Google Analytics New Features Part 3: Advanced Analysis

Advanced Table Filtering

Want to know which keywords are your top performers? How about easily being able to cut PPC keywords by worst performing engagement metrics? You could do this before with Analytics, but it was a bit of a chore.

Now with advanced filtering, you can sort and filter your tables of data by custom parameters. This should really help with digging out the exact data you are looking for amongst all the “noise.” Check Google’s video for more detail:

Sharing

For those of you who work with clients, or need to report to third parties on their analytics data, the sharing feature has the potential to become an invaluable tool. Now you can click the “share” button to generate a URL which can then be passed on to a colleague or client for them to view.  Also, there is now the capability to annotate a given point in time on a graph.

Intelligence and Custom Alerts

Analytics is now more intelligent! The new functionality actively monitors events and creates alerts if something happens outside an expected range of activity on the site, for example if your new visitor rate spikes through the roof, or similar. You can even set the sensitivity of how many alerts you get to see.

You can also now set up custom alerts along the same lines:

The theory behind all these changes is saving time and enabling greater information at your fingertips in less time. To me these all look like positive steps forward and I know I’ll be using some of these features in anger…