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Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics Features’
In Case You Missed It
Before you say goodbye to the holidays, take a look at this great holiday list on the official Google blog by our very own Avinash Kaushik, called Top Ten Ways To Get Your Business Ready For The Holidays. By publishing this now in January, we’re hoping you’ll take these lessons into the whole year, because as Mom used to say, “Christmas should be every day of the year.”
Use the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords that you never thought of incorporating into your campaign for the holidays. (Here is a how-to guide for how best to use the tool: Monetize The Long Tail of Search).
2. Know what’s hot this season:
Research on Insights for Search to see what the “Rising Searches” are and understand how people are searching for your brand (and your competitors!).
New Google Analytics API Features
Over the past few months we’ve received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API, and it included adding access to Google Analytics newest and most powerful features, such as advanced segments, custom variables and more. Today we want to let you know about improvements to the Google Analytics Data Export API, including the following highlights (all the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group):
Support for Advanced Segments
With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond your aggregated data and peer into the nuances of traffic and visitor activity on your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Germany is over 2 minutes.
We’ve added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:
- Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
- Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.
This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.
Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data
With the recent Google Analytics launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data. Good call! So now, you can access 48 new metrics around goal performance. We’ve also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, and step names for each profile.
Take a look at this video describing how to work with goal configuration data in the API.
Custom Variables
Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we’ve added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you’ve used is now available through the Account Feed.
We’ve updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group. We can’t wait to see the new apps that come from developers using this data. We’re hoping that you spend your holiday tinkering with it 
Enjoy!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team
Holiday Bonus: More Great Features
We all love the holiday season, and so now, here are a few reasons to love it even more! A few weeks ago, we announced a set of powerful, flexible, and intelligent features. Today, at SES Chicago, Phil Mui announced additional features that build on these same themes to make your life as an analyst easier. We hope you’ll enjoy them.
Annotations
Do you ever wonder about an inexplicable change in your traffic? Or forget exactly when you launched something, or who was responsible? After scratching your head, did you have to chase down different departments in your company or go digging through old emails to get an answer?
For instance:
- Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down?
- When did the new display ads campaign launch?
- Who’s responsible for the checkout page redesign and when did it go live?
Running around asking everyone from marketing, IT, and product doesn’t scale. More and more large companies are using Google Analytics, so we wanted to cut down on the mileage you need to cover to account for everything that happens to your website and online marketing.
This week, the wild goose chase is over — you can now easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out “what happened” with the launch of Annotations in Google Analytics.
Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers. This short video will show you how to use Annotations.
Taking its usefulness even further: Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business. So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease. No wonder this has been one of the top requested features in Analytics for such a long time!
Custom Variables Now Available In Advanced Segments
When we announced Multiple Custom Variables in October, the only way to view metrics on these Custom Variables then was to open the standard “Custom Variables” report in the Visitors section. This week, a user can create an advanced segmentation based on any key, value, as well as key-value combination of all Custom Variables. In other words, if you’ve created a Custom Variable such as “Logged In Member”, you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports.
You can also create Custom Reports with any of the key or value dimensions associated with any Custom Variable. Now, you can see how a segment defined by Custom Variables behaves along any of the metrics available in Google Analytics.
New Analytics Tracking Code Setup Wizard
One of the more daunting tasks in setting up analytics on any site is to manually configure the tracking code for specialized situations, such as multiple subdomains, cross-domain tracking, mobile web tracking, PHP sites, campaign tagging, etc.
Well, fear no more. When you create a profile, you’ll notice a new tracking code setup wizard in Google Analytics. This wizard automatically generates the appropriate tracking code according to the setup options specified by you.
New Version of The Analytics API
In addition, new data dimensions and metrics will be made available, including those in our recently announced features.
Enjoy — and happy holidays from the Google Analytics team!
Posted by Jeff Gillis and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team
