A while back I walked into a meeting and said:
"You know what… web analytics tools like Site Catalyst, Yahoo! Web Analytics, WebTrends, and yes even Google Analytics, are mostly glorified data pukers. Each tries to outdo the other in trying to collect ever more data and regurgitating it. For all the math they do, it is astonishing how little intelligence they have, how little actual smarts are applied."
Silence for a a few mins.
Awkward glances.
Then this: "What do you mean, and what can we do?"
Me: "I wish the tools would use an algorithmic approach to highlight the things an Analyst needs to know, give 'em some starting points. Why make people dig for hours?"
You have to hand it to the team at Google, you "provoke" them and they respond. Google Engineers truly rock!!
Today Last week the Google Analytics team announced a raft of sweet features that take the current functionality in GA, wrap a liquid hydrogen fuel tank on it and shot it into a higher value orbit. Take some time to learn more about how you put more power behind your analysis punch: Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent.
In this post I'll want to share rest of the story, what came of the above provocation.
The first thing you'll notice in Google Analytics is a new cool ability to better identify the "known unknowns", i.e. we know what we want to know, but we don't know if and when it is happening.
The feature is, rather cutely, known as Custom Alerts.
Here's an example. Everyone tells me that Twitter is nothing but hype. But
[sidebar]
i started to write this post in preparation of the GA new features launch, unfortunately the next day i broke my right hand. that meant going to emetrics to do the announcement in a temporary cast, and of course no blog post. i had surgery this past thu. metal plate and some screws in, things will be normal in a few weeks.
i unfortunately still can't type the thoughtful teachable post i had in mind, rather here are two videos that tell you about two features i am really proud of. hope you'll love 'em as well.
[/sidebar]
custom alerts: identifying the known unknowns
video: 8 mins:
sweet? : )
intelligence: identifying the unknown unknowns!
video: 16 mins:
love it?
i hope you had fun learning a bit more about these two cool features. promise me you are going to set up two segmented custom alerts today!
let me answer one question that might be top of mind: the features are rolling out to all accounts starting last thu, it'll get to yours any day.
it would be great to hear from you, please share your feedback, suggestions and critique via comments. thanks.
Via 
Can't wait to try out the great looking new features although part of me still pains for the need to consider with all of this extra functionality the need to remember some basics:
1) If no action can be or is going to be taken any golden nuggets / insight is worthless.
2) Before jumping into any new tool/ technology/ functionality clearly define what ones objective is and then through the toolsets available decide which best meet that goal and which metrics are most suitable. Otherwise more data no matter how insightful and timely is just that. This ultimately goes back to the need to plan from the ouset, not simply consider analytics at the last moment.
Looking forward to trying out the GA mobile update and on that note can I suggest a couple of blog post topics it would be great to hear you discuss:
i) Mobile analytics: differences with traditional onsite, options available (server logs / mobile specific eg: Bango etc), pitfulls, what metrics are more important….
ii) Analytics maturity models: with a fair amount of discussion about half a dozen or so maturity models be great to hear your take on them etc.
Thanks as always!
ps: hope the hand heels up fast…how'd it happen?
Excellent features Avinash, thanks for provoking the GA team like that ;-) There was acutally one GA API based tool that did stuff similar to what the Intelligence does (can't remember the name, but it was feature on the API help pages somewhere). However, Analytics Intelligence looks even better.
I can't wait for it to be enabled for my account.
For starters – you should definitely consider doing more blog videos!! It's a nice change of pace and I really enjoyed watching them.
I'd like to add that Custom Alerts can handle volume if you need it. I have played with this feature for a few weeks now and I set up some custom alerts for my own management needs. One of those alerts lets me know when a Goal Conversion rate decreases by more than 75% week over week. I have applied this to 250+ profiles (and counting!) and I'm really loving it right now. Because I am responsible for so many accounts / profiles, this alert – applied globally – allows me to:
1. Give immediate attention to problems (If tagging is removed or a website URL has changed and I need to update my Goal URL)
2. Focus on the most critical tasks (everyone is important but if there is an issue I know where it is and which Goal to repair. This is extremely helpful instead of digging in to 250+ profiles one by one or using the GA overview screen)
3. I can set-up other alerts too like PPC traffic increases or decreases for our big-spenders (over-budget or need to increase PPC spending).
There's an infinite number of possibilities now with Intelligence / Custom Alerts – and they save boat loads of time for me! :)
"Google Intelligence" is pretty sweet, and I can't wait to play more with it!
However after using it for only 10 seconds I found a major flaw that I'm surprised all the "experts" haven't picked out: Alerts is lacking the ability to use cost data and e-commerce data as metrics!
I mean, how obvious is it that I want an alert whenever my CPA rises above a certain threshold? Or when the turnover for a given product category suddenly drops?
It is almost like Google forgot to ask all webshops about what type of alerts they would want, and only focused on more "traditional" sites.
great intro and explaination.
I am now in the situation where I wish my clients used GA instead of Omniture!
Whilst Sitecatalyst allows you to set alerts quite elegantly – the integration of segmentation in GA has makes me so jealous!
Hey Avinash,
The custom alerts feature is awesome. Inspired to get along with GA as an alert. I never knew that it has got these possibilities.
First of all : No worries on you , hope that u will get better very soon, in Arabic "Salamat inshallah" :)
I hope that people will get engaged in web analytics as a routine and a most to have job for each business small or large.
The new google features is just a result of good analytics ninja calls ,like you.
Regards
Ouch! I can only imagine the type of nature photography you must have been attempting to break your hand! May it heal quickly. In the meantime, I guess you'll become quite adept at one handed typing.
And BTW, thank you for throwing the gauntlet at Google! These new features are sure to be put to good use!
Has the "Intelligence" feature been fully rolled out yet?
Can't see it anywhere on my GA. I'm in England if that helps, maybe it's just for US at the moment.
Thanks
Alex
What a revelation. Web Analysis will not be the same with these features. I remembered doing custom dashboards with control limits. These intelligence features is so useful for finding insights. I think that everybody will start their analysis using these features .The companies in paid solutions will get Google analytics just for that. Great.
Great post Avinash…I haven't watched the videos, but you answered my most pressing question, "why don't I have the new features in my account?!" The post on the Analytics Blog implied that "as of today (last week) the new intelligence is available…"
But I looked everywhere for it and still cannot see it today. so as soon as I see it, I have a list of alerts that I need to make.
Here's an idea…
SMS Alerts to my iPhone!! Then I can work from the golf course, right?
I can't wait to get my hands on these new features.
This is great stuff Avinash. I really like the video format since it's easy to visually see what you are explaining.
I am also excited about these new features. Can't wait to find some time to play with it!
Excellent feature, and thanks for the great job outlining how it works, and most important – how to glean actionable insights from the alerts.
I agree that you should be doing more blog videos when possible!
Rob: Site Catalyst is a wonderful tool and has been a source inspiration for many vendors to do things differently in the last few years. Do them better, more simply etc. It is my fondest hope that the ecosystem pushes each vendor and forces them to junk the sub-optimal ways of doing things.
What is clear to everyone, including the team at Google, is that "glorified data pukers" are not going to survive – regardless of if they are called Omniture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics or Google/Yahoo Analytics.
In the end we the end users win, hurray!!
Mike: It was more mundane, running down stairs, late for an appointment, turn, hand caught in the bannister, crack!
Christos: My hope is that this will push the paid vendors to substantially improve their own solutions and make them intelligent rather than stay on the daily path of collecting and puking ever more data out. If they improve it puts pressure on others which then fosters innovation all around.
Soeren: I would use a different word than "flaw".
As I had mentioned this is phase one and a lot of metrics and dimensions are being actively analyzed by Intelligence. Over time that should only increase. Meanwhile I encourage you to play with the many Outcomes already available for you to use.
Juls: I am not sure how to read your comment. But…
We can work harder to make the path easier, we can make the journey less stressful, we can use technology to tell you when you might be doing things right or wrong. You still have to want to go somewhere, ideally you know exactly where you want to go.
-Avinash.
He's a genius, and it's fair to say some of us are not:
"I've never had a computer [in my office], I've never had a calculator in there, I've never had a stock ticker in there," Warren Buffet insists. He believes that if a deal needs complicated calculations before you can decide if it is right, then it probably is not. He always leaves a 'margin of safety', he says, so that if things don't work out as he'd hoped, he does not lose money.
Your efforts to apply Occam's Razor to the complexity and bring us simple solutions is greatly appreciated!
Avinash, Thanks for the insights into the enhancements and for driving change at Google and in this space. I haven't gone in to even see if I have the intelligence features yet. However, one challenge that I see this possibly helping with in my organization is helping to alert us when a specialty tag falls off of our site. We have had some specialty tags that are in places that are often modified. Sometimes the developers are not as familiar with web analytics tags and blow them away during a feature redesign. If the lost tag isn't caught in our QA process, it's caught by our business users when they look at some reporting and see flatlines. Setting an alert on the the metrics coming from these tags to let us know if they go to zero will allow us to get tagging back sooner. I know that this is probably under-utilizing the feature for it's intended purposes.
PS: I hope your hand gets better quickly. Must be irritating.
“Google Intelligence” is very cool. It is definitely a step in the right direction, however, there is still something missing – the answer to the question "why", i.e. why did the amount of visitors to my site dropped yesterday.
Kampyle integrated with Google Analytics to do just that. We integrated user feedback with Google Analytics data, allowing Kampyle not only to raise an alert when something happens but also to say why did it happen. You can read some more about it here: blog.kampyle.com/post_332
This is awesome Avinash.
I hope Google Analytics also will inlcude the possibility to add context into the reports in the future.
Flag activities (campaign from – to), add comments to events/alerts that have happened etc.
I really think this a great development of the system. No more follow up on competitors features, but a new market standard.
As you mention this i step 1, and I have a few suggestions for what to include in the next step :-)
You say that data are compared to the last 13 months/weeks, and in that way the variation during time is not taken into consideration. A really nice development would be to be able to choose what period you want to get your data compared to. It could be a few standard options like: The day before, the same day of week last week, all days before in the same week, last week, or the exact same period but the year before. In that way the picture will be even more precise.
But again, a really great feature. Looking forward to have even more advanced features in the future :-)
Thank you, thank you, thank you! This was beautifully explained, and with the typical Avinash enthusiasm and rapture that makes us keep coming back. ;)
I am meeting with our Quality Assurance and Sales department later this week to discuss with them how to use Google Analytics (and Crazy Egg) to provide our other departments with actionable insights, rather than reports. I will use this info as an exciting closer to that meeting, I think!
Avinash – Hats off for this post inspite of being handicapped :-).
I finally got time to view the features (again) and amazingly I got more insights this time around than when I first heard it at Emetrics. To me the cool thing is that even though the features are tool specific (Google Analytics), the concepts you talk about have another layer of intrinsic value — and that being encouraging your readers to think beyond the everyday dashboards and trending etc. and move more into what the current reports are not showing.
Get better soon so that you can write some "thoughtful teachable post" :-)
odd broke right hand same time frame
finally, its been said drill down reports and simplifid dashboards and basic math are not "analytics", neither is measuring…
u've always been a proponent of start simple move to complex: start w/ basics on to discovery, insight, prediction, optimization and action …. now a way to accelerate the process
Soooo is this feature ever going to be rolled out?
Alerts for dipping conversion rates – I like that! Would have been nice to have today on one of my PPC accounts.
If you like Kampyle read this article from Website Magazine http://bit.ly/32mqlQ
that reviews usability tools.
I am affiliated with usertesting.com but the article covers many tools.
Amanda
Avinash,
I just saw you speak at eMetrics. Was a wonderful presentation.
In the past, I've heard you speak and advocate a free survey tool called 4Q survey. I signed up this week and saw that your name was all over the product, so I was very reassured about its quality. But today, I went back to login to the site and I saw that your name and your endorsement had been pulled. What happened? Why was your name pulled from the 4Q survey home page?
Thanks again!
I read this blog and comments to increase my knowlede, as my work assignment does not involve WA. So a few questions:
1. How did you set up a goal value/visit of $2 for Twitter?
2. Why was data compared to the last 13 months/weeks? Is 13 an industry standard of time? Seems more usable to have the time period determined by the user, as previously mentioned.
3.What would you do if you have a high bounce rate? I read your post on bounce rates and it makes sense to check traffic sources, KW, and LP content. Perhaps your action is not to match the traffic sources and KW to that same LP content in the future?
On the hand..activity promotes healing.
Avinash, hope your hand heals quickly. This is a great post. The point about the time required to analyze and drill down into the data is incredibly true. I'm curious what new features are being considered or developed related to data visualization. I like the visualization tools that are available now. Are there plans to either further enhance these or allow users to customize them?
Brady
Harlan: Answers to your questions…
1.The average per visit goal value for my blog is $1.67 so I set a much higher, to be aggressive, $2 as the value for Twitter traffic as I have higher expectations from that traffic.
2. Today the three time periods you see are daily, weekly and monthly. In each a long enough time period is shown for you to find strategic insights, but that does not mean you can't look at smaller number of months. I like 13 months because I can more easily look at same month last year, always a good thing.
3. Here's a post with very specific ideas of how to improve high bounce rates:
Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages
Hope this helps.
Brady: The GA team will continue to find new and interesting ways to visualize the data but what I am more excited about is the cool data visualizations that people outside are building on top of GA data using the free API.
Here's the latest one:
Google Analytics data Treemap visualization created using the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library:
(Especially checkout the jquery powered filtering feature, really awesome)
Another cool one is:
Trendly, a most excellent way to find automated insights from your data, visualizations are particularly intriguing.
Avinash.
Unfortunately, the new functions are not rolled out to my account till now. I'm really looking forward to get it.
Hi Avinash
I guess the real challenge for all marketers is this:
Who would be brave enough to set up alerts for the BIG metrics (when revenue per day drops below x) and have the alert go directly to their management team?
Nothing like a bit of pressure to make your team perform and keep business data front of mind for the bean counters, eh?
Best regards with the healing hand and just got my Web Analytics 2.0 book today…great bedtime reading!
David
David: Sadly that might take much longer than it should, Marketers and Analysts are not all that much into personal accountability. : )
But I am optimistic that that will change with time. We will educate the management and the management will learn to embrace the whole concept of "failing faster" rather than being punitive about acceptable failures.
-Avinash.
Avinash – hope you're healing quickly!
I moved a couple of my goals last week. (I just changed the drop down option for goals 3&4 to 6&7.) All of the historical data disappeared! Do you know if this was the expected behavior or did I do something? Thanks in advance!
Angie: First the most important thing: Your goal history is not lost! ')
Moving goals is a helpful feature in the new version of Google Analytics, you can see the view you want.
Unfortunately, and I am sorry about this, the messaging in the system is not clear on the impact of you moving the goal from, say, set 1 to set 2 (or whatever).
Each goal has its "position" in the system. When you move the goal it inactivates the old position and recreates it in the new position. Fresh start in life. :)
But when you look back you don't see any history (obviously). This is something the team at Google should make a lot more clear and think about.
If you want to "recover" the "lost" history for a goal you had moved then follow these steps:
1. Say you had moved goal "Leads Captured" from Set 1, Goal 1 to Set 2, Goal 2.
2. Go back to the Profile Settings page. Create a goal into Set 1 Goal 1 (the original position before you moved it).
3. Call this goal "Historical Data for Leads Captured".
4. In setting the goal, say it was lead_submitted.html before, use a value that won't ever be matched, say leads_submitted_avinash.html.
This way your old data will be there but new data will go where you moved the goal to.
5. Now go back to see your reports. Magic! All your "missing" historical data is still there waiting to be loved.
The team at Google is always updating things so hopefully they will move your data when you move goals. But until then if you move your goals you know that your data is still there for you.
-Avinash.
Hi Avinash,
I wrote a cautionary post (http://www.webranking.com/blog/google-analytics-goal-position-change-is-flawed) on "changing goal positions" after I tested position changes and discovered a few elements of this feature that I have issue with. Sam Niccolls, from SEOmoz, mentioned that GA probably has a messaging issue here which I tend to agree with.
While I am still not recommending to change goal positions due to the analytics data history corruption/confusion that can result, I think that your advice to Angie is the best strategy for changing goals and retaining accurate data history that I have come across.
Cheers,
James
Hello Avinash,
As usual, you make wonderful contribution to the world, thank you!
I am still waiting to get my "intelligent-insights" enabled for my account – but hope it will unavail soon.
The reason I am writing this post (and I hope it is fine with you) is in hope that you will use your sway with the G-Team that is working on google-website-optimizer (=GWO), so to have them (or someone else) create a plugin to connect GWO with wordpress themes.
I already suggested this over a year ago in one of the wordpress forums:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/211871?replies=6
The purpose is to allow bloggers (such as you, me and others), to test different versions of their themes (and widgets) layout.
According to the replies I got in the WP forum, what I suggested is not supposed to be hard to implement (and I believe it will do a huge amount of good to the WP community!)
Thank you for doing what you do, I have the utmost respect for your online (and offline) presence!
Tal
Tal: Have you used this:
SES Theme Split Test
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-ab-theme-split-tests/
It is a theme split tester for A/B testing WordPress themes. It uses Google Analytics to do the reporting. Details here:
http://www.leewillis.co.uk/how-to-split-test-wordpress-themes/
I'll of course also suggest this to the GWO team, perhaps they can create something as well.
Avinash.
Thank you Avinash!
That plugin skipped my eye (I see it is just a month old, I should have checked again before posting).
p.s (with no relevance to our previous conversation): Consider adding threaded comments to your blog. Or better yet, use something like
http://disqus.com/
or:
http://www.intensedebate.com/
Which will integrate into the blog, will allow threading, and will also allow people to login using their twitter/facebook (so on) accounts.
Thanks again!
Tal
That's a great post Avinash. I can only imagine the looks on their faces when you said your opening statement. I love the newest updates to GA.
How's your hand? I have been playing with voice recognition to text recently. You may want to give it a whirl while your hand is healing :-).
As time goes on, more and more people will start to realize the large gap between data reports and analytics. Your post reminds us all that true analytics comes from providing insights into what is happening in time to improve the system, not just reading about what went wrong in some report.
till now i m using sitemeter will start using analytics after changing my theme..
I agree with Robert on the voice recognition. I have used Dragon Naturally Speaking with good success. My friend suggested it when he broke his collar bone and couldn't type for 2 months!
Great post, thank you.
Craig.
I have a theory that if nonprofits started to behave more like businesses they'd have a much larger impact than their business counterparts. Something I've been dying to get an arts presenter to try is a marketing campaign that makes use of barcodes you can share with your friends via cameraphone for discount and free tickets. It's something that can be analyzed and might prove as a worthwhile to get butts in seats and maybe convince someone to contribute to help continue what they just got to see for free.
I keep hearing about how great this, but I have yet to see it. Is there anyway to tell how long it will take to completely roll out?
Ben
Good read Avinash!
I have a question about SEM. What do you think the challenges are in Search Engine Marketing, and what would you do to overcome them.
Thanks,
Kanika
Avinash, you are absolutely right with "for all the math they do, it is astonishing how little intelligence they have, how little actual smarts are applied.” I hope this situation is beginning to change. –Mikhail
Hi Avinash,
I have a small issue with making a custom alert – while the Intelligence feature & the 20 goals are rolled out on the account I'm working on, when I try to set up a custom alert for the goals I can only do so for (what it indicates as) goals 1-4, as if the new goals feature hadn't happened.
Any cure/advice?
Love your work,
Matt, Cornwall, UK
Matt: It is a current limitation due to the balancing act to get the feature out in beta faster. It would be reasonable to expect that more metrics, and dimensions, will be available over time to create custom alerts.
I am a huge fan of Outcomes so I assure you that having access to all Goals is very very high on my personal wish list. :)
Avinash.
Good thing we have you to explain all this to us so we can make sense of it and jump-in. I got access to Intel a little late for whatever reason and now I'm beginning to check it out.
When I first looked at it, I really didn't know what to do with it. So, naturally, I went to your blog and found this post! Now I can go in and mess around and hopefully get better data in less time.
Awesome videos, thanks for sharing them here with us!
Avinash thanks so much for the videos! They've been so helpful. Keep up the great work!
Avinash, This is an excellent post, It is obvious you put a good deal of time putting these videos together. I find myself getting very frustrated with Google and their various tools. It does appeal they are trying to help, however it takes great effort to stay on top of everything. It's odd that takes an outsider to give a full explanation of exactly how their own products work. Keep up the good work, much appreciated!
Orlando Tarins
Avinash,
For most the websites my company oversees, we don't have much data to work with. Can I use Google Analytics Intelligence to create goals for each of my KPI's?
For instance, let's say Visits is one of my KPI's. I crack open Analytics Intelligence and it says that each week my *expected* number of visits is "2,453-3,659". Multiply that by four and I assume I should get 9,812 to 14,636 visits per month. So if I'm really ambitious, I would aim each month for 14k visits or more for the website's traffic.
I know this is, um, maybe a lazy way of doing things…but is it at least a starting point for those of us who are still catching up with marketing methods and statistical analysis (I was an English Lit major…)? Any reasons not to do this?
Thanks!
Adrian: Forecasting and setting goals is a complex process. What the Intelligence feature does is essentially predict out "where the numbers should be" given your past performance and variability and more stuff like that.
What you have described is a good starting point. But remember any algorithmic system does not know things it does not know. I know that sounds crazy but say you just increased your ppc spend, or got a groupon thing. In that case your expected outcome should be massively more than historical or what Intelligence might say.
So be aware of that and happy analytics! :)
Avinash.