October 16, 2007

Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. new Google Analytics features were announced, plus an updated version of Urchin software.

The super-cool new Google Analytics features that were announced all deal with allowing people to be better able to act on their Google Analytics report information, which is fantastic. I mean, that's the core reason why anybody has an analytics in the first place - to help them make improvements.

Site Search
Users can enable the new site search feature to identify keywords, categories, products, and trends across time and user segments.

The reason this is so cool is that is gives very down-to-earth, practical insight into your website visitors. What are they looking for, and did they find it? Why can't most people find this particular product?

The new site search feature aggregates data about how searches affect site usage, e-commerce activity, and conversion rates by tracking internal search patterns. The potential of this new tool is almost scary! Search patterns tell you what people are looking for, what they are interested in, and what they need right now.

In fact, Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog article titled "Kick Butt With Internal Site Search Analytics" (what a great title!) that talks about how cool site search data is and all the wonderful things that can be learned from it.

The word is that this feature will soon be available worldwide, and it works with Google Custom Search, GSA (Google Search Appliance), Google Mini and a ton of other non-Google site search products.

Event Tracking

Event tracking, which launches in a limited beta at the eMetrics Summit, enables Google Analytics users to measure visitor engagement with a site's interactive elements, such as Ajax, Javascript, Flash movies, page gadgets, downloads and other multimedia Web 2.0 experiences.

This new event tracking feature is going to be so handy, in so many different ways! I can't wait to hear some of the inventive ways people come up with to use this.

Google Analytics users who are attending the eMetrics Summit can sign up for event tracking at the Google Analytics booth (those lucky dogs!).

New Languages
Google Analytics has added six new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25. The new languages are Czech, Hungarian, Portuguese (Portugal), Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian.

Posted by Meredith Smith, Director of Marketing at 12:04 PM

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Comments

Do you know when the event tracking features will be rolled out on a larger scale?

I just updated a piece of software I am working on called Hab.la to automatically report user behavior to google analytics. Hab.la is a web service that let's you chat with visitors to your website using your existing instant messenger. I.e. visitors to your site appear as buddies on your buddylist.

I think it'd be great to split these logs of interactions with the website (i.e. the chat widget) off away from raw hits on the page.

I blogged about this at: http://hab.la/articles/2007/10/27/now-with-google-analytics-integration

Posted by: Ben at October 29, 2007 4:49 PM