Google Analytics introduces new Intelligence

In our continuing series on the most useful functions within Google Analytics, this month we review some of the new features that Google has just announced, including more comprehensive reporting capabilities, greater customisation options and a new “intelligence engine” that it says “can help search marketers drive smarter data insights”.

The most significant of these new features is the “Analytics Intelligence” that is designed to “provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods”. For example, Intelligence could alert you about a large surge in visits from a particular referrals site last Thursday or let you know that bounce rates of visitors from Queensland increased by 80% a week ago.

The idea of this feature is to save time delving through statistics to discover erratic patterns of behaviour and instead, use this time more constructively by determining what needs to be done to resolve the issues highlighted by the alerts.

Other features of Analytics’ new “intelligence engine” include the ability to define alert sensitivity and to create custom alerts. These custom alerts give the option to compare the same day to that in the previous week and highlight any chosen custom discrepancies on a week-to-week basis. This should prove to be a very useful addition.

The other features that Google has recently added to Analytics are:

• Expanded goals & site engagement goals.
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced analysis features (incl. advanced table filtering)
• Multiple custom variables.

Although this expanded functionality of Analytics will undoubted improve its reporting capabilities, the most necessary element in making its information valuable will remain the human-being who correctly interprets and takes action upon the resulting data!

If you’d like to know more about how the new Intelligence function, or how Google Analytics could be used to enhance your website’s performance, please contact us for further information.

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