2009: A Look Back

2009 was a fun year for us, and we hope, for you too. Here's a month by month breakdown of new features and significant launches from 2009, with links to the blog posts announcing or explaining them. And if you haven't yet, take a look at the Google Analytics YouTube channel, where you can see tons of tutorial videos on the new features.

A big thank you to our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, who have helped advise us on our product roadmap and told us what you need to see in the product.

Get ready! 2010 should be even more exciting.

January

• Track Google Sites with Google Analytics

April

• The integration of AdSense and Google Analytics
• The public launch of the Google Analytics API
• Google Analytics IQ - an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools
  
  

May

• Integration with Google Ad Planner so that you can replace traffic estimates with directly measured Google Analytics data
• Pivoting and Secondary dimensions become available in your reports
• Share custom reports and advanced segments
• Track YouTube brand channels with Google Analytics

June

• Import your Google Analytics goals into AdWords
  
• New homepage and website for Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Desktop Wallpapers!
  
  


• International blogs in German, UK & Ireland, Spanish, French and Japanese

July

• Advanced Segments for Event Tracking

August

• Getting started guides for the API
• Number and reach of Authorized Consultants breaks 100 global partners, with a presence on every continent except Antarctica

September

• Event Tracking available via the API

October

• More goals and new goal types
  
  
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
  
  
• Unique Visitor metric added to Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reports
• Multiple Custom Variables
• Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report templates
• Analytics Intelligence reports and Custom Alerts

December

• New asynchronous tracking code
• Annotations allows you to easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened".
  
• Custom variables available in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports
• New tracking code setup wizard
  
  
• API new features, including support for Advanced Segments, more goals and goal types, and custom variables
• Urchin Software version 6.602 available in more languages

And, of course, we added the ability to post comments on our blog posts.

From our entire team, we hope that, wherever you are, you and yours had a safe New Year's Eve and are looking forward to a happy, healthy, productive and data-driven 2010!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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Holiday Gift Idea: New Book By Avinash

You're going to put surveys in holiday gifts this year, right? Well, if you're as customer-centric as Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google, you just might. And next year's gifts will be even better.

Avinash has just published Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, also at http://tr.im/akweb. It looks to be a fantastic read by one of the foremost web analytics practitioners and teachers, who is seeing an undeniable evolution of web technologies and online trends, including social media, video, and mobile.

Now is a crucial time to make changes - or get started - and in his typically perceptive style, Avinash begins with a new definition of web analytics:

"Web Analytics 2.0 is: the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition, to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)."

From this framework, he explains how to do web analytics correctly, starting at the best place of all - choosing the right tools (aka, the beginning). As you read, pick any chapter, and you'll emerge an adept at an element of web analytics, from the basics of tracking your site, to analyzing visitor clickstream, to SEM and SEO.

But he goes way beyond this, discussing the practices of competitive analysis, website testing, surveys, using and tracking social media. And he even gives practical tips for working in the industry, including what statistics you might want to know. The book is written in Avinash's clear style, including charts and screenshots.

If you've ever had a conversation with Avinash, you know that you'll come away enriched about our industry and practice. I remember speaking with someone who reported to him at Intuit, who said that she learned more about web analytics in her first half hour one on one with Avinash than she had in her entire career before that.

For instance, we recently launched 20 goals, up from 4, per profile. Avinash has been speaking about the importance of tracking many goals, what he calls micro-conversions, for a while. Take a read to get an expert practitioner's view.

And on top of the incredible content in the book, Avinash is donating 100% of the proceeds from sales of the book to benefit The Smile Train and Ekal Vidyalaya. To read more about the book from Avinash himself, take a look at the announcement on his blog.

Getting this book for yourself or your analyst will be giving a gift to your company. Think of Avinash as Santa Claus. (Avinash Claushik?!)

Happy holidays. :-)

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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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

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API Python Client Library Updated

It's easier for developers to program in the languages they know, so we updated the Google Analytics API Python Client library with the just-launched API version 2 features. We also added reference examples for both the Account Feed and Data Feed. Now it's easier than ever to automate your analysis workflow using our API.

Taking The Library For a Spin

With the updated library, we thought it would be a great time to highlight the power of the new features. So we created a sample application to do just that. The application uses the new Python library to retrieve metrics for a series of segments. It then performs some calculations on the data and creates bar charts using the GChartWrapper package, an open source Python wrapper for the Google Charts API. Finally, it uses the Python Imaging Library to add a title and legend, and stitches all the charts together into a single image. We decided to release this application as open source so you can create visualizations with your own data.

Solving Business Problems

Since social media is all the rage, let's use this new application to help Avinash Kaushik, our Analytics Evangelist, measure "engagement" on his popular Occam's Razor blog. We also wanted to determine if the time he spends participating in social media sites is valuable and sends new readers to his blog.

First we created segments to pull all the referrals from Facebook and Twitter. Second, we chose five calculations and corresponding metrics to compare the performance of these two segments. We then compared the segments to each other and, for context, for all the visits to the site as a control.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the results:

Let's Analyze

Some interesting observations become apparent.

• Far more visits originate from Twitter (3.6x) when compared to Facebook, perhaps not surprising given Avinash's Twitter followers (~16,120)
  
  
• Visitors from Twitter tend to be new visitors, a good thing, but they view fewer pages and spend significantly less time on the blog.
  


• On the other hand Facebook delivers an audience that is loyal. These visitors come back to the site more often and spend a significant time on the blog (compared to Twitter and all other visitors).
  

The bottom line? Even though social networking sites are all the rage, they actually contribute very little to Avinash's blog. If this blog were a company, it would be wise to ensure the time and effort put into driving traffic from social media is proportionate to the actual volume of traffic and goal conversions from those sites.

Hopefully this example shows how powerful our new features can be.

If you're interested in running this report against your own data, the application is free and open sourced. Additionally, we made it really easy to change the metrics, segments, calculations and all the other visual properties to power your own visualizations. Download it here and give it a whirl, we would love to hear your feedback.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

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Happy Holidays!

The Google Analytics team would like to shout "THANK YOU!" to our users. We are so proud of the people using this product. It's a pleasure to be associated with you and build Google Analytics for you.

Through interactions with you at meetings, conferences, in online forums, in the press, and in comments on this blog, we've discovered an intelligent, innovative and engaging group of people who are at the forefront of a fledgling industry. We couldn't be happier to be a part of this ecosystem.

And we appreciate all the feedback. Please continue posting comments, and we'll chime in too when we can.

Happy holidays!

Posted by The Google Analytics Team

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Multilingual Urchin 6.602 Now Available

Join us in welcoming Urchin 6.602 to the world, the long-awaited multilingual upgrade to our "run-it-yourself" web analytics package. This release adds support for all 11 of our supported languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Japanese, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), and Korean.

Read the complete Changelist for all the details, or visit our Download page to get the goods.

Urchin 6.602 also includes a bunch of significant new features, including:

• Enhanced LDAP integration (more protocols supported)
  


• 1-Click Installer -- no need for an "outboard" database anymore
  


• GeoDB user adjustments -- don't need the full GeoDB? Run fast & light with Urchin 6.602
  


• Updated compression utility -- allows data archives greater than 2GB
  


• Option to select which profiles (and their overview data) to display on users' default "home" screen (aka, roll-up report)
  
  
• Bing.com support (hooray!)
  


• ...and lots of bug fixes and documentation updates
  

Urchin 6.600, released in June 2009, was a major upgrade, so you may want to revisit that blog post for more info.

Urchin 6.602 is available now as a full-featured 30-day demo from our download servers and licenses can be purchased from any of our Authorized Consultants for US$2995. Check it out!

Urchin 6.6's built-in Keyword Generator Tool makes managing your campaigns a lot easier.

Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Software Manager

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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:

1. Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
   


2. 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

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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!

Note: Annotations is rolling out a bit slower than planned due to the holidays. New features within Google Analytics are launched on a phased roll out due to the volume of accounts, and the demands of testing as we activate the new feature. Usually this process takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the feature. Annotations is being activated to an additional 10% of accounts each week and will be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.

Custom Variables Now Available In Advanced Segments

Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. In Google Analytics, not only are you able to define multiple custom variables, each custom variable is a name-value pair and can be assigned one of 3 scopes: page, session, or visitor. Each custom variable name and each value is an arbitrary string defined by you pertinent to your business needs.

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.

The ability to create visit segments based on Custom Variables is critical in maximizing the full potential of Custom Variables. Users can now slice and dice their metrics by decorating their site traffic with the appropriate key-value pairs.

Custom Variables Available In Custom 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

Later this week, there will be a separate announcement about a set of very exciting features to our Analytics API. Here's a little preview: Support for Advanced Segmentation will now be available through the 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

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SES Chicago Next Week

Come to the windy city next week and catch Google Analytics' fearless Senior Product Manager Phil Mui in action at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference. Phil will be presenting at two sessions on Monday at SES:

• MUST SEE: What's New and Exciting with Google Analytics - Monday at 12:45pm at the networking lunch which we're sponsoring. He'll cover the latest feature launch, AND - he might announce some new features. You never know with Phil. We really hope you can make this session - you'll want to share it with your friends, literally (hint, hint). We're not saying anything more.
  
  
• Phil will also participate in a panel called How to Turn Your Web Analytics Into a Money-Making Machine along with Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Sterne, founder of the Web Analytics Association and the eMetrics conference.

Also, the AdWords team will be there in force, presenting the Google Ads Factory Tour, a series of sessions designed to give advertisers practical tips they can use immediately to improve search and display performance. They'll also be holding a session on AdWords Optimization Tools as well as on The Next Generation of AdWords Bidding: Conversion Optimizer. Read more at the AdWords blog post, and register for SES here.


Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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Webinar: Google Analytics' Newest Features

As of this week, all the new Google Analytics features we recently announced should be available in all accounts! (And just yesterday, we announced one more - a new, asynchronous tracking code snippet.)

If you missed the announcements or are curious about the features you're now seeing, join us in this upcoming webinar, happening next week on Wednesday. We'll provide an overview and demonstration of the features and provide tips on some best practices and uses. You'll learn how the following features have added more power, flexibility and intelligence to Google Analytics' enterprise class capabilities:

• Engagement Goals
• Expanded Mobile Reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
• Unique Visitor Metric
• Multiple Custom Variables
• Sharing Advanced Segments & Custom Reports
• Analytics Intelligence
• Custom Alerts

When: Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Time: 10 - 11 am, PST

Register here.

There will also be an opportunity for Q&A so please ask your questions beforehand through Google Moderator.

We hope you'll come learn more about the latest features .... and we may even have a few extra surprises to share then, too! Hope to see you there.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

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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

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Episode # 3 - Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick

This is the third video in our recent Rapid Fire series where you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them!

Generally we want to focus on your questions about key metrics and analysis techniques, but this week we get a little technical.

In this episode we discuss:

• How to group referrals from common sources
• How to setup Google Analytics to track multiple web sites and view all the aggregate data in one profile
• Strategies to track websites that support different languages
• The value of using Google Analytics on You Tube partner channels
• Troubleshooting discrepancies in Google Analytics Data
• Best practices for implementing E-commerce tracking for E-commerce sites
• Simplifying customizing the date range in GA
• How to track segments of users who interact with internal referrals/cross sell campaigns
• Tracking Social Media campaigns

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

• Help Center: What are profile filters
• How to group email referrals using filters
• How to configure roll up reporting in Google Analytics
• Google Analytics for You Tube Brand Channels - Announcement (Ask your you Tube account rep to get this properly configured)
• How to troubleshoot Google Analytics implementations
• How event tracking works
• Video: How to create Advanced Segments with events
• How to track lead gen forms in Google Analytics
• Justin Cutroni's eBook, Google Analytics Short Cut

If you found this helpful, we'd love to hear your comments.

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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Depth and Discovery: Powering Visualizations with the Google Analytics API

We're always really excited to see what developers are building with Google Analytics. Here's an amazing visualization using the API from our friends at Juice Analytics. Now, this is what we're talking about when we say this stuff is "Off the charts!" (The API team t-shirt slogan). :-)

At Juice, we work with web analytics APIs large and small, from Google, comScore and Omniture. The Google Analytics API is our favorite. It powers the world's best, most widely deployed analytics site. And it powers Juice products like Concentrate (innovative search analytics) and Vasco de Gapi (a tool for exploring the Google Analytics API).

We were approached by the Google Analytics API team to explore new ways of looking at data with the API, and we were excited by the possibilities. We've been working on our own visualization framework, JuiceKit, that integrates the power of the Flare Visualization Library with Adobe Flex.

The result is Analytics Visualizations, two visualizations powered by the Google Analytics API that are free to use. You just need a Google account with access to Google Analytics data to explore your own data. Here are the details about the visualizations, called Referrer Flow and Keyword Tree.

Referrer Flow

Curious about what sites are linking to you and what content is benefitting the most? The Referrer Flow visualization answers those question and shows how results change over time. It's a stream of daily treemaps showing pageviews and bounce rates for various groupings of your website's pages. You can group by combinations of page title, referrer and url.

Here is a brief video introduction:

Clicking on the treemap will filter all the data by the page, referrer or url that you clicked on. Click again to clear your filter.

Keyword Tree

A list of top keywords isn't enough to really understand how people are searching and finding your site. The Keyword Tree visualization displays the most frequently used search keywords and how they are used together. Here's a video overview:



You'll see a frequently used search term at the center and the words and phrases that are most often used in combination with that word. Pick a different starting word by typing into the box in the upper right or selecting from the top word across the bottom of the screen. The words are sized by their frequency of use and colored by bounce rate (or % new visitors or average time on site). Roll over a word to see details about that combination of connected words.

Depth and Discovery

In designing these visualizations we focused on the question: how can we let users uncover the unexpected? That means designing targeted visualizations focused on limited well-defined issues. The Referrer Flow monomaniacally focuses on a single question "What pages are people viewing on your site and where are they coming from?" The Keyword Tree is laser-focused on word ordering and what that means for keyword performance.

The Google Analytics reporting tool is a great general-purpose reporting solution. It gives the advanced users everything they need to answer specific questions. However, its generality means it has limited ability to focus on two issues; depth and discovery.

The Google Analytics API is Google's solution to this problem. It's an opportunity both for businesses like ours that can create new ways of analyzing data, and for large sites that can use the API for integration, custom analytics, and more.

Thanks, Juice! We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

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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

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New Feature Spotlight: Analytics Intelligence

How would you like to have 24-hour a day access to a dedicated assistant who is focused exclusively on your site's analytics? Your assistant would be so diligent and detailed that they wouldn't miss a thing. Sound too good to be true? We're giving you one. Say "Hello" to Analytics Intelligence.

Your new hardworking assistant, Analytics Intelligence, can't replace you or a professional analyst. But, it can find key information for you and your professional analysts -- so that your team can focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless sea of data.

Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic. Anytime something significant happens, it adds an automatic alert in your Intelligence reports. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps on one of your referrals, Analytics Intelligence creates an alert. Of course, it's up to you to go find out that the bounce rate jumped because someone inadvertently changed the landing page. But you might not have noticed that there was a problem that needed fixing if your trusty assistant hadn't alerted you.


Behind Analytics Intelligence is a sophisticated algorithmic intelligence engine that detects any anomalies in your traffic patterns. That means it's smart enough to know the difference between a change that's actually part of a larger trend versus a change that you might need to look into. But, from a user perspective, Analytics Intelligence couldn't be simpler.

Navigate to the Intelligence reports and you'll see three reports -- Daily Alerts, Weekly Alerts, Monthly Alerts. Daily Alerts contains all the alerts that are based on daily data. Weekly Alerts contains alerts based on weekly data. Monthly Alerts contains, you guessed it, alerts based on monthly data.

When you look at your alerts, you'll notice that your trusty assistant has already gone through your historical data and posted alerts. This highlights a key feature of Analytics Intelligence: you don't have to do anything -- alerts automatically get posted to your account.

The best way to come up to speed on Analytics Intelligence is to take a look at the alerts that are being created for your data. You can learn everything you need to know about how to interpret your alerts in this 2-minute video.

You can also instruct your assistant to be on the lookout for specific things that you want to monitor. Let's say you are running a billboard campaign in New York's Times Square. You want to be proactively informed regarding how the campaign is impacting traffic from New York. To do this, go the Manage Intelligence Alerts page,


and set up a custom alert (see the example, below).


You might even want to set up a second alert that checks for decreasing New York traffic, so you can see if the campaign is starting to wind down.

You'll then receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily Alerts, whenever one of these things happens. You can be notified by email as well, so you'll know what's going on even if you're not checking your reports.

If you're ever unsure about how to set up an alert, try starting with one of the templates on the Manage Intelligence Alerts page. Just click Copy, and then modify and rename the alert to fit your needs.



As with automatic alerts, the best way to learn about custom alerts is to try them out on your own data. You can also refer to the articles on Analytics Intelligence in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Sign in to your account to try it out. It's time to meet your new assistant!

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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New Feature Spotlight: Advanced Filters

Here is another in-depth look at one of our recently announced new features: Advanced Filters (or Advanced Table Filters), written by the excellent team at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

For the daily user, Advanced Filters may be the most useful new feature of the bundle of new features, in terms of streamlining your actual process once you access a report and are actively doing analysis. They are found at the bottom of the table in any report. As a habitual poweruser, I've been clamoring for it for years, and it has made my process so much simpler. It's the equivalent of replacing a screwdriver with a powerdrill.

You no longer need to export your data to slice and dice it to see your desired subsets. Now, you can set a filter while looking at a certain report to get the information you want, without having to exit and create a filter or advanced segment. Within seconds, you can whittle down a massive data table to look at a subset that is important to you.

One example already given in this tutorial video is to show just the keywords that have a low bounce rate (less than 30%) and that referred at least 25 visits. Right away, you've found high value and high traffic keywords. We're using this feature almost every time we look at a data table in a report. It makes you feel much more command over your data.

Here are three more interesting uses of the new Advanced Table Filtering:

Looking for specific non-branded keywords

Sometimes, it helps to see keywords that contain a certain word or phrase, but exclude the brand name. Taking a company called DeLallo Italian Foods, for example. If I wanted to see all the keywords that contain the word Italian food but exclude the brand name DeLallo, I could easily use the advanced filters for this. Previously, I would have done this using regular expressions in the filter:

Filter Keyword: containing ^(?=.*italian food)(?!.*(delallo)).*

No more! Now, we don't need to do this! Now, it is so easy with the advanced filters. Just filter for Keyword containing Italian food and excluding DeLallo.

And presto! Your report is updated. And, at any time, you can edit this filter to further refine it, or delete it altogether.

Landing Pages, Sorted by Bounce Rate

Has this ever happened to you - you're looking at your Top Landing Pages report, and you sort by bounce rate, only to have a bunch of pages with 1 entrance clogging the top of the report? With advanced filters, you can filter out those pages with a low number of entrances to get a better look at which landing pages with significant traffic have a high bounce rate. All you have to do is filter by Entrances greater than 50 (or whatever threshhold floats your bounce-rate-boat).

Top Content, Sorted by $ Index

Another similar use for sites with e-commerce or a goal value enabled is when you're looking at the Top Content report, sorted by $ Index. What you're trying to find are the pages that have the highest value - those that are viewed during a visit that results in a conversion. Again, it's common to get a lot of pages at the top that have a low number of pageviews.

First, it helps to filter out those pages that have a low number of pageviews. But once you do that, you'll likely see the pages with the highest $ Index are pages of your shopping cart or checkout process. We can filter out these pages with the advanced filters too - just add a new condition below your first filter that excludes pages that contain the word cart (or checkout, etc.) in the URL.

These three examples give you a taste of Advanced Table Filtering for your analytics, but they just scratch the surface. Once you explore your own analytics, I’m sure you’ll find many more uses of this flexible and powerful new feature. You'll really notice it's use when you find you're happily lingering for 5 extra minutes, using this new interface feature to easily gain insights and ask questions that would've taken you an hour before and possibly a data export. Pure wizardry. :)

Posted by Jim Gianoglio, LunaMetrics, A Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

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New Free Google Analytics API Dashboard Application

If you manage many Google Analytics profiles, it can be difficult to stay on top of all your top line metrics across accounts -until now. Trakkboard is a free, easy to use desktop application that allows analysts to create dashboards that pull data across different Google Analytics logins and different Google Analytics profiles to display top level metrics all within the same view.


This application was built using the Google Analytics API by our friends in Germany, Trakken GmbH and is available in English, German and Spanish. Once downloaded, you can add multiple Google Accounts, select Google Analytics Accounts and profiles, then choose from any of the pre-canned report widgets. The report widget will then appear on the dashboard. This process can be repeated with other Google Analytics Accounts, Profiles, and Widgets - and your customized dashboard is ready to use.



What's really nice is each report widget can be configured to automatically fetch new data from the API at a regular interval, for example, every hour. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to see top level metrics across all your accounts.

Some of the other available features include:

• 15 different report widgets available
• Top/flop keywords widget (movers & shakers)
• Drag-drop and resize report widgets
  
• Update all widgets at the same time
• Update individual widgets at set intervals
  
• Use tabs for more dashboards
• Resize report widgets
• Notes widgets for comments
• Add up to two Google Account Email addresses
• FAQ Center available in English, Spanish, German

We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

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Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick - Episode #2

This is our second video in our recent initiative to ask you to share your most burning questions via Google Moderator (link: Google Analytics Google Moderator site).

This week, Avinash brings his cast (leaving only one good analysis ninja arm) and we sit down to do a rapid fire Q&A to answer your questions.

In this episode we discuss:

• Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
  
• Ways to report total number of keywords over time
  
• Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
• Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
• Path analysis for keyword reports -- why it's bad and what to do instead
  
• How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
• How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
• How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)

Here are links to the resources discussed in the video:

• Measuring Macro and Micro conversions
• Create custom reports with Google Analytics API Excel Plugins
• Absolute unique visitor tracking can be found under Metrics -> Site Usage -> Unique Visitors when creating a new custom report. Once created, you can apply any advanced segment (such as traffic from Google) to get the unduplicated number of visitors that came from Google.
• Simple way to track exit clicks in Google Analytics
• Excluding tracking certain visitors (like site owners and administers) by IP address
• Configuring Google Analytics to track 3rd Party Shopping Carts
• Cross domain tracking _getLinkerURL(), _link method reference

If you found this helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. We will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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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

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Google Analytics API on App Engine Treemap Visualization

It's Friday, time for some fun! Advanced API analytics fun :)

Here is a captivating way to look at your Google Analytics data in a Treemap visualization. You can visualize your own data with our live demo. (Note: IE currently not supported for visualization part.)

click to enlarge

And, here is a video explaining how to look at the Treemap visualization and how to use it.



The goal of this example was to teach people how to use the Google Analytics API on App Engine in Java, as well as to demonstrate how to use both OAuth and AuthSub along with the App Engine's various services. The code looked great, but the output was a boring HTML table. So we used some open source tools to transform the table into a pretty tree map visualization, which is also useful in noticing interesting metrics.

All the code has been open sourced on Google Project hosting. Also, here's an article describing how this application works making it easy for developers to use this example as a starting point for new data visualizations and other Google Data projects.

For the data retrieval part, we used the App Engine Java SDK and the Google Analytics Data Export API Java Client Library to retrieve data from Google Analytics. The example code implements both unsigned AuthSub and registered OAuth authorization methods allowing developers to get up and running quickly in their dev environment and later switch to a secure authorization method in production environments. The application also uses the Model-View-Controller pattern, making it flexible and allowing developers to extend the code for new applications (e.g. adding support for other Google Data APIs).

And lastly, for the visualization part, we used the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library to create the Treemap. This JavaScript library is maintained by the Stanford Visualization Group and excels at creating brand new visualizations from a data set (in this case a boring HTML table). To handle all of the interactions, including rollover, tooltips and slider controls, we used JQuery. Here is the JavaScript source for the visualization part of the sample.

Enjoy!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

p.s. If you have created any cool new visualizations using the Google Analytics Data Export API,email us so we can highlight them as well.

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