Google announces 14 new analytics features

Yesterday's Google Analytics Summit contained 14 new product releases, with perhaps the most interesting being the ability to view demographic data. 

The Google Analytics blog has a rundown of all the new features, but here are a few of the most significant... 

Demographic data

This is a big one. You can now view demographic data for your audience by integrating with DoubleClick. 

This is new data, and will allow businesses to segment particular visitor groups for the purpose of remarketing, or perhaps to see which products are selling most from a certain age group. The potential uses are interesting. 

According to Dan Barker: 

This is the big one really from most users' point of view. Something that really gives utterly new data to every website owner. The demographic reports themselves will be useful and interesting.

On top of those though, they're adding demographic segmentation. You will be able to view virtually any report in Google Analytics, segmented down by a particular demographic criteria. The possibilities there are almost endless. There are very simple uses, but also quite sophisticated ones.

Google Tag Manager: auto event tracking

This takes a lot of pain out of the job for analytics users. From now, Auto-Event Tracking allows Google Tag Manager users to 'listen' for events on the page without adding any custom code, before sending data to Google Analytics or other tags. 

According to Econsultancy trainer Damion Brown: 

Historically, if you wanted something tracked as an event you'd need to manually code it into the html of the page. That's fine in smaller scenarios, but in an enterprise environment it's usually going to means bugging a developer to make a change, and with staging and testing it can be a long and uncomfortable process.

This announcement suggests that GTM will make all that a thing of the past, which will really open things up. You can track a lot more with Google Analytics if you make use of Events.  

Tool to migrate from 'classic' analytics to 'universal'

Dan Barker: 

 

Google has hinted about this for a while, and I think some website owners are getting a bit fed up of the mixed messages around classic/universal. It will be great to get to a point where you can migrate across and retain your historic data.

More educational tools

This could be a useful feature for amateurs like me, or for smaller businesses with fewer resources. This essentially encourages people to use Google Analytics and learn 'on the go'. 

Every feature in Google Analytics will now have an in-product video that users can watch for more information about how to use a certain feature. Very handy. 

BigQuery integration

One for Google Analytics Premium users i.e. firms with lots of data. 

This new feature allows user to access their session and use data from Analytics within Google BigQuery for more granular and complex querying of unsampled data.

I'll let Google explain:

For those unfamiliar with Google BigQuery, it's a web service that lets you perform interactive analysis of massive data sets—up to trillions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand. Plus, your data is easily exportable.

New acquisition report

This has been available to some already, but will be rolled out to all users over the next few weeks. 

It will replace the 'Traffic' Sources' section on the left hand menu of GA, and allows users to see how customers/visitors are acquired, their subsequent behaviour on site, and conversions.