Google Analytics has a new tool in Beta called Intelligence. It allows users to set up alerts. At the moment we do not know much more.

This is how it is described by Google (analytics.blogspot.com):

“How would you like to have 24-hour a day access to a dedicated assistant who is focused exclusively on your site’s analytics? Your assistant would be so diligent and detailed that they wouldn’t miss a thing. Sound too good to be true? We’re giving you one. Say “Hello” to Analytics Intelligence.

Your new hardworking assistant, Analytics Intelligence, can’t replace you or a professional analyst. But, it can find key information for you and your professional analysts — so that your team can focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless sea of data.

Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website’s traffic. Anytime something significant happens, it adds an automatic alert in your Intelligence reports. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps on one of your referrals, Analytics Intelligence creates an alert. Of course, it’s up to you to go find out that the bounce rate jumped because someone inadvertently changed the landing page. But you might not have noticed that there was a problem that needed fixing if your trusty assistant hadn’t alerted you.

As with automatic alerts, the best way to learn about custom alerts is to try them out on your own data. You can also refer to the articles on Analytics Intelligence in the Google Analytics Help Center.”

Google have finally updated the Analytics dashboard. Until now, on logging in to a Google Analytics account, all the domains were listed, but with no reported information shown. Now, for each domain, you can quickly see the number of visits, average time on site, bounce rate, completed goals and % Change (hits). Also, it is possible to specify either a daily view, weekly or monthly. The % change is a great addition, as growth trends can quickly be identified.

There are still several short comings and minor annoyances with the Google Analytics software, but this is a sign that they are making an effort to improve on the product.

About Analytics

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Integrated with AdWords, users can optimize online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.

History of Google Analytics

Google’s service was developed from Urchin Software Corporation’s analytics system, Urchin on Demand (Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005). The system also brings ideas from Adaptive Path, whose product, Measure Map, was acquired and renamed to Google Analytics in 2006.

In December 2007, Google rolled out the new ga.js page tag which they recommend to use for all new accounts and new profiles for new domains. Existing urchin.js page tags will continue to work, nevertheless the new tag will allow site owners to take advantage of the most up-to-date tracking functionality, ability to graph multiple data points at once and to track eCommerce transactions in a more readable way.

Limitations

Many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Firefox’s Adblock and NoScript) can block the GATC. This prevents some traffic and users from being tracked, and leads to holes in the collected data. Also, privacy networks like Tor will mask the user’s actual location and present inaccurate geographical data. Some users do not have Javascript-enabled/capable browsers or turn this feature off. However, these limitation are considered small – affecting only a small percentage of visits.

The largest potential impact on data accuracy comes from users deleting or blocking Google Analytics cookies. Without cookies being set, GA cannot collect data. Any individual web user can block or delete cookies resulting in the data loss of those visits for GA users. The only protection a website owner can use to prevent this, is to ensure best practice policies are upheld on their web site. That includes being transparent in what visitor data is collected and how it is used. This information is usually placed within a privacy policy statement page.

Because GA uses a page tagging technique to collect visitor via a combination of JavaScript and cookies, it has limitations with websites browsed from mobile phone. This is due to the fact that only the latest phones are currently able to run JavaScript or set cookies (for example, iPhone and other Smart phones and PDAs).

It is important to note that these limitations affect all on-site web analytics tools that collect on-site visitor data using page tags. That is, the small piece of code (usually JavaScript) that acts as a beacon to collect visitor data.

Source: Analytics information from Wikipedia