help Forum where you can ask questions and discuss the new version.

This release wouldn’t have been possible without your feedback. Please continue to send us your feedback as you start using the new interface.

Happy analyzing!

UPDATE: 3/17/11 1:40pm PST, we fixed an issue that prevented us from collecting sign-ups. If you signed-up before 1:40pm PST, please sign-up again: beta sign-up page.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Introducing In-Page Analytics: Visual context for your Analytics data

When looking at Google Analytics reports, sometimes it’s difficult to visualize how visitors navigate on a given website page. To make this visualization easier, some users keep the website open in another browser tab so they can reference it while looking through reports. Others rely on the Site Overlay report in Google Analytics, which, admittedly, hasn’t worked as well it could.

Today, we’re happy to share with you a bit of what we’ve been working on to address this problem. We’re releasing a new feature into beta: In-Page Analytics. With In-Page Analytics, you can see your Google Analytics data superimposed on your website as you browse.

Take In-Page for a spin and let us know what you think. In-Page Analytics is still in beta, so some things in the report may not work perfectly yet. There’s a lot left to do, but there’s even more that we want to build going forward. In-Page is currently available for all English users of Google Analytics. We also have a demo video that walks you through the feature and how you might use it.

You’ll find the In-Page Analytics report in the Content section in your Google Analytics account, and it replaces Site Overlay. You can read more about In-Page in the Google Analytics Help Center. Let us know what you think and how you’re using it!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Google Instant and Google Analytics

Today, we announced the launch of Google Instant, a new Google.com interface that shows relevant results while the user types. This exciting new search interface applies to both search results and related ads. We expect Google Instant will help users find what they’re looking for faster. With this change, you might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and in the distribution of organic keywords. For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward.

To read more about how this change affects AdWords advertisers, please visit the Inside AdWords Blog. Users of Webmaster Tools should also see their post about Google Instant.

Update at 5:10pm PST: Clarified that you may see a change in the distribution of traffic of organic keywords.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Launch: Intelligence Just Got Smarter!

Hopefully, by now, you’re making good use of the Intelligence report in Google Analytics. If you’re looking to avoid the feeling that Google Analytics is “puking” too much data at you - a phrase coined by Google’s beloved analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik - you're not alone. We've heard you, and Intelligence is your first stop. As we mentioned in a previous post introducing Intelligence, it’s your dedicated assistant, monitoring your website traffic for significant changes that you should know of. Wondering what’s going on under the hood of your site traffic? Intelligence will tell you.

And it’s improving and getting smarter. Here are two improvements we’re announcing today.

New! AdWords Alerts

If you have linked your Google Analytics account with an AdWords account, Intelligence will now automatically surface important changes in your AdWords campaigns performance right in Google Analytics. So, in addition to the alerts you are used to getting, such as time on site and revenue, you’ll now receive alerts about your AdWords campaigns and the traffic they are bringing to your website.

You might already be familiar with custom alerts in Google AdWords, which alert you when important changes you specify happen in your account. With AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you benefit from automatic detection of significant changes, with no extra work for you to configure these yourself. For example, you might see an alert if the CTR for one of your campaigns increased unexpectedly. Or you might find that revenue from one of your destination URLs has dropped significantly from the week before. In both cases, you didn’t need to know ahead of time what to look for. These important changes are automatically detected and brought to your attention.

Here's how to use them. AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence work just like automatic alerts have in the past. You can learn more about how to use Analytics Intelligence here: http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-intelligence.html.

In order to use AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you need to have a linked AdWords account. Additionally, you need to have destination URL auto-tagging turned on. If you already use the AdWords reports in Analytics, you’re all set.

1. Sign into your Analytics account

2. Select Intelligence from the left-hand navigation

3. Choose daily (default), weekly, or monthly alerts

Directly underneath the graph, you’ll see check boxes for Custom Alerts, Web Analytics, and AdWords, which is next to the orange arrow in image above.

If you want to focus solely on your AdWords alerts, you can uncheck Custom Alerts and Web Analytics. Then, you can adjust the sensitivity slider to see just the most significant alerts or create an advanced segment to more closely investigate the change.

New #2! More options in Custom Alerts

It always easy to create a custom alert if there is a metric you’d like Intelligence to specifically monitor. See the orange arrow again, below:

You name the alert, apply it to a profile, designate a time period, and then set conditions for the visitor (such as City matches New York, or Campaign matches Fall Sale), and the metric (such as time on site greater than 5 minutes, or % of new visits is greater than 30%).

And now, we’ve added a ton more options in the Alert Conditions drop downs, including all of the 20 goals you have configured in each profile. They’ve also been dressed up for a night on the town, wearing their actual goal names such as “Goal8 Value: Visited >10 pages.” Only goals that you have configured will show up in the list, keeping the drop-down menu clean and courteous.

Among the other conditions and metrics now available: e-commerce and AdWords metrics, as well as more traffic sources, and more content page metrics. And remember, you can tell Intelligence to email you when an alert is triggered.

Intelligence is getting smarter and smarter, making you more effective. Try it out if you haven’t already.

Posted by Beth Liebert and Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

The New AdWords Reports in Google Analytics

Last month, we made a number of announcements around the Google Analytics ecosystem. Along with launching the Google Analytics Application Gallery and making the new, faster page tag the default, we released a major update of the AdWords reports in Google Analytics. As of today, all Analytics users now have access to the new AdWords reports. With this update, you have access to three new reports, 10 new dimensions, and more AdWords metrics.

Three Brand New Reports

Three new reports give you the ability to dig into all aspects of your AdWords campaign performance. Click any photo to enlarge.

Day Parts Report

Curious to know the best day of the week for your ads or the best hours of the day for your campaigns? See your ad performance broken down by day of the week and by hour of the day using the Day Parts report. The Day Parts report can help you find the most profitable times of day for your ads. Then pair it with the Ad Scheduling feature in AdWords to automatically adjust your bid to capture the right traffic at the right time.

Destination URLs Report

What are your best landing pages? The Destination URLs report lets you dive into the performance of each of your Destination URLs. You can break out performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Apply a secondary dimension like Keywords and see your top Destination URL/Keyword pairs.

Placements Report

The Placement Performance Report in AdWords shows you the performance of your ads on the Google Content Network. With the Placements Report in Google Analytics, you can get rich post-click performance data about your campaigns and find the best sites to target your ads. Or, either exclude the sites that don’t send you engaged traffic or identify the top performers to create a targeted display campaign.

10 New AdWords Dimensions

Dive deep into your AdWords performance using 10 new AdWords dimensions. For example, try Match Type to see performance between Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match. Love the search query report in AdWords? Segment by Matched Search Query to see exact user queries that triggered your ads and post-click performance.

Clicks Tab in Campaigns and Keywords reports

The Clicks tab brings your AdWords performance metrics into Google Analytics. From the Clicks tab you can get an overview of AdWords performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Combined with Goals or eCommerce tracking you can see a complete picture of your AdWords performance.

How to Get Started with the New AdWords Reports

To start using the new AdWords reports in Google Analytics you need a linked AdWords account. You also need to make sure that Destination URL auto-tagging is turned on. Start from your AdWords account, select the Reporting tab, then Google Analytics. To access the reports from Google Analytics, select Traffic Sources, then AdWords.

You can see the new reports in action in this video:

Hope you enjoy the new reports! Let us know what you think in the comments.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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

Making the Web Faster

Today, our web search team announced how Google search now uses site speed as a factor in ranking. All things being equal, a faster loading site is better than a slower site.

With this announcement, we wanted to remind you about Google Analytics asynchronous tracking. The asynchronous tracking code has a faster load time and can improve site speed, especially on rich-media or script-heavy pages.

We encourage users to update to the asynchronous snippet to help make your site and the web faster. You can read up on how to implement the asynchronous snippet on our Google Code site. We also have a comprehensive list of migration examples to help you make the switch.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Back to Hits

Over the years we’ve worked hard to make complex data easy to access and easy to understand. We’ve released features like Advanced Segmentation, which lets you segment your traffic on the fly, Custom Reporting-- the ability to create and share your own reports--, and Analytics Intelligence, an algorithmic intelligence engine that automatically spots important changes in traffic. All of this work was done with the belief that you needed this data in order to make sense of your website traffic.

We’re big believers that data trumps opinion, so we set out to prove our belief. We’ll be the first to admit that we were wrong. After extensive analysis by our quantitative teams, we’ve uncovered that hits (or How Interneters Track Success) is the only metric that actually matters in web analytics. Forget that business about absolute unique visitors, goal completion rate, or even bounce rate. If you want to achieve success, you need to focus on hits.

With this finding, we’ve gone back to the drawing board with the Google Analytics interface. Since this will be a major change, we want to share with you a preview of the new Google Analytics UI:

(click to view full-size)

To help you make this transition, Avinash Kaushik is releasing a new book: Web Analytics 3.0 - The Greatest Hits. The new book (more of a thick brochure, really) is chock full of nearly 1,000 words on how to use hits to track your success. It’s your chance to learn how to hit from a true analytics ninja. Plus it’s much shorter than most of his blog posts.

We’re looking forward to exploring the next stage of web analytics with you. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a hit counter to watch.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team & Hits Master

​Upcoming System Upgrade for Greater Scalability & Reliability

​Within the next two weeks, Google Analytics will be performing a system upgrade. This upgrade is to further increase the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics to meet the demand of an increasing number of enterprises using Google Analytics. Rest assured your website traffic data will be unaffected and there will be no interruption to data collection or processing. All reports will be available and accessible to users. However, for some limited hours, users will not be able to perform administrative account actions such as opening new accounts, creating or modifying profiles, setting up filters and goals, managing user access, etc. The specific system upgrade times will be posted in the Google Analytics administrative interface. If you anticipate a need to make account changes during the next two weeks we encourage you to make them as soon as possible to ensure smooth operations during the system upgrade.

We are proud to see the continued growth in Google Analytics and are committed to delivering the unparalled reliability and scalability that users have come to expect from products running on Google’s globally renowned infrastructure.

P.S. Google Website Optimizer will also be undergoing a system upgrade. All running experiments will continue to run and collect data. However users will be unable to create or modify experiments. Read more on the Website Optimizer blog.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Coradiant/Urchin Analytics In A Box Launched

Urchin analytics software has a long tradition of integrating with other software/hardware platforms, and today we are pleased to announce the latest such collaboration: Coradiant's new Analytics In A Box (AIB). AIB is an appliance that sits behind your firewall, passively collecting web traffic data via a packet-sniffing technique. This gives you the option of reducing your reliance on page tags, as Coradiant's system collects traffic data in an independent way. Log file headaches are also gone for good, which will be music to the ears of any sysadmin!

AIB uses a modified version of Urchin 6, in conjunction with Coradiant's complementary technologies to give you new ways to look at both your web traffic AND the performance of your site/server.

From Coradiant's press release:

"Analytics In A Box provides a comprehensive view into customer Web site interaction, and insights into online conversion outcomes. Analytics capabilities are substantially enhanced through access to a richer data model and customizable reporting solutions. A complete set of dashboards for executive consumption, as well as access to granular data allows deeper insights into marketing optimization, site performance, content optimization, conversion behavior and navigational analysis."

Please see Coradiant's site for more information.




Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Software Manager

Google Analytics launches asynchronous tracking

Google Analytics now provides a new Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternate way to track your website!

Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a "separate lane" to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements.

The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded

The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Using the new tracking code is optional: your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to improve your webpage load times and fine-tune the accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you'll love this new option.

Learn more about this new tracking code on our Analytics Help Center and get started on Google Code.

Posted by Jesse Savage, Google Analytics Team

An Integration With Feedburner

The FeedBurner team has just announced an integration with Google Analytics. We know what many of you are saying. "About time!" We'll take it.

If you are using both Google Analytics and FeedBurner, you will automatically see campaign attribution for item clicks tracked by your AdSense For Feeds or your Google FeedBurner account. To read more and get details, please see the blog post here and take a look at the below image:

It works in the same way as URL tagging. You can see how many people click through to your site from the content sent by you in your feeds. FeedBurner is now automatically inserting Google Analytics tracking codes into the URLs of your items, or content. For instance, if you publish a blog and a subscriber reads it and then clicks through to your site, you will see that the source of that visit is Feedburner. And as you can see, it gives even more granular information, such as the type of feed reading software or email.

Taking a step back. What is a feed? From the help article, feeds "are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere." The most popular types of feed formats are RSS and Atom feeds.

If you're publishing content like this blog, then feeds are probably half the story. Feed subscribers are a very important audience to be aware of. If people are really interested in what you have to say, they'll subscribe to your feed or RSS so they can be automatically updated every time you publish new content. They don't want to miss it, and don't want to have to keep visiting your page to check if you've published new content. FeedBurner is the way you can measure how many people are using your feed and who they are. It's could be called Google Analytics for feeds :-) Or Google Analytics could be called web...analytics...burner?

Anyway, FeedBurner shows you not only how many subscribers your feed has, but also metrics like geography and reach, with a breakdown by each piece of content (or "item") you publish. It also tells whether they clicked on a link in that content or went to the actual piece of content on your site. You can also see where the subscriber is reading your feed; whether in email or some kind of feed reader, such as Google Reader.

Another thing to be aware of is AdSense For Feeds, which allows you to monetize your feeds by placing AdSense ads in them.

This integration is the first step towards using these two very similar tools together. You still need to log in to FeedBurner to actually see how many subscribers you have and the rich detail around your feed usage FeedBurner provides.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

New Feature Spotlight: Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Last week, we introduced expanded mobile reporting features in Google Analytics. To help developers, this launch includes features that make it easy to see how people are using specific parts of their iPhone and Android applications. The same Google Analytics reports that provide insights into website traffic and engagement are now available for mobile apps.

As with websites, there are two basic categories of user interaction you can track: pageviews and events. Since mobile apps don't contain HTML pages, developers simply determine when their apps should trigger pageview requests. Google Analytics then aggregates this data in the Content reports to display the number of visits, session length and bounce rates. The data gives insight into how your users interacted with the app.

Developers can also track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews using Event Tracking. These user actions can include views of embedded videos, button clicks, downloads and more. App developers can then use this data to understand which features are most popular and inform decisions about which features should be promoted or prioritized for further development.

Redfin, an online brokerage for buying and selling homes, recently tested Google Analytics on their mobile application. Watch this video to learn more about their experience:

To get started using Google Analytics to understand and optimize how people use your iPhone or Android mobile app, check out the SDK and technical documentation.

Posted by Meredith Papp, Google Mobile Ads Team

New Feature Spotlight: Engagement Goals, Goal Sets and 20 Goals Per Profile

Last week, we announced a bundle of new enterprise-class features in Google Analytics. Over the next few weeks, we'll do posts which go into depth on each new feature. Here is the first, which goes into detail on the expanded and improved goals in Google Analytics (related video). It's very clearly and insightfully written by our friends at WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, with links to related help center articles.

You can probably think of more than four things you'd like your visitors to be doing when they visit your website. Until last week, Google Analytics had limited the number of configurable goals per profile to just four. Sure, you can create 50 profiles and thus track up to 200 goals, but having to switch back and forth in your reports can be a bit cumbersome. Well, here's some very welcome news: comprehensive site performance measurement just got easier. A newly released feature in Google Analytics now lets you create up to 20 conversion goals per profile, including new Engagement goals.

What is it?

Each profile now can be configured with up to four “Goal Sets”, each capable of housing five individual goals. In your Traffic Sources reports, each goal set appears as its own tab (see screenshot below) and the goals associated with the set are listed out in plain text, just as before, to show you how your visitors are accomplishing the objectives of your site. (Click any image to enlarge it.)

In the screenshot above, you can see that Goal Set 1 is comprised of five individual goals. Look in the white boxes under "Goal Set 1" and you'll see "Goal 1: Newsletter Signup", "Goal 2: Contact Us Page", "Goal 3: New User Registration", "Goal 4: Webinar Signup" and "Goal 5: Catalog Request". Goal Sets 2, 3, 4 contain various other goals, and a simple click on the tab puts the numbers you need right at your fingertips.

When viewing your Goal reports, you'll now see up to 20 individual goals in the “Select Goal:” dropdown list, so you can quickly and efficiently look at trend data, funnel visualizations and more:

Setting Up Your Goals

Goal configuration has a new look which follows the goal set organization. For each goal set, you can add up to five individual goals (the remaining number of goals in each set are conveniently noted for you). To add a new goal, just click on the “Add goal” link for the goal set you wish to add a goal to.

With all of these new goals to configure, it's a good practice to use your goal sets to group your goals strategically. For example, you might use Goal Set 1 to track a set of e-commerce related goals such as Successful Purchase, Added Item to Shopping Cart, Deleted Item from Shopping Cart, and things of that nature. For your next set, you might want to track interaction goals such as Newsletter Signup, Followed us on Twitter, Logged In, etc... The sky's the limit, but make sure to consider how you'll want to use your reports when configuring your new goals.

New Goal Types - Engagement Goals

Another change you'll notice is the addition of two new goal types called Engagement goals: Time on Site and Pages/Visit. Previously goals could only be counted when a particular page URL was visited, but Engagement goals will allow a conversion to be recorded when a visitor reaches a certain threshold of involvement with your site. For instance, do you have an ad-serving site and want to record a conversion when a visitor has seen 10 pages? Now you can. Or, are you serving up audio/video or longer content pieces and want get an idea of how long people are listening, viewing or reading? A Time on Site goal can help.

Time on Site allows you to specify a greater than or less than value of time spent on your site as one of your goals. The following goal would fire once a visit passes five minutes in length:

Pages/Visit allows you to set a greater than, equal to or less than value to a pages-per-visit value. The following goal would fire upon the 6th pageview of the visit:

As always, if you'd like a monetary value to be assigned to any of your goals and used in cost and revenue calculations, just enter the amount in the "Goal Value" field.

Note: funnels do not apply for Engagement type goals. Speaking of funnels...

Goal Funnels

One more change to the goal creation page is the goal funnel creation step. The setup is collapsed by default (as it is optional), but if your URL Destination goals follow a path and you'd like to see how users are entering, following and abandoning that path, this is something that you can take advantage of. To create a funnel, just click on the “+ Yes, create a funnel for this goal” link and start entering the URL path to your goal, adding up to 10 steps.

Happy Goaling!

With this new addition to Google Analytics, opportunities to understand and then cater to your visitors abound. So the question is, how will you take advantage of this for your site?


Posted by WebShare, A Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent

Today, we're announcing a new set of Google Analytics features which builds on last year's enterprise-class feature launch. Some add more power to existing capabilities. Others provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your enterprise. Finally, we'll introduce Analytics Intelligence. Resist the temptation to skip ahead. We wouldn't want you to miss anything. :-)

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 better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you're optimizing 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. To install the code snippet, select "Advanced" from the "Add new profile" setup wizard within Google Analytics, and select the radio button, "A site built for a mobile phone". We support PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your regular 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. Check out the SDKs and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you'll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers 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 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 Boston 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 the following 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 organizations use to adapt and customize Google Analytics. We're adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.

• 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. If you've used the _setVar() function, the concept of custom variables will be familiar, but we've taken it a step further: 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), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. This powerful customization capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple custom 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 we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report 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 automatically be imported. You can also now select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.
  

Intelligent.

Now, for the new feature you've been waiting for! Wouldn't it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Beginning 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 bounce rates of visitors from Virginia 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.
  

• 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 & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.
  
  Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then look for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!
  
  
  

That's the summary. We're excited to share more details about each of these features, so stay tuned! We'll discuss each feature in turn over the next few days.


Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

P.S. We're not the only ones with exciting news today! Google Website Optimizer also announced some big features - over time charts and a Website Optimizer API! Check out the Google Website Optimizer blog to learn more.

Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics

Earlier this year, we asked Forrester Research to help us understand the key trends in enterprise web analytics. The commissioned study conducted by Forrester, "Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics" provides rich insights into what large companies want from an enterprise solution and how they are thinking about their web analytics decisions.

First, let's provide some context for what was considered an "enterprise." The study looked at companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue. Of the 198 companies that met this criteria, almost half (45%) have annual revenues in excess of $5 billion. Three quarters of the companies have over 5,000 employees.

One of the study's findings that we find interesting is around the role of people and web analytics technology. As companies re-evaluate their investments in web analytics, the study explains that:

"Enterprise companies must ask themselves if they are paying too much for capabilities that they simply do not need. In some cases, gaining fewer seldom-used capabilities is a worthwhile tradeoff if funds can be reallocated to hire more resources necessary for analysis."

Companies are recognizing that analysts drive insights, not the analytics tool itself. According to the study, "sixty percent of decision-makers agree that investments in web analytics people are more valuable than investments in web analytics technology." This is in-line with Avinash Kaushik's 10/90 rule for web analytics success: invest 10% of your analytics budget on the actual technology and 90% of your budget in the people who deliver actionable insight, whether in-house analysts, agencies, or vendor partners. It's the people that matter.

Below are other key findings from the Forrester report's Executive Summary:

• Free web analytics takes residence within the enterprise. A staggering 53% of enterprises surveyed currently use a free technology solution as their primary web analytics tool, and 71% use free tools in some capacity. This places use of fee-based solutions in the minority, with only 33% of survey respondents paying for web analytics technologies (12% use homegrown solutions, and 2% use some other option). In addition, it dispels the belief that free solutions are only being used in small organizations or somehow diminished in their capacity to provide value to the enterprise.

• The merits of free analytics products are compelling. Among respondents currently paying for their primary web analytics tools, 66% would consider displacing them with a free alternative. While the primary driver for this consideration is cost, 60% of enterprises are more likely to consider a free tool now because of recent improvements in free solutions. Additionally, 52% are enticed by free tools because they allow enterprises to invest more in the people necessary to drive insight rather than the technology used to collect and analyze data.

• Balancing costs and benefits requires introspection. We found that 52% of practitioners employing both free and fee-based solutions fail to effectively use more than half of the capabilities offered by their tools. This realization is cause for a needs assessment to determine if fee-based web analytics technologies are justified or simply excessive. For many, spending on web analytics technologies could be better allocated toward program development and acquisition of expertise.

• Reliability and ease of use are characteristics that enterprises crave. For 71% of enterprises surveyed, web analytics data plays a significant role in driving decisions. So it comes as no surprise that users place a premium on data assurance, with 45% citing reliable data collection as the most important vendor selection criteria. This was followed by 40% who listed an easy-to-use interface and product pricing as the second equally most important vendor selection consideration.

• Organizations are approaching a point of inflection. Nearly two-thirds of enterprises would abandon their current web analytics provider given the right circumstances. While 74% of large enterprises agreed that web analytics is a technology that they cannot do without, many indicated that alternative tools would suffice. These metrics indicate that organizations are receptive to change and justifiably seek solutions best suited to meet their needs.

If you'd like to learn more, download the full report. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Post a comment and tell us what you think!

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics Blog in German

Today we're delighted to announce a new blog for our German speaking Google Analytics users. The German Conversion Room blog launched recently and is run by our colleagues in Europe. In addition to covering Google Analytics tips and advice, the new blog will also include posts about Website Optimizer and Google AdWords conversion tools such as Conversion Optimizer.

Check out the new blog today by visiting conversionroom-de.blogspot.com. You can sign up for the site feed to have weekly posts delivered directly to your inbox.

And don't forget we have other conversion focused blogs for our non US readers...

• conversionroom.blogspot.com for our readers in the UK and Ireland
• central-de-conversiones.blogspot.com is our Spanish conversion blog
• analytics-fr.blogspot.com for our French speakers and
  
• analytics-ja.blogspot.com in Japan
  

Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team