Cormac Moylan

Google Analytics Increases Its Smarts

20
Oct 09

One of the silly limitations in Google Analytics has been their decision to restrict you to setting a mere 4 goals per profile. An obvious work around was to create sub-profiles of your main analytics profile and go crazy with as many goals to your heart’s content. Thankfully Google have removed this restriction and as of today they are rocking a 20 goal limit on profiles!

Google Analytics today introduced a few very tasty “engagement goals that allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site”. They have also tackled the problem of tracking mobile visitors to your site that don’t have JavaScript enabled. Finally, another really exciting feature coming soon is the addition of Business Intelligence to Google Analytics.

Google have introduced time based goals. These goals give an indication of how long visitors are spending on a page. For example, you can setup a goal conversion of < 2 minutes on a certain page in an attempt to measure its appeal or success. If the page in question has content that takes approximately 4 minutes to read then what does it mean when more than 80% of your visitors are on that page for less than 2 minutes? Does it mean that your content is convoluted? Does it mean that that your content is so good that the visitors got their info and bounced?

What if you have setup a time based goal conversion that shows that visitors to your site are spending far too long on a page? Should you make amendments to your content? Make your site’s content more navigable?

Like anything you’re trying to measure, be sure to hook into as many data sources as possible to understand your visitors. For the two above examples you should look to add more data to the mix by digging down further and coupling your time based goals with things like bounce rates, keyword referrals, and visitor paths.

Another cool addition to the goals feature of Google Analytics is Pageview based goals. These guys gather analysis on when a visitor exceeds a certain number of pages. Very handy for tracking your visitors and figuring how how compelling your site content is to them. Check out Justin Cutroni’s post on New Google Analytics Goals for a more through overview of the other goal additions to Google Analytics.

It’s also fantastic to see that Google Analytics can now track virtually every mobile website and mobile device whether or not the device is able to run JavaScript or not. The only restriction is that you have to add a server side snippet of code to your site. But it’s a worthy hurdle to jump to cover all visitor bases.

And finally, the best for last:

“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.”

Check out his video for more info on the soon to come intelligence engine. Really exciting stuff for all of us analytics nerds.

Oh, and in other Google Analytics news, I’m now a Google Analytics Qualified Individual having passed my exam last Sunday.