Marketers and analysts, are you ready for the latest version of Google Analytics!!! 🙂
As announced today on the Google Analytics blog and at eMetrics, the Google Analytics team is rolling out a new version of GA (version 4) with exciting new capabilities, many more customization options, and the totally awesome and super powerful Intelligence feature.
Over the next several days I’ll be posting specific posts about each of the new GA features, but for now here is a quick summary of what you’ll start seeing in your reports.
- Expanded goals
- Mobile reporting
- Advanced table filtering
- Unique visitor segmentation
- Multiple custom variables
- Sharing of custom segments and custom report templates
- Intelligence
- Automated and custom alerts
Please note that some of these features are rolled out as we speak (ok, it is past noon Pacific, 10/20/09 🙂 ), and others will be rolled out in the next few days or weeks.
More Power!
- Goals and more goals! We have conveyed your requests to Google. You weren’t satisfied with 4 goals and now you can have up to 20; yes, 20 goals! Measure those important actions! In addition, you can now measure two engagement metrics, Time on Site and Pages per Visit.
- Expanded mobile reporting. Not only you can track traffic from your iPhones, but now GA allows you to track mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices (great way for application developers to measure engagement). In addition, traffic to mobile sites can be tracked (for sites built in PHP, Perl, JSP, ASPX), for devices with or without JavaScript.
- Secondary dimensions and pivoting. Great table and filtering features. Check out our post on these here.
- Unique Visitors Segmentation: now available across many dimensions in your Custom Reports. Answering the question of “how many actual visitors” got a little bit easier.
More Flexibility and Customization Options
- Multiple custom variables. The requests of the analytics ninjas have been answered! Define an important interaction for your site and set a custom variable to track it. Tracking can be done at the page, session, and visitor level.
- Sharing custom segments and custom report templates. If you can create them, you can now share them :). It’s as easy as copying and pasting a URL.
Intelligence
- Analytics Intelligence. This new feature is just great! Any time a tool can help automate the mundane and allows you to focus on the business, you gotta love it! This new report will provide automatic alerts when significant changes in your data occur, in daily, weekly and monthly intervals.
- Custom alerts. You can create your own custom alerts and be notified by email or through the UI.
That is it for now. Log in to your GA account and check out some of these features and let us know what you think!
Feras AlhlouChief Technology Officer
Feras Alhlou previously co-founded E-Nor in 2003 and served as President until its acquisition by Cardinal Path in 2019. Feras is passionate about his work with some of the world’s most recognized brands and public sector organizations to deliver data-driven marketing value. A recognized thought leader on the Google Marketing tech stack, he has traveled the globe educating businesses, practitioners, and consultants, and he’s also co-author of Google Analytics Breakthrough: From Zero to Business Impact. Feras received a Masters of Engineering Management degree from the University of South Florida and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tulsa. He is a Certified Web Analyst, Board Member for Red Cross Northern California, and a 3rd-degree black belt in Aikido.
