Google Analytics releases lots of new features including advanced segmentation


I’m going to share an email I sent to the Google Analytics team when they sent us an email last month that they had changed the interface and asking us to beta test the new features. However they only told us about the cosmetic changes, somehow the email about the segmentation didn’t come through.

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 5:56 AM, Jackson, Steve wrote:

Hi google,

Why on earth are you discussing basically an interface change which does help, looks nice but is basically cosmetic when in actual fact you have just revolutionized the entire platform by adding powerful, customizable, behaviorally based segmentation?? GOOGLE ANALYTICS WITH SEGMENTATION! You just moved into the big league!

I nearly missed it! Advanced segmentation (beta) in a tiny little link. You just turned GA into SiteCatalyst with Data wharehouse! You just made my day! When does this feature go live? because this is what Google Analytics has been in desperate need of for the last 2 years.

It’s a HUGE move on your part.

Could you tell I was excited? :) My point about SiteCatalyst is of course over the top, Omniture have a widely different value proposition and you get what you pay for, but in terms of pure features GA and IndexTools are there or therabouts.

I hinted in my last post about Yahoo! that Google would respond. Well they did. I was going to write a long post about how it worked and what you should do, but Avinash already beat me to it. I’d fully recommend reading his excellent article on the matter and once again I have to tip my hat to the folks at Google.

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October 23rd, 2008
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Mark
Posted on:
November 2, 2008 at 5:12 pm

Analytics is interesting, there is a rumor thast Google use the data and then go and build their own blogs for traffic sites.. is this true?

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Justin
Posted on:
November 6, 2008 at 4:00 am

Google continues to impress me with the extremely powerful and useful tools that it offers at no cost. It sounds like these new features to Google Analytics will really continue to improve GA. I think anyone would be crazy not to use Google Analytics in some fashion, even if it is in addition to other analytics software.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Heather Harris
Posted on:
November 6, 2008 at 6:36 pm

Thanks for posting your email to them, I like you had some of the same questions. great blog, love analytics.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Captain Blackbeak
Posted on:
November 7, 2008 at 9:31 am

@Mark;

No I would doubt they would build blogs based on the data they have, there isn’t any reason for them to do so.

Google do use the data in an aggregated way for overall trend analysis if you give them permission. This is a useful source of competitive data for anyone, you can benchmark for instance bounce rates and across industry verticals.

@Justin;
I agree. It’s really starting to compete on equal terms across features with some of the paid vendors.

@Heather;
Thanks for the comments.

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Health Product Reports
Posted on:
November 9, 2008 at 7:22 pm

If being a successful Internet marketer is one’s goal, a very important component is testing. With this latest addition, Google analytics will work great for most users. Good post.

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Chaichen
Posted on:
November 10, 2008 at 8:20 am

Google Analytics, I like it. Thank’s for your sharing…

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Graham Cox
Posted on:
November 15, 2008 at 3:51 pm

Google Analytics is very interesting. Thanks for keeping us up to date about the new features added to this.

Comment Number:
8
Written by:
Captain Blackbeak
Posted on:
November 16, 2008 at 3:53 am

Thanks guys for the kind words.

Comment Number:
9
Written by:
Zepp
Posted on:
November 25, 2008 at 5:20 am

I use Google Analytics myself for all my sites and blogs and I love it. It’s so handy and best of all it’s free. Thanks for explaining the new features as I’m still new to Analytics.