2009 was a fun year for us, and we hope, for you too. Here's a month by month breakdown of new features and significant launches from 2009, with links to the blog posts announcing or explaining them. And if you haven't yet, take a look at the Google Analytics YouTube channel, where you can see tons of tutorial videos on the new features.

A big thank you to our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, who have helped advise us on our product roadmap and told us what you need to see in the product.

Get ready! 2010 should be even more exciting.

January

• Track Google Sites with Google Analytics

April

• The integration of AdSense and Google Analytics
• The public launch of the Google Analytics API
• Google Analytics IQ - an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools
  
  

May

• Integration with Google Ad Planner so that you can replace traffic estimates with directly measured Google Analytics data
• Pivoting and Secondary dimensions become available in your reports
• Share custom reports and advanced segments
• Track YouTube brand channels with Google Analytics

June

• Import your Google Analytics goals into AdWords
  
• New homepage and website for Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Desktop Wallpapers!
  
  


• International blogs in German, UK & Ireland, Spanish, French and Japanese

July

• Advanced Segments for Event Tracking

August

• Getting started guides for the API
• Number and reach of Authorized Consultants breaks 100 global partners, with a presence on every continent except Antarctica

September

• Event Tracking available via the API

October

• More goals and new goal types
  
  
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
  
  
• Unique Visitor metric added to Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reports
• Multiple Custom Variables
• Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report templates
• Analytics Intelligence reports and Custom Alerts

December

• New asynchronous tracking code
• Annotations allows you to easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened".
  
• Custom variables available in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports
• New tracking code setup wizard
  
  
• API new features, including support for Advanced Segments, more goals and goal types, and custom variables
• Urchin Software version 6.602 available in more languages

And, of course, we added the ability to post comments on our blog posts.

From our entire team, we hope that, wherever you are, you and yours had a safe New Year's Eve and are looking forward to a happy, healthy, productive and data-driven 2010!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

You're going to put surveys in holiday gifts this year, right? Well, if you're as customer-centric as Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google, you just might. And next year's gifts will be even better.

Avinash has just published Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, also at http://tr.im/akweb. It looks to be a fantastic read by one of the foremost web analytics practitioners and teachers, who is seeing an undeniable evolution of web technologies and online trends, including social media, video, and mobile.

Now is a crucial time to make changes - or get started - and in his typically perceptive style, Avinash begins with a new definition of web analytics:

"Web Analytics 2.0 is: the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition, to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)."

From this framework, he explains how to do web analytics correctly, starting at the best place of all - choosing the right tools (aka, the beginning). As you read, pick any chapter, and you'll emerge an adept at an element of web analytics, from the basics of tracking your site, to analyzing visitor clickstream, to SEM and SEO.

But he goes way beyond this, discussing the practices of competitive analysis, website testing, surveys, using and tracking social media. And he even gives practical tips for working in the industry, including what statistics you might want to know. The book is written in Avinash's clear style, including charts and screenshots.

If you've ever had a conversation with Avinash, you know that you'll come away enriched about our industry and practice. I remember speaking with someone who reported to him at Intuit, who said that she learned more about web analytics in her first half hour one on one with Avinash than she had in her entire career before that.

For instance, we recently launched 20 goals, up from 4, per profile. Avinash has been speaking about the importance of tracking many goals, what he calls micro-conversions, for a while. Take a read to get an expert practitioner's view.

And on top of the incredible content in the book, Avinash is donating 100% of the proceeds from sales of the book to benefit The Smile Train and Ekal Vidyalaya. To read more about the book from Avinash himself, take a look at the announcement on his blog.

Getting this book for yourself or your analyst will be giving a gift to your company. Think of Avinash as Santa Claus. (Avinash Claushik?!)

Happy holidays. :-)

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Urchin analytics software has a long tradition of integrating with other software/hardware platforms, and today we are pleased to announce the latest such collaboration: Coradiant's new Analytics In A Box (AIB). AIB is an appliance that sits behind your firewall, passively collecting web traffic data via a packet-sniffing technique. This gives you the option of reducing your reliance on page tags, as Coradiant's system collects traffic data in an independent way. Log file headaches are also gone for good, which will be music to the ears of any sysadmin!

AIB uses a modified version of Urchin 6, in conjunction with Coradiant's complementary technologies to give you new ways to look at both your web traffic AND the performance of your site/server.

From Coradiant's press release:

"Analytics In A Box provides a comprehensive view into customer Web site interaction, and insights into online conversion outcomes. Analytics capabilities are substantially enhanced through access to a richer data model and customizable reporting solutions. A complete set of dashboards for executive consumption, as well as access to granular data allows deeper insights into marketing optimization, site performance, content optimization, conversion behavior and navigational analysis."

Please see Coradiant's site for more information.




Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Software Manager

It's easier for developers to program in the languages they know, so we updated the Google Analytics API Python Client library with the just-launched API version 2 features. We also added reference examples for both the Account Feed and Data Feed. Now it's easier than ever to automate your analysis workflow using our API.

Taking The Library For a Spin

With the updated library, we thought it would be a great time to highlight the power of the new features. So we created a sample application to do just that. The application uses the new Python library to retrieve metrics for a series of segments. It then performs some calculations on the data and creates bar charts using the GChartWrapper package, an open source Python wrapper for the Google Charts API. Finally, it uses the Python Imaging Library to add a title and legend, and stitches all the charts together into a single image. We decided to release this application as open source so you can create visualizations with your own data.

Solving Business Problems

Since social media is all the rage, let's use this new application to help Avinash Kaushik, our Analytics Evangelist, measure "engagement" on his popular Occam's Razor blog. We also wanted to determine if the time he spends participating in social media sites is valuable and sends new readers to his blog.

First we created segments to pull all the referrals from Facebook and Twitter. Second, we chose five calculations and corresponding metrics to compare the performance of these two segments. We then compared the segments to each other and, for context, for all the visits to the site as a control.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the results:

Let's Analyze

Some interesting observations become apparent.

• Far more visits originate from Twitter (3.6x) when compared to Facebook, perhaps not surprising given Avinash's Twitter followers (~16,120)
  
  
• Visitors from Twitter tend to be new visitors, a good thing, but they view fewer pages and spend significantly less time on the blog.
  


• On the other hand Facebook delivers an audience that is loyal. These visitors come back to the site more often and spend a significant time on the blog (compared to Twitter and all other visitors).
  

The bottom line? Even though social networking sites are all the rage, they actually contribute very little to Avinash's blog. If this blog were a company, it would be wise to ensure the time and effort put into driving traffic from social media is proportionate to the actual volume of traffic and goal conversions from those sites.

Hopefully this example shows how powerful our new features can be.

If you're interested in running this report against your own data, the application is free and open sourced. Additionally, we made it really easy to change the metrics, segments, calculations and all the other visual properties to power your own visualizations. Download it here and give it a whirl, we would love to hear your feedback.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

The Google Analytics team would like to shout "THANK YOU!" to our users. We are so proud of the people using this product. It's a pleasure to be associated with you and build Google Analytics for you.

Through interactions with you at meetings, conferences, in online forums, in the press, and in comments on this blog, we've discovered an intelligent, innovative and engaging group of people who are at the forefront of a fledgling industry. We couldn't be happier to be a part of this ecosystem.

And we appreciate all the feedback. Please continue posting comments, and we'll chime in too when we can.

Happy holidays!

Posted by The Google Analytics Team

Join us in welcoming Urchin 6.602 to the world, the long-awaited multilingual upgrade to our "run-it-yourself" web analytics package. This release adds support for all 11 of our supported languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Japanese, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), and Korean.

Read the complete Changelist for all the details, or visit our Download page to get the goods.

Urchin 6.602 also includes a bunch of significant new features, including:

• Enhanced LDAP integration (more protocols supported)
  


• 1-Click Installer -- no need for an "outboard" database anymore
  


• GeoDB user adjustments -- don't need the full GeoDB? Run fast & light with Urchin 6.602
  


• Updated compression utility -- allows data archives greater than 2GB
  


• Option to select which profiles (and their overview data) to display on users' default "home" screen (aka, roll-up report)
  
  
• Bing.com support (hooray!)
  


• ...and lots of bug fixes and documentation updates
  

Urchin 6.600, released in June 2009, was a major upgrade, so you may want to revisit that blog post for more info.

Urchin 6.602 is available now as a full-featured 30-day demo from our download servers and licenses can be purchased from any of our Authorized Consultants for US$2995. Check it out!

Urchin 6.6's built-in Keyword Generator Tool makes managing your campaigns a lot easier.

Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Software Manager

Over the past few months we've received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API, and it included adding access to Google Analytics newest and most powerful features, such as advanced segments, custom variables and more. Today we want to let you know about improvements to the Google Analytics Data Export API, including the following highlights (all the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group):

Support for Advanced Segments

With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond your aggregated data and peer into the nuances of traffic and visitor activity on your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Germany is over 2 minutes.

We've added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:

1. Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
   


2. Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.
   

This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.



Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data

With the recent Google Analytics launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data. Good call! So now, you can access 48 new metrics around goal performance. We've also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, and step names for each profile.

Take a look at this video describing how to work with goal configuration data in the API.



Custom Variables

Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we've added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you've used is now available through the Account Feed.

We've updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group. We can't wait to see the new apps that come from developers using this data. We're hoping that you spend your holiday tinkering with it :-)

Enjoy!


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

We all love the holiday season, and so now, here are a few reasons to love it even more! A few weeks ago, we announced a set of powerful, flexible, and intelligent features. Today, at SES Chicago, Phil Mui announced additional features that build on these same themes to make your life as an analyst easier. We hope you'll enjoy them.

Annotations

Do you ever wonder about an inexplicable change in your traffic? Or forget exactly when you launched something, or who was responsible? After scratching your head, did you have to chase down different departments in your company or go digging through old emails to get an answer?

For instance:

• Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down?
• When did the new display ads campaign launch?
• Who's responsible for the checkout page redesign and when did it go live?

Running around asking everyone from marketing, IT, and product doesn't scale. More and more large companies are using Google Analytics, so we wanted to cut down on the mileage you need to cover to account for everything that happens to your website and online marketing.

This week, the wild goose chase is over -- you can now easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened" with the launch of Annotations in Google Analytics.

Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers. This short video will show you how to use Annotations.



Taking its usefulness even further: Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business. So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease. No wonder this has been one of the top requested features in Analytics for such a long time!

Note: Annotations is rolling out a bit slower than planned due to the holidays. New features within Google Analytics are launched on a phased roll out due to the volume of accounts, and the demands of testing as we activate the new feature. Usually this process takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the feature. Annotations is being activated to an additional 10% of accounts each week and will be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.

Custom Variables Now Available In Advanced Segments

Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. In Google Analytics, not only are you able to define multiple custom variables, each custom variable is a name-value pair and can be assigned one of 3 scopes: page, session, or visitor. Each custom variable name and each value is an arbitrary string defined by you pertinent to your business needs.

When we announced Multiple Custom Variables in October, the only way to view metrics on these Custom Variables then was to open the standard "Custom Variables" report in the Visitors section. This week, a user can create an advanced segmentation based on any key, value, as well as key-value combination of all Custom Variables. In other words, if you've created a Custom Variable such as "Logged In Member", you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports.

The ability to create visit segments based on Custom Variables is critical in maximizing the full potential of Custom Variables. Users can now slice and dice their metrics by decorating their site traffic with the appropriate key-value pairs.

Custom Variables Available In Custom Reports

You can also create Custom Reports with any of the key or value dimensions associated with any Custom Variable. Now, you can see how a segment defined by Custom Variables behaves along any of the metrics available in Google Analytics.

New Analytics Tracking Code Setup Wizard

One of the more daunting tasks in setting up analytics on any site is to manually configure the tracking code for specialized situations, such as multiple subdomains, cross-domain tracking, mobile web tracking, PHP sites, campaign tagging, etc.

Well, fear no more. When you create a profile, you'll notice a new tracking code setup wizard in Google Analytics. This wizard automatically generates the appropriate tracking code according to the setup options specified by you.

New Version of The Analytics API

Later this week, there will be a separate announcement about a set of very exciting features to our Analytics API. Here's a little preview: Support for Advanced Segmentation will now be available through the API.

In addition, new data dimensions and metrics will be made available, including those in our recently announced features.

Enjoy -- and happy holidays from the Google Analytics team!


Posted by Jeff Gillis and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team

Come to the windy city next week and catch Google Analytics' fearless Senior Product Manager Phil Mui in action at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference. Phil will be presenting at two sessions on Monday at SES:

• MUST SEE: What's New and Exciting with Google Analytics - Monday at 12:45pm at the networking lunch which we're sponsoring. He'll cover the latest feature launch, AND - he might announce some new features. You never know with Phil. We really hope you can make this session - you'll want to share it with your friends, literally (hint, hint). We're not saying anything more.
  
  
• Phil will also participate in a panel called How to Turn Your Web Analytics Into a Money-Making Machine along with Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Sterne, founder of the Web Analytics Association and the eMetrics conference.

Also, the AdWords team will be there in force, presenting the Google Ads Factory Tour, a series of sessions designed to give advertisers practical tips they can use immediately to improve search and display performance. They'll also be holding a session on AdWords Optimization Tools as well as on The Next Generation of AdWords Bidding: Conversion Optimizer. Read more at the AdWords blog post, and register for SES here.


Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

As of this week, all the new Google Analytics features we recently announced should be available in all accounts! (And just yesterday, we announced one more - a new, asynchronous tracking code snippet.)

If you missed the announcements or are curious about the features you're now seeing, join us in this upcoming webinar, happening next week on Wednesday. We'll provide an overview and demonstration of the features and provide tips on some best practices and uses. You'll learn how the following features have added more power, flexibility and intelligence to Google Analytics' enterprise class capabilities:

• Engagement Goals
• Expanded Mobile Reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
• Unique Visitor Metric
• Multiple Custom Variables
• Sharing Advanced Segments & Custom Reports
• Analytics Intelligence
• Custom Alerts

When: Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Time: 10 - 11 am, PST

Register here.

There will also be an opportunity for Q&A so please ask your questions beforehand through Google Moderator.

We hope you'll come learn more about the latest features .... and we may even have a few extra surprises to share then, too! Hope to see you there.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics now provides a new Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternate way to track your website!

Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a "separate lane" to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements.

The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded

The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Using the new tracking code is optional: your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to improve your webpage load times and fine-tune the accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you'll love this new option.

Learn more about this new tracking code on our Analytics Help Center and get started on Google Code.

Posted by Jesse Savage, Google Analytics Team