"Secret" new Google Analytics features (GA Intelligence) to be released soon?

Disclaimer Note: This article does not represent a break in NDA for my current participation in the Google Analytics trusted tester programme as the data for the article came from a YouTube RSS feed

I’m a subscriber to the YouTube Google Analytics channel, it’s a nice community facility I’ve found useful to blog about and to share with clients. To make my life easier, I’ve subscribed to the channel through a (possibly not too well known feature) rss feed of uploaded videos.

Today when I was going through my shared analytics feeds in Google Reader (here’s a link to my shared Google reader rss feed of great analytics blogs) I saw two new videos uploaded by Google. After clicking on the links I was redirected to an error page on YouTube saying the video’s were private (ie not public facing) - but the video descriptions and screenshots were enough to pique my interest:

If you want to check it out yourself - this link will take you to the raw rss feed.

The two videos appear to relate to 2 new features I’m assuming are about to be released to the public, both of which look interesting:

Feature 1: Threshold Goals

This appears to be a modification to goals allowing different rules to be applied to goals management. This feature doesn’t give me much of a clue to what it will offer, beyond an expansion of (possibly) the page view based goals features we live with today.

Feature 2: Google Analytics Intelligence

GA Intelligence?Now this one gives me a much better idea of what the features will be, the screenshot shows a new menu item above the visitors menu called “Intelligence”, with three menu options:

• Daily alerts
• Weekly alerts
• Monthly alerts

So, presumably we’re getting an alerts service - the “Intelligence” name is a little perculiar, after all alerts are not much more than a copy-cat service on top of what Omniture and Yahoo Web Analytics already offer. Are we really getting an intelligence service? What kind of alerts will we be getting? 

All very interesting, and I expect this will be all over Twitter and Blogs very soon - but it’s got me interested today!

What I’m seeing here doesn’t appear to be what was discussed / released by Mediapost a couple of weeks ago under the title “Google Analytics: May I suggest this” suggesting a new uber intelligent, predictive analytics solution from Google.

Update on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 7:54AM by James Dutton

So it turns out I was right, these ‘secret’ new features of Google Analytics have gone live - after the features were announced at emetrics.

I’m impressed with the responsiveness of the product team in rolling out new features as a result of client feedback - I’ve frequently shared concerns about the limited number of goals (previously 4, now increased to 20), the inability to share custom segments and reports (can’t recall the number of times I’ve been on conference call trying to diagnose why a client or agency doesn’t have the same data as me in a segment because the regular expression was mistyped..), limited scope of custom variables (previously 1, now increased to unconfirmed), advanced filtering (previously limited to one dimension by regular expression, now expanded to multiple filters on dimensions and metrics).

Here’s the video for Google Analytics Intelligence - will have to wait to see just how intelligent this is, and to learn about the processes used to drive the analysis - one of the concerns I have is that this means more time wasted in over analysing daily leaps and drops (note the example in the video) - while this is ‘cool’ to analyse, it doesn’t really tell us much and is missing the longer term pattern. It’s interesting nonetheless:

Hop on over to the Google Analytics blog to read more on the announcement.

Note also that Google Website optimizer was also updated yesterday, two new features were added: over time charts  (not totally convinced on this one - they’d have been better off building automatic alerts to notify by email when a test reaches statistical significance) and a new website optimizer api here.

Comments

[IMGuru]

truly amazing features ....I see that we need not have to think of using omniture if google continues to add features like this over the period of time :)

[James Dutton]

Hi IMGuru,

Thanks for your comment!

While Google Analytics is becoming a much stronger product with releases like this, there are still a lot of product features that GA doesn't offer that a Webtrends or Omniture offers. For this reason it's important to identify specific needs before selecting a tool. For example GA's ecommerce functionality is very limited, not offering cross sell analysis or cart analysis.

That said, I'm expecting Omniture will need to ramp up their product development efforts given just how far GA has moved in the last couple of years.

Cheers, James.