Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface improvements. Let’s take these new features one at a time.
1. Custom Reports: Lets you create reports using any source of data (such as people who have bought something on your site, average number of pageviews, geography, visiting source) as the X and Y coordinates for a chart.
2. Audience Segmentation: Lets you look at custom slices of your Website’s audience (such as people who stay for more than two minutes, people who came from TechCrunch, people who came from the New York Times, people who bought something, people who came from Techcrunch and bought something).
3. AdSense integration: This was along time coming. You can already track how your AdWords campaigns impact traffic to your site. Now you can see data from your AdSense account as well. Marry that with Google Analytics data and you can get new insights into not only which ads you place through AdSense are doing the best, but from which referring sites. (Read more on the AdSense blog).
4. API: This will be rolling out “soon,’ but is also being announced today. Google will open up an API to Gogle Analytics that will allow developers to pipe all of the data in Google Analytics to other Websites, tools, widgets, or even mobile apps. So if someone wants to create a widget that will let people show their Google Analytics charts on their blog, that will be possible.
5. Bubble Charts: The new motion charts allow you to visualize data across five dimensions (x axis, y axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, and position over time). It lets you create an animation to show you what’s been happening with your Website’s key metrics. This feature comes out of the Trendalyzer software Google bought from Gapminder in 2007. (See video below).
6. User Interface Tweaks: You’ll notice some new subtle shading and highlighting. But the biggest change will be in the management dashboard. Now, if you track more than one Website with Google Analytics, you will be able to see trends across all of them at once.
Below is a video of the new “motion charts,” which let you track data across time. You can find more videos showing off these new features here.
Much needed upgrade. Let’s see how long it will take to get real time analytics official app for Android and iPhone now
Why would you need an app?… just log in through the web-browser.
Where is the most awaited feature. LiveAnayltics – Where users can see their traffic in realtime.
Does anyone know of an analytic tool that shows time of day trends for visitors to your site?
K Curtis
http://www.ngagelive.com
You may want to check out visistat for that… http://www.visistat.com
Good job Analytics team. The hardest part of making a good analytics package is helping users extract and understand the relevant data.
I have been using Google Analytics for 2 months now & the features are just amazing. I now know who is clicking on my site form which country & the source. I even know what are the keywords i am getting traffic from. Its just amazing.
Hi Erick,
You ned to get a spell cheker. It would alert you to the “ugrade” problam in the titel of you’re post.
Oh. I see what you did there.
How about collecting some IP addresses?!?!
“AdSense inside Google Analytics” — This is a feature I would be interested in having assuming it breaks down by page, subdirectory, etc. the click rates of the various ads. To my knowledge, one currently would have to have separate google adsense ads with separate tags to get such click rate info. The motion chart looks to be useful also. Thanks for giving us the youtube presentation.
That would be Advanced Segmentation, not Audience segmentation
Ain’t that sun chyet now…lol
About damn time!
Wake me up when Google combine FeedBurner, Analytics and Webmaster Tools — then I’ll be interested…
Any prediction on if or when Google plans to monetize the API? It seems that this new GA API would allow their Google Adwords API to compete with all the expensive software from Marin, Clickable and others.
Techcrunch comment on Google analytics upgrade {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/8r3Cb74dc9_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Techcrunch comment on Google analytics upgrade ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/sUTkpLwevJ”}}}
We’ve been playing with the advanced segmentation for weeks. It’s awesome! You get on-the-fly segmentation on historic data, which couldn’t be done with profiles (profiles only segment data starting the day the profile is created).
You can use regular expressions, save your segments for a later use; no need to plan all your profiles in advance anymore!
We don’t have access to custom reports yet? Anyone want to share?
Does the API finally mean that we’ll be able to log visits with something other than the crappy Google-provided JavaScript? I’m sick of getting JavaScript errors in Internet Explorer…
Nobody is holding you to use GA, stop using it. Maybe you want something better as extremetracker.
And if you mean that you’re using IE, you deserve nothing less than shit. Enjoy your fail.
Some people will always complain, even about a free service. Jeepers! (Yes I said Jeepers)
http://tobroketolaugh.com/
Is Techcrunch against spell checking? I don’t get it. What’s a “Ugrade”
Really? you don’t get it? You are small-time douchebag. Persnickety (or w/e the noun is) is not a virtue,
Do you need everything spelled out for you?
cool ugrade
cool features, but Woopra still kicks ass !
Lol. At least Google counts all your visitors.
I use Woopra and find it really cool… What do you mean by “at least Google counts all your visitors”?
The good part is that this is a great upgrade to a great product.
The downside is that you have to give a big company your data and hope that they don’t use it against you to make their company bigger.
Let’s hope that “don’t be evil” only applies when the results could add billions to their bottom line.
http://www.tvlamps.biz – The source on DLP TVs.
“The good part is that this is a great upgrade to a great product.”
Wrong, it’s just a ugrade.
Serious websites don’t use Google Analytics, Unica’s NetInsight is way better! And you don’t have to share your data with big brother.
Any word on how they’re rolling this out? Are they adding this functionality to random blocks of accounts? Still no sign of it in our Analytics account.
UPGRADE does not = UGRADE
Great to see some improvements! Now let’s see if they can get more accurate with the website stats. Slimstats has been giving me different numbers then Google Analytics.
Still not a fan of ol’ analytics, it’s a hosted application, and it’s javascript. Therefore, it’s not 100% accurate, unlike the simple, fast and effective AWStats
I find awstats to be really unreliable. It’s reasonably accurate with regard to unique visitors, but it vastly overstates page views. At least with Google Analytics you’re certain that your numbers aren’t inflated by bots.
Nick – I got news for you – awswats is not 100% accurate – no log-based analysis solution is. Think about shared IP addresses, proxy servers, etc. If you want to get a more (not 100%) accurate picture of visitors and visits, page tag (i.e. JavaScript) is better.
That’s right Erick. This is news, but getclicky.com launching REAL TIME goals and campaign tracking, which NO OTHER SERVICE OFFERS, is not news.
When we released an official iPhone app – again, we’re the only analytics company in the world to provide one – you didnt’ care then either. But I’d bet my ass if Google released GA for iPhone, you’d write a huge post about it.
BTW, Clicky also offers the best API in the analytics world, has for over a year now, and we already have tons of widgets to put on your site that use it. But that wasn’t news when it was released either. Nope.
We also have kick ass audience segmentation, that not only gives you general data about that segment, but also lets you view each individual visitor from that segment (general details such as browser, location, etc, as well as each action (pageview etc) performed).
But none of this is news, right?
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
C’mon Sean, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?
Cry much?
Wow Sean, I hope you aren’t actually serious. If you are, get over it man. Also, your ‘late night bitterness comment filter’ is not functioning.
I cry myself to sleep every night!!
You should update your google comparison since it obviously no longer applies
If you compare Analytics with Getclicky: the free version of clicky is kinda crippled, imo.
Nice implementation of Hans Roslings charts. He actually invented this type of presentation and Google bought it.
Hers the Ted video http://www.ted....on_poverty.html
well fantastic upgrades.Now adsense publishers can track my their ads with much powerful Google analyst.
lol still no sign of the ugrade fix =P
It would be good if google also comes up with a way to share the date in public (without login) for people who want their info to be public..
GA is not real-time yet!
I’ll keep using Woopra Analytics.
another reason google is the shiz. awesome upgrades.
that was a pretty cool video – they’ve got a great base platform to work from – i expect big things in the future for analytics.
I see the new design when I logged in, but the new functions are not available yet.
Wonder when its gonna release?
New functions are now available, check it out man.
Great upgrade!! A couple of those features I have been looking for in other analytics tools.
i won’t see the update in my adsense account. did u see in u r adsense account ?
Motion Charts….Wooooooooow.
this is such a wonderful news, specially for adsense users, this will help us to evaluate the ad performance more precisely.
I can’t find the new features in my Analytics account… Anyone know why or how I get it to show?
GA is a good tool, but who knows what Google is doing with all this data? I prefer keep my analytics data for my self (I use Piwik http://piwik.org open source web analytics with advanced API, and keep my data
)
I can’t even begin to say how amazing the visualization feature is. It will really help to see trends for keywords in seconds. For example I have some keywords that have been slowing in time, but without a lot of digging it’s hard to see why. I can’t wait to try this feature!
How sad to know that these features are limited to invited account. Let’s just say that it is still in beta phase.
We need the help in understanding our customers, especially with increasing pressure pushing ad costs higher.
These are nice improvements on the part of Google ANalytics..^^ way to go guys!
The Google Analytics new features like Advanced Segmentation & Custom Report
helps the users to see not just numbers, but equip them to….
http://digitalm...rise-ready.html
Its about time. There are so many possibilities its like learning analytics all over again. This is going to save us 100’s of hours each month. Glad they have not released the the API yet to give us some to catch up.
That’s a great set of new features. Personally I’m waiting for the Adsense to Analytics integration; no invite as yet, I guess they’re taking their time to roll it out.
Doesn’t Google Analytics still slow down the webpages? No one is addressing this issue.
Ya but this is available at present to only US publishers ..I am waiting for this..
Ya but this is available at present to only US publishers ..I am waiting for this..
adsenseblog.info/
Google has also released their event tracking API which is separate from the page tracking API. You no llonger have to create a ‘virtual’ page to track outbound links or other events on your page. A special thing about the event tracking api is the value parameter which is numerical and therefore is chartable. You can use this parameter to measure your website’s response time using Google Analytics. Similarly, you can also use it to chart load time of your pages as seen by real users. See more details at my blog:
http://www.vine...te-performance/