So this is pretty exciting news for Google analytics users, and more importantly for those who are spending lots of money on commercial analytics packages. Google has pushed out a major update to their analytics package.
Here’s a quick look at some of the features :-
Ability to track mobile apps, and non java script mobile handsets.
Advanced table filtering. How many times have you looked at a data set say pages by bounce rate and sorted the columns to show the highest bounce rate at the top? If you have lots of pages you could get a long list of un-important landing pages which happen to have a high bounce rate but maybe only 1 visitor a week. So the real gold is the pages with high bounce rate and a visit count over a certain threshold. These are the pages you want to spend your time optimising. All too often that data is lost or you need to export it to excel and do some wizardry to get to that data. Now in Google Analytics you can conditionally sort a list with a threshold on another metric. Really useful stuff this advance table filtering.
They have added e-mail alerts to the mix as well, this being Google they did not stop at allowing the user to manually configure alerts. They have also introduced a automated alerting system designed to draw the user to the events in the data that are unusual.
So these features are not just another update to Google analytics but they are pushing the package into a leading space in some areas. These are features that commercial analytics packages simply don’t have available in an on-demand basis or they are available in expensive additional modules.
So Google analytics just became a much more compelling alternative and is accelerating its growth in this area. This is good news for the consumer of any analytics package as competition forces companies to improve.
It strikes me as being slightly odd that you cannot add a target to a campaign at the point of campaign creation. It seems a logical optional set of data that you should be able to add to campaigns. Omniture makes it really easy to import campaigns campaigns on mass and targets on mass. However there is no integration as such between the two products.
So I can add targets for a campaign but the targets live in a seperate menu and the rest of your campaign data lives under the campaign report. It would be nice to simply be able to drop some target metrics in to the campaign report, just like any other event. This would give a nice consoldated view of a campaigns performance and its traget.
This would open up lots of possibilities for reporting on this data in an easier fashion. What do you think good or bad?
1) Capture your most popular in-site search terms. Once captured use this data to provide links into your search pages from your homepage and other high ranking pages. Tip try to include the terms in a sentence with includes other key terms for your site. Example “latest analytics news on search term”.
2) Use your analytics package to discover common search engine keywords to individual site sections/pages. Consider including these terms in your structural links across sections. e.g if you have a recipes section which rates well for keyword stir fry consider linking to a relevant section or page from other areas of the site using that term.
3) Consider using path reports to discover content which is closely related. Present this data as related content on the page. This provides more cross linking to content pages which is good for SEO.
4) Find your pages with the most search engine traffic. These pages tend to be your highest ranking pages and therefore they have significant page rank. Consider manually building links from these pages to other pages and topics where its beneficial for your pages to rank well.
5) If your analytics package supports alerts, use this feature to alert if traffic changes dramatically to pages. Generally large increases could be due to another site linking to your site. It is a good idea to review these links and engage in any comment activity on the linking site to maximise exposure and increase the chances of gaining additional links from that site.
We learnt about the CMO dashboard back at the Omniture 2009 Keynote speach. You can get a sneak peek at what this services looks like in the video of the keynote. Josh announced that the CMO dashboard would be made available on cmodashboard.com. This domain is registed to Omniture however is still drawing a blank in a broswser today. So maybe that plan has not gone ahead.
The dashboard tool is a consulting services implemented product. Omniture are leveraging existing and new partner integrations through their Genises solution. However the CMO dashboard data sheet suggest that custom integrations are possible as well. For more details check out the Omniture CMO dashboard press release.
So we can get reports from s.props e-mailed or downloaded by the hour. This could be really useful for generating up to minute cool on page features such as tag clouds powered by popularity. Or a list of what people are searching for within the last 60 mins. However the big blocker to developing a nice fast moving feature along these lines is the fact that I can’t generate a report for the last 24hrs. I am forced to choose between Today and Yesterday which obviously have uses but no good for the above use case.
Logged in today and caught sight of this
Omniture will conduct a scheduled maintenance of our system and databases at 3:00 pm MT, Thursday 7/16. The site will be unavailable for 30 - 60 minutes. Scheduled reports will run (although delayed) and all data collection will continue as expected.
Normal incremental updates generally do not cause outages to the service. So this could be an interesting update with some major changes?
Sitecatalyst 20.3h code release can now nativiley detect the additional info retained in the new Google referring url. Googles change is being tested on about 10% of the Googles searches. The key difference here is that Google are adding the keyword and the position in the results your search result appeared in. This means that Sitecatalys can now correlate search terms to search positions. This is incredibly useful info, for example you should now be able to report on and alert on changes to your search ranking position in Google for your popular keywords.
Check out the blog post over at the Omniture blog.
Update : See post below stating that this code update does not support the additional search result placement cd=!
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