Nobody likes to receive a begging email, so my apologies to my Google Account manager: within minutes of hearing about the new ‘must have’ features being rolled out in Google Analytics, he got one from me. Surely it was just an oversight that I hadn’t been personally invited onto the beta programme? Fortunately he took pity…

Anyway, what’s new? Well, Google is clearly gunning after the big guys with lots of ‘enterprise-class’ messaging being slung around.  To be fair, they have added some very nice (and some would say, overdue) features that you would expect from a top-end analytics package. Fingers crossed they get around to adding more than 4 goals per profile soon!

I’ll do some future posts on the ‘how’ but for now, read on for a summary of the ‘what’.

New-look Account Management Dashboard
Not a major change but a useful one. From the login, I can now see all the accounts under my management with summary stats over canned periods – day, week, month and year – along with nice little green arrows and nasty little red arrows (I heard about the red ones, I don’t have any…) that show the % change across accounts for visits, average time on site, bounce rate and completed goals. By clicking on an account name, the next dashboard shows a view with all the profiles for that account plus the same summary stats. Much easier to navigate accounts with large numbers of profiles/websites.

Advanced Segmentation
Google Analytics has always provided some segmentation so you could view, say, data on just Google organic traffic then get a breakdown of that traffic by new versus returning visitors or by the keyword queries they used to find your website. But it wasn’t that flexible. Often, the only way to get at the specific data you wanted would be to set up separate profiles with custom filters. A bit of a pain and the worst bit was the delay - these profile/filter combinations couldn’t work on historical data – you had to wait a day or so and if you got it wrong…with the new segmentation functionality it’s now much easier to achieve the granularity you need, when you need it.

Nine predefined custom-segments are provided such as “Search traffic”, “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions”. Apply one, and you’re now looking at data for just that segment. The real power though is building your own custom segments: fancy looking at all Returning Visitors that came via Google AdWords and converted on a specific goal? Now it’s dead easy to do this with drag and drop.

Custom Reports
If you need a specific view of your data, the drag and drop custom reporting lets you choose the metrics you want to see as well as how you see them. If you’ve a particular segment selected, the report presents your metrics on that data. I like the fact that the custom reports are integrated with the Google Analytics UI and can be applied from the usual menu toolbar.

Motion Charts
If you’re a fan of motion charts, then forgive me for not getting too excited about this new feature. I’ve not used them before so my luke-warm response is probably down to my inexperience with them. I’ve only played with this feature a bit so my opinion may well change once I get to grips with it. For those not in the know, motion charts allow you to carry out multi-dimensional analysis on metrics you choose. It lets you associate metrics with the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size and bubble colour and then provides a visualisation of that data. It even lets you play back their interactions over time. Possiblly a great feature but It makes my eyes go funny. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully applied motion charts to uncover any nuggets of practical insight.

Other Stuff
I’ve not seen the other features currently in private beta – Data Export API and integrated AdSense reporting – but they are of less interest to me anyway. But if you are interested…the Data Export API will allow developers to hook into the read-only report-level data to do, I suspect, very whizzy things with it. The integrated reporting with AdSense will be a welcome addition for the affiliate community so they can see within Google Analytics how their £millions are stacking up .

What do you think?
Have you used any of the new features? Let me know what you think. How do you rate Google Analytics with other analytic packages such as Yahoo Web Analytics (IndexTools).