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Google announced a number of new and upcoming features for Google Analytics today. The features, Google says, focus on three things: power, flexibility, and intelligence.

It is the intelligence aspect, which Google places the most prominence on, and this comes in the form of a feature called "Analytics Intelligence," which will provide users with automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of their site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly, and monthly periods. Users can be notified by email or right within the Google Analytics user interface.

Google has also added goals for "time on site" and "pages per visit," as well as the ability to define up to 20 goals per profile. Here’s some more on that:

Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. They will be adding a code snippet for users to add to their mobile sites. PHP, Perl, JSP, and ASPX sites will be supported.

"iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website," says Dai Pham of the Google Analytics Team. "What’s more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement."

They have also added Advanced Table Filtering, which allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Here’s more on that feature:

Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics, and they are also adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.

Google says that it will be going into more detail on the new features in the coming days on the Google Analytics Blog. The features will be appearing in Google Analytics accounts gradually over the coming weeks.

Omniture and comScore have formed a partnership aimed at providing advertisers and publishers with a more comprehensive view of online data.

The partnership will combine Omniture’s method of analyzing web traffic by looking at data collected by servers with comScore’s panel based audience measurement.

Previously the two methodologies had different objectives and used contrasting data collection technologies, resulting in metrics that caused confusion among publishers and advertisers.

Magid Abraham
Comscore President,
CEO and Co-Founder

This partnership blends the two methodologies in an automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement aimed at allowing publishers to represent themselves in a more accurate way to advertisers, and for advertisers to improve their media planning with more data about their reach.

"comScore and Omniture are working to provide the marketplace a much-needed solution for consistent Web-wide measurement," said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO.

"This relationship will deliver to our customers the solution that they have been seeking, thus helping to promote and accelerate the usage of digital marketing intelligence for delivering actionable business results and competitive advantage. We believe it will also help the industry overcome concerns of inconsistent measurement of digital audiences and promote further adoption of digital media advertising."

The partnership is aimed at allowing joint Omniture and comScore customers to use Omniture tags to collect and share information with comScore’s Media Metrix 360.
 

Google has released some new features for the Google Analytics API, including event tracking, navigational data, and increased filter length. The company says these features were prioritized based on feedback from users, with event tracking being the most requested feature.

Event tracking allows users to measure the number of user interactions with a site. You can track things like the total number of times a white paper is downloaded, the length of time it takes to load a video, the number of validation errors users get when filling out a form, etc.

"To illustrate, let’s look at Sprout. Sprout’s integration with Google Analytics helps customers track user interaction within their Sprout content," explains Nick Mihailovski of the Google Analytics Team. "However, users currently must log into the Sprout interface to see billing and account management data, and then also log into Google Analytics to see how their own sprouts are performing. Now that event tracking is available through the API, companies like Sprout can pull the interaction metrics tracked by Google Analytics events and present them directly in clients’ performance dashboards–effectively leveraging Google Analytics as a platform to power their analysis reports."

The Event Tracking API docs can be found here.

With navigational data, developers can create new visualizations to see what gets the most clicks. For example, customer site overlays can be created, and the navigational data can be analyzed to see what performs the best.

Filter expression length has been increased to 128 characters, which means developers can perform more complex queries with fewer requests to the API. This can save bandwidth and quota, according to Mihailovski.

All of the changes to the Google Analytics API can be found at the public change log. This is periodically updated whenever changes are made to the API.

In May Ann did a post “Track Keyword Positions with BLVD Status” showing how you can enhance your keyword tracking with the analytics tool BLVDStatus.com. Well earlier this week they launched two new products, both of which greatly enhance your ability to track and understand both your keyword traffic and rankings.

Keyword Vitals: Basically a marriage between keyword traffic reports and…

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

New Features & Alert System in BLVD Status