Chris & Natalie at Google HQ

Last week WiderFunnel Marketing again had the pleasure of attending the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Partner Summit at Google’s headquarters in Mountainview, CA.

At the summit Authorized Consultants got a sneak peak at the newest features to be bundled into Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer starting today.

Here is a look at some of our favorite new Google Analytics features.

Mobile reporting

According to the Nielsen Company the total number of smartphone (iphone, Android, Blackberry) subscribers grew from 15 million in Q2 2008 to 26 million in Q2 2009. That’s a 73% increase in just one year!

In response to this fast-growing trend Google has expanded its Mobile Reporting feature by tracking applications built for iPhone and Android devices.

Now using GA you can gain an understanding of how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used.

The Nielsen Company also reports a 34 percent year-over-year increase in mobile Web visitors from 42.5 million in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009. In particular women, teens and seniors are helping to make this growth happen.

Nielsen Company’s mobile media guru Chris Quick comments, “Now that the technology is more mainstream, women are quickly embracing the benefits as ‘connected consumers,’ tapping the convenience of Web access on mobile phones to network, browse the latest shopping deals and get ideas for dinner, all while on the go.”

If you are currently running a mobile web site, GA can help you track traffic to from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript.

In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Availability: Mobile Apps tracking available week of October 21, 2009. Users can download mobile tracking snippet instructions from the Google Analytics blog or wit for the code snippet to be published via the Setup UI over the coming weeks

Expanded Goal Tracking

The Expanded Goal Tracking feature is an obvious favorite of ours. Gone are the days of creating multiple profiles in your GA account if you have more than 5 goals.  Google now allows you to define up to 20 goals per profile.

Google has also introduced a new goal type measuring site engagement and branding success on your site.

Web traffic and conversion rates alone do not tell the full story. Measuring engagement and branding success is key in understanding the lifetime value of a customer.

The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit.

Availability: Available to all users the week of October 21, 2009.

Multiple Custom Variables

Initially Google offered us a single User Defined Variable in Google Analytics.

If you wanted to know if your visitors were male or female, you could collect this information in the single GA User Defined Variable and then segment web site activity to learn if Males purchased more than Females, or if Female shoppers purchase different items from Male shoppers and so on.

Or, if you wanted to know whether visitors to your site who purchased something returned to the site to shop again, you could set the User Defined Variable to a value such as “customer” on the receipt page and then segment your GA reports to learn about repeat customer activity.

But what if you wanted to know how Female Repeat Customers used your site? A likely question if you are examining customer loyalty, and the lifetime value of a customer.

Up to now tracking multiple values in a single User Defined Variable in GA has been difficult to implement and has produced complex reports. The problem is that you don’t always collect the same information at the same time.  If you capture a visitor’s gender at one point in their session and then capture the “customer” value indicating that they made a purchase, the second value would overwrite the first value that you set.

With the release of GA’s latest features, you can now set multiple custom variables.

With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into  trackable segments. Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently. For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports
section).

Availability: Phased rollout through the coming weeks starting the week of October 21, 2009.

Managing your custom reports and advanced segments

Being able to share segment definitions, custom reports and report templates is a huge time saver when it comes to distributing GA reports throughout the company.

With the latest changes in GA you can:

• Create a custom report or custom segment for a particular profile and make it available to any user who has access to the profile.

• Share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account.Once the other person receives the link and clicks it, a template of your custom report or advanced segment will load in his or her own account. Your profile’s data will not be included in the template.

Availability: This feature is currently available to all GA users for more information see the Google Analytics Help article.

For a complete list of the new features released this week see GA Blog