14 DAY TRIAL // Google Analytics, the free stats tool from Google, has gotten a major upgrade with a bunch of new features and some updated ones. The most touted feature is the so-called Analytics Intelligence, which will notify the users of the changes it deems important based on an algorithm that determines their significance. Other features now have some more advanced functionality and there is also a greater focus on mobile reporting.
“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,” Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team, wrote. The idea is to allow the users to focus on the events and what they mean rather than wasting time sifting through the data to spot any anomaly. The alert level can be customized according to their importance to adjust the number of alerts users receive. They can also set up their own custom alert triggers.
The update comes with two new goal types too but users can set up to 20 of them. The new goals allow users to measure user engagement and branding success on their sites with the new thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. For the more advanced users Google introduced some new features to the Advanced Analysis Features. “Earlier this year we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. [...] Now we're adding Advanced Table Filtering. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions,” Google explains.
Finally, Google is focusing more on the mobile space, which has seen a lot of growth lately thanks to the increasing number of smartphones. Analytics can now track mobile websites and mobile apps and Google has modified the way it takes the measurements to allow for more devices to be counted. Users can now install different code snippets that don't rely on JavaScript to take into account the lower-end devices that may not come with a fully featured browser. Finally, iPhone and Android app creators can install tracking components to measure the involvement of their users.