127 New Dimensions And Metrics Available In The API

One of our aims of the Google Analytics Data Export API is to provide access to all the data you find in our reporting UI. To that end, we are releasing 127 new dimensions and metrics via the API today!

Some of the powerful new data points are:

• Unique visitors - ga:visitors metric has been updated to support the true number of unique visitors for any date range (instead of the daily unique visitors). It also supports significantly more valid combinations.
• Organic Searches - The number of organic searches within a session.
• 10 new Adwords dimensions - Including Matched Query (what people searched for, not the bid term) and Placement Domain (which site you content ads were running on).
• Search Result Views - The number of times a search result page was viewed.
• 3 Time dimensions - To simplify plotting graphs.

We also included 111 calculated metrics to make it easy to query most common calculations in the reports, such as bounce rate, cost per conversion, and margin. Now, getting calculated metrics is both more convenient and in parity with the calculated metrics in the UI.

You can see a complete list of the new dimensions and metrics in our public changelog.

With all these dimensions and metrics, it can be time consuming to find the values you are looking for. To simplify this, we’re also launching a new interactive dimension and metric search tool. You can use this interactive tool to search for a dimension or metric using its search-as you-type feature. Even more exciting is the ability to easily determine valid dimension-metric combinations just by selecting the dimensions/metrics that you want to request. Here's a screenshot:

We hope that you will find this new tool and additional data useful. As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback, in our developer group.

Posted by Jeetendra Soneja and Ivanna Kartarahardja, Google Analytics API team

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New ActionScript 3 Library For The API

We love simplifying access to Google Analytics data though our API. So today we’re happy to introduce a new ActionScript 3 Client Library built by our friends in Russia, DENIVIP Media, for our Data Export API.

This library provides a simple way to access your Analytics Data from both AIR Applications and Flash Player (though a proxy). The library was initially built to power DENIVIP Media’s new TiViCon application, which you can read more about on DENIVIP’s blog. “Given the potential value of this library to many other developers, we decided to make it freely available along with its source code,” says Denis Bulichenko, Director of Business Development at DENIVIP.

So now you have a simple way to access all your data in ActionScript 3.

You can get the open source ActionScript 3 library, a really nice quick start guide, and a sample application all from their website.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

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Monetize Your Top Exit Pages

Google Analytics does a great job of allowing you to analyze your web traffic through a very important metric: top exit pages. This metric, along with bounce rate and time on site, is valuable as it allows you to measure the impact of changes to your webpages. Did exit rate go up or down? You can choose to optimize pages with high exit rates to try to keep your visitors longer or help them convert, or -- if the page is a logical exit point, you can monetize outgoing traffic on high exit pages by using Google AdSense. (As you may know, Google Analytics and AdSense are integrated, similarly to Analytics and AdWords, so you can optimize your AdSense campaigns using data in Google Analytics.)

If you choose to monetize an exit page, take a look at this short real-world example.

SavetzPublishing.com, on its FreePrintable.net site, provide documents and templates for individuals and businesses, ranging from business forms and certificates, to bookmarks and almost any other document someone would want to print. With sixty-six sites focusing on different niches in printing, Savetz Publishing was looking for a way to optimize their ad placement without having a negative impact on their core users. As a solution, they decided to “find the pages with the highest exit rates and put AdSense on them," according to Kevin Savetz, the owner of Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable.

Kevin has been an Analytics user for as long as he can remember and he had an idea of where the bounce and exit rates would be highest. Kevin used Google Analytics to confirm his theory and placed AdSense ads on some of these pages. He quickly realized that this advertising did not have a significant negative impact on his site’s core users and on conversions. Instead, as he describes, these ads provide “a means of monetizing traffic that would already be leaving. My users are still happy and getting relevant content.”

Savetz Publishing’s strategy highlights how sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that is already exiting the site. AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Kevin put it, AdSense allowed him to “see a huge jump in revenue after targeting exit pages.”

And taking it one step further...As a Google Analytics user, you understand how visitors interact with your website. With this knowledge and the controls in AdSense, you can even structure your AdSense ads to appeal to advertisers who want to display their ads on your site. In turn, you will earn revenue by displaying more relevant and high quality ads.

Here are a couple suggestions to get started with AdSense on your site.

• Try testing AdSense first on your top exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your relevant traffic, by referring to your top exit pages report.
• If, like Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not turn your relevant traffic away, increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. You can use the additional revenue you earn from AdSense to help you generate more qualified traffic.

Learn more about AdSense and start by testing on your exit pages.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Nathan Deoms, Google AdSense Team

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Happy New Year!

Welcome back! Hope you're starting off the New Year with a bang, and we have something that will help. Good things come in threes, so here it is, one more holiday gift, our third. And, like our last gift, it's three gifts in one from the holiday ninja of web analytics, Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist here at Google.

Last time, Avinash created three custom reports of incredible value. This time, in his latest post, he expounds on three advanced segments that are just as useful as the custom reports, and even easier to create and use on a day to day basis. The post is called 3 Advanced Web Analytics Visitor Segments: Non-Flirts, Social, Long Tail.

And the great part is that, like a true evangelist, he describes them in an accessible way such that you can understand and create them for whatever web analytics tool you're using. And if you're using Google Analytics, you can simply click on a link to add them to your own profiles.

To whet your appetite for a fantastic read, here are the three segments

#1. Non-flirts, potential lovers (hint: this is a segment that's working for you)
#2. Social media link tracking (this is like a complete book's worth of knowledge in a few paragraphs)
#3: Search Queries With Multiple Keywords [3 words, as well as 4, 5, 10, 20]

The post goes beyond just giving you a few segments (reminder: with the click of a button, you can actually use them): I'd add it to a required reading list for any Google Analytics poweruser. Enjoy, and thanks Avinash.

Happy 2011!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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