What’s new about Analytics Intelligence?

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week we’re sharing a few new features in our Intelligence reports.

In 2009, we debuted the first iteration of our Intelligence reports. Since then, we have been enhancing these reports with more insightful information such as explanations, SMS alerts and improved alert quality.

In the past month, we have released a few enhancements to these reports. First, there is a new overview report that surface significant events for a given date range in a sortable table.

With this flexible table overview, users can perform full-text search, event sort, as well as drilling into details of each event. For example, clicking on the “Details” for row 2 above,

In this detail view, users can explore the event further, add an annotation, or drill in by clicking on Go to Report, which allows users to jump to a full report related to the dimension of interest.

Additional improvements include the ability to create and edit custom alerts without leaving the Intelligence reports:

We’ve also made significant improvements to the quality of automatic alerts by filtering similar alerts and more comprehensive measurements of importance.

As we continue to improve the Intelligence reports, we hope to surface more actionable insights to you. If you have suggestions for our effort here, we greatly appreciate your comments.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team

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Shoes of Prey - Using Custom Reports to identify influential pages

One of the most effective ways for startups and small businesses to generate more sales on their e-commerce sites is to optimize their site for conversions. With no large marketing budgets to play with, this is one of the most cost-effective means of driving more sales.

The Shoes of Prey team, an e-commerce startup specializing in custom women’s shoes, are constantly tweaking their site in order to maximize sales. A component of their strategy is to provide visitors with useful content and to make the purchase process as straightforward as possible.

Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations, Shoes of Prey, shares with us how he uses Google Analytics custom reports to identify content that influences sales. Based on their learnings, Shoes of Prey now have a good idea of what content and messaging to utilize on their site to encourage more visitors to make a purchase. Read more on the Conversion Room Asia-Pacific blog.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

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New Google Analytics - Overview Reports Overview

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

This week we’re going a bit meta with an overview of the new Overview reports in the new Google Analytics. Overview reports were part of the old version of Analytics, of course, but we’ve made some changes to help your analysis.

Anatomy of the Overview Report
Each overview report consists of three sections. There's a timeline graph, some aggregate metrics, and a set of reports.

Whats inside of each of these sections depends on which report you’re looking at. For example, the Visitor Overview shows a graph of visits and metrics like New vs. Returning visitors, while Content Overview shows metrics like pageviews and average time on page.

The Graph
We’ve made a few changes to the graphs in the new Google Analytics, and we'll share them here. You can now make adjustments to the graphs you see in Google Analytics from the buttons on the top right of the graph:

• Switch a graph between Line Chart and Motion Chart
• Graph different metrics: Select from the dropdown or the scorecard

Metrics dropdown

Metrics Scorecard

• Compare two metrics: Graph an additional metric for comparison

• Graph By: Change graph from between Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and even Hourly for some reports

Reports
The bottom section of an overview reports lets you look through a subset of the reports available in that section. You can flip through these reports to see where you want to start your analysis. In the Traffic Sources Overview, we can start by looking at a report of Keywords.

From here we can go view the full report or look at another report, like Referral Sources:

Intelligence Overview
Google Analytics Intelligence automatically searches your website traffic to look for anomalies. When it finds something that's out of the ordinary it surfaces this as an alert. You can also setup your own alerts by defining custom alerts.

Now you can feel like the president of the principality of Analytica with your very own Intelligence Overview report.

The Intelligence Overview report shows you all of your automatic alerts (daily, weekly, and monthly) at a glance. From the Intelligence Overview, you can click on Details to see a graph of the alert and go directly into the GA report. You can also add or review an annotation right from the pop-up graph.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of Overview Reports. Please continue to send us feedback on the new Google Analytics. Stay tuned for next week’s installment in New Google Analytics series.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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Issue affecting Analytics data for April resolved

Late last night we discovered an issue in Google Analytics that caused reports with data from April 2011 using custom reports, advanced segments, or secondary dimensions to return 0 visits. Our team has been hard at work since then, and have found the cause and are taking steps to resolve the issue.

We will update this post as we work to resolve this issue. As always, you can visit the Google Analytics Status Dashboard to see the current status of Google Analytics.

Update 5/18/11 1:40 PM PST
We have completed the fix for April data affected by this issue ahead of our estimate. Data for April using advanced segments, custom reports, or secondary dimensions has been restored.

Update 5/13/11 3:45 PM PST
April data affected by this issue has been restored for all days after and including April 20th.

Update 5/11/11 10:30 AM PST
We want to reiterate that no data was lost due to this issue, and we’re working hard to make the April data fully available in your Analytics reports. Our current timeline for restoring full functionality for April data is approximately 12 days, by May 23rd. We’re doing what we can to shorten this period. We’re restoring the data day by day so you will see it come in to your account over time and not all at once. Keep in mind, that you can view the affected April data through the standard reports.

Secondly, we’ve seen some comments about Fast Access mode and its relation to the issue. Fast Access mode is a change, in name only, to how we label a sampled report to help better explain why sampling happens in Google Analytics. This change was not responsible for the issue with April’s data.

We’ll continue to update this post with developments we work to completely resolve this issue.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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New Ecommerce tracking and validation in the Analytics SDK for Android

Increasingly, mobile applications allow you to purchase products and virtual goods. For that reason, it’s important to track these mobile transactions in order to understand which products perform well.

So today we’ve added Ecommerce tracking functionality to the Google Analytics SDK for Android.

Ecommerce Tracking
With Ecommerce mobile tracking, you can capture transaction and product information, send the data to Google Analytics, and then analyze which products performed best. Of course, because this is all within Google Analytics, you can also tie transaction data back to app usage behavior. For example, you can now compare the referral that generated an app download by the revenue it generated. See the Google Analytics SDK for Android developer docs to learn how to implement this feature.

Debug and Validation
In addition to Ecommerce, we’ve added new debug and dry run modes to make it easier to validate your Google Analytics implementation.

Debug Mode:

tracker.setDebug(true);

With debug mode, all data requests to Google Analytics are sent to the Android log, allowing you to validate that your app is sending data properly. You can view the Android log using the adb logcat command.

Dry Run:

tracker.setDryRun(true);

The dry run mode sends all tracking data locally so that you don’t corrupt your production data.

See Us At Google IO
We’ll be demoing all this new functionality this year Google IO, so stop by the Optimizing Android Apps With Google Analytics session on May 11, 12:30PM – 01:30PM / Room 9.

Posted by Jim Cotugno, Google Analytics Tracking Team

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Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week we’re sharing a new feature, the Site Speed report.

At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster, and we are glad to see that many website owners share the same idea. A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.

To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.

Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in the new Google Analytics platform. With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site.

Uses for the Site Speed Report

• Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
• Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

One effective use of the Site Speed report is to measure speed for your most critical pages. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Or, you might learn that certain pages on your site run slower in some browsers. In addition to the Site Speed report, we’ve created a custom report that you can use to help answer these questions: view the Site Speed custom report.

Setting up the Site Speed Report

By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. We have detailed instructions in the Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center. Once you’ve updated your tracking code, a small sample of pageviews will be used to calculate the page load time.

We’re excited to bring this important metric into Google Analytics as part of the new Google Analytics platform. Please continue to send us feedback on Site Speed and the rest of the new Google Analytics.

By Zhiheng Wang, Phil Mui on behalf of the Google Analytics team and the Make the Web Faster team.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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Web Analytics TV #18

Welcome to yet another amazing episode of Web Analytics TV! We had so much fun doing this one, you are going to have a blast as well.

Web Analytics TV, as you well know by now, is powered by your questions. In this episode we had questions from Australia, Brazil, India, Denmark, England, Netherlands and so many other places. Y’all rock!

Our process for this show is simple.

Step 1: You ask, or vote on, your favorite web analytics questions. Vote on next week’s questions using this Web Analytics TV Google Moderator site.

Step 2: From a secret undisclosed location at the Googleplex Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer them. : )

Here is the list of last weeks questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:

• (0:12) Best way to integrate Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics
• (1:21) Getting the page title next to the all navigation report
• (2:18) Why clicks and visits might not match between AdWords and Analytics
• (3:43) Preventing URL tracked with campaign tracking being indexed by Google
• (5:04) Is there a downtime using ga.js (tracking code). And the benefit of async?
• (7:04) Why you see other in the top landing pages report?
• (9:06) Why you see self-referrals in Google Analytics
• (10:41) Tracking banners and internal campaigns
• (12:45) Combining the search referrers to a group of pages
• (13:55) Tracking the number of clicks that happen between domains
• (15:48) Is there a Pod cast on iTunes?
• (16:20) Google Website Optimizer
• (17:22) Differentiating between video click referrals
• (18:16) Using matched search query term without auto-tagging

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Passing IDs from Google Website Optimizer to Google Analytics
• Reasons for clicks and visits discrepancies in AdWords and Analytics
• Why Steve Souders recommends using GA Async Tracking
• Why you see other in your reports
• Using setDomainName and ignoring certain referrals
• Another approach to tracking internal campaigns using internal site search
• Using Custom Reports in Google Analytics v5
• Using Events as Goals in Google Analytics v5

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below.

This series would not be possible without your awesome questions. Please submit them on our public Google Moderator site, and while you are there don’t forget to vote for your favorite questions. Avinash and I will answer them in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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