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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?