Is Google Analytics Really Enterprise Ready?

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Oct 27, 2008

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The team over at Google has come out with some enhancements to the Google Analytics software designed with the enterprise in mind. They claim they have been listening to our needs and that this is the biggest update to the analytics software to date. But is it enough to ward off the threat the Yahoo has brought on? Let's take a look at the updates and see.

The Battle for Free Web Analytics

It has only been a few weeks since Yahoo introduced Yahoo! Web Analytics, a new free web analytics tool based on the former IndexTools software. They haven't officially released the software to the broader audience yet, but they have provided some insights into what can be expected.

Google, on the other hand, has offered their web analytics software for some time now. While it's not a bad offering — especially considering it's free — it has lacked the some of the features that an enterprise level analytics product needs to really be of value to a business.

Google Analytics Updates

Of the updates Google is announcing, several are expected to be available anytime while a couple of others are still in Private Beta. As of this morning, we haven't seen anything new in the Analytics Dashboard. You can also watch YouTube videos of some of the new updates.

New Account Management Dashboard

Move between your accounts and profiles easier with a new account management dashboard. Even more importantly, you now have a bird's eye view of some key performance metrics for your accounts from the dashboard. You don't have to go into each account dashboard to get the basic view of what's happening on your site.

New Administrative Dashboard

From this new dashboard, see how many visits your site has had, what the average time on the site was and what the bounce rate was. In addition you can view the % of change in a number of metrics including Visits, Bounce Rate and Time on Site. You can view all this information based on a particular Day, Week, Month or Year. Some of the data is even color coded to let you know immediately of any issues.

The new dashboard is definitely an improvement over the current one.

Advanced Segmentation

Analyze subsets of traffic on the fly. Google makes a couple of predefined segments available out-of-the-box including: “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions”, or create your own.

Advanced Segmentation

Segments can be applied to current or historical data and you can compare the performance of the two segments side by side.

Segments are not filters. Filters are applied to information coming into your account to provide customize final reports. They modify data at the pageview level. Segments do not actually modify your data. They simply enable you to filter the data in your report so that you can see how different types of visits are performing.

There's a good blog post by Avinash Kaushik on how to use the Advanced Segments, along with a YouTube video.