Google Analytics & 7 New Features

Knowing how your web is performing, not only in the search engines, but also how you site is engaging with the visitors has a great value for webmasters. Most likely if you are a webmaster you do check your analytics at two times a week if not even every day, to see how the organic traffic is doing, how referrals is doing and/or how your new strategies are engaging your visitors to meet your goals.

One of the most used analytics tool amongst the webmasters is the free Google Analytics tool, it’s free, its powerful and its easy to use. The even better part is that Google Analytics is constantly improving and adding new features to help you know little more about your website and how your site is engaging with visitors, performing in search engines and which of your campaigns is performing best.

Today I received an email from Google Analytics letting me know about 7 new features which are in beta testing so I decided to blog about it (sometimes I just check what I need and never pay attention to the new things, unless someone explicitly lets me know about that, perhaps these features were there longer then what I think).

The 7 New Google Analytics Features

• Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts
• Expand Goals and New Engagement Goals
• Expand Mobile Reporting
• Unique Visitors Metric
• Advanced Analytics Features
• Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates
• Multiple Custom Variables

All of the features are really interesting and give an excellent report of data-analysis for your site which can really help you understand what parts of your site are doing well, which ones needs to be improved and how you can push your site further more and engage better with your visitors. My preferred new features are the Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts and Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals, but lately I am also eager to know how my website is performing on mobile devices and how many visitors visit my site through iPhone, Android or any other phone that supports web browsing.

Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts and Setting it up

Whenever I build a new site I do set targets I want to meet. Would that be traffic determined target, conversion or rankings doesn’t matter, but I need targets to determine my success with the new site (or with an existing site which I want to improve). So instead of viewing my weekly or monthly analytics for this new site and see on which days I reach this goal, with the new analytics intelligence with custom alerts setup I can receive emails whenever I reach my goal.

Setting up with the custom alerts is easy and can be done with just few clicks, in addition you can set up different goals, could for visits, visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, average time on site, percentage of new visitors to your site, goal conversions, revenue etc.. in addition you can define if you want this report to function for determined keyword, for a referral path, a campaign, city or region or country/territory etc. All data which have a great value, but lets see a simple example on how to setup an alert.

• Chose your website profile for which you want to setup an alert. On the left sidebar you will notice the Ingelligence Beta link labeled under the My Customizations panel.
• Setup the alert name and chose a period (daily, weekly or month) for your new goal
• Setup the goal conditions and to what you want it to apply. Chose keyword (if you want to track how your keyword is performing), chose the condition as matches exactly and as value add the keyword which you want to track.
• Setup the alert options. In this example I want to track whenever my site reaches a total of 50 visits a day for that keyword. So i chose Visits in the Alert me when option, as condition I add Is greater then and value is set to 50.
• Then just simply click on Save Alert after making sure that you have setup your alert correctly

In five simple steps I have create an alert for my new goal, every day my site will receive 50 visitors for that keyword I will be alerted via email. Of course once i reach my goal for a week regularly and I still won’t be ranking #1 for that keyword I will setup a new goal with a greater value, this way I can analyze how much work I involve into reaching my goals and can determine the success of my SEO Optimization. But that’s not just that, as you did saw there are much more alerts that can be set up.

Google Analytics Custom Alerts Video Tutorial
In the bellow video (made by Google Analytics team) you can learn how to setup your custom alerts step by step and learn some new options too.

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