The New Google Analytics – Good for Enterprises? by Robbin Steif, LunaMetrics
(LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will be doing a Google Analytics Training Day in New York City on Dec. 9)
Recently, Google Analytics announced six new features, some of which really make GA better for the enterprise-level user. Today, I’d really like to look at what kinds of things GA has done to make itself ready for enterprise analytics — and what they still have to do.
We’ve come really far in the area of enterprise-level analytics:
• Google Analytics now has an Applications Programming Interface (API) – a way to access the data and interface with external applications. It’s in closed beta (we’ve been working with it here at LunaMetrics). An API is vital to enterprises – organizations that often need to export their data into custom dashboards and other enterprises systems, such as CRMs, bid management tools, web personalization engines, and more.
• Now, there’s an easy new way to do segmentation (called Advanced Segments). For the first time, you can easily create a segment of everyone who came on paid search, or who came from a specific country (or both, or whatever you need) and do segment-specific analysis. Best of all, the segments work retrospectively on your data. In the past, you had to anticipate your needs and create special profiles and filters. When your boss asked, “What was the average order size of individuals who came from our recent email campaign?” you had to have hoped you had anticipated that question a few weeks (or months!) in advance. Now, you can whip up an Advanced Segment and see that information right away.
• Also introduced a couple of weeks ago: Custom reporting. Now, you can make reports very specific to what you need and save them, so that you can use them over and over again (and run the same report requirements over different profiles and even different accounts that have the same login.) Different individuals in an enterprise have the need for narrow, specific reports. It gives each of them just what they want.
• There’s also a new interface for viewing accounts and profiles, so that you can easily compare different sites. This is pretty vital to enterprises, because understanding the profitability and performance of business units is one of the many ways that they measure themselves.
• Google Analytics introduced object-oriented programming when they brought out their new code a year ago (known as ga.js). The new code made it much easier to have multiple sets of code on a single page. Imagine an enterprise like a university – each department may want to keep their data confidential. But at the provost or president level, there may be a need to roll up all the data and see how the total site is performing. The “new” (ok, it’s not so new) code makes having two sets of code much easier.
• Event Tracking. This was a capability that Google Analytics announced a year ago and which is still in limited beta. It enables the site to track not just pages and clicks, but events, such as, “Did they look at a movie? Which movie did they start? How far did they get into the movie?” There are lots of other events that can be tracked, but the movie example is an excellent one, because it gets to the core of how event tracking works. Here at Luna, we agree that many sites need event tracking (not just enterprises) but that there are some enterprises who cannot live without it.
Still on my wish list for enterprise Google Analytics:
• Multiple user defined variables. Right now, you can create only one user defined variable (like “member” or “purchaser.”). But an enterprise will want to pick up the fact that the user is female and Dutch and blonde and a member of the organization – they need many user defined variables to help understand their users. (Like all the items on my wish list, this one has a workaround too, but we need some additional user defined variables “out of the box.”)
• Cross domain tracking needs to be easier. Google Analytics uses first party cookies. That means, as soon as you move from one domain to another, it thinks you are a different person. There are great ways built into GA to track across domains, but they aren’t scalable. It’s one thing to track from your small site to your third party shopping cart, and something else entirely to track among hundreds of sites. Yes, there are workarounds (and we developed one of them here at LunaMetrics), but again, we need out of the box solutions.
• Unique visitor tracking across multiple domains. Even once we solve the cross domain tracking problem, we have another. Media sites – like a radio company such as Clear Channel, or a magazine company with multiple magazines — really care about unique visitors (in addition to visits.) So if someone visits one Clear Channel site and then another day, visits a different ClearChannel property without going through the first one that they had already visited on the prior day, that person will be seen as two unique visitors even if the cross-domain tracking is set up. Why? Unless the visitor actual travels from one site to the other, the cookies are never transferred. Again, there are workarounds right now.
• More robust user permissions. Enterprises need three levels of permissions: read only, admin access limited to parts of the site, and administrative access for the whole account. Right now, GA has the first one (read only) and administrative access for the whole account, but there is no ability to give admin access for only certain profiles.
Having said all that – wow, are we getting there!! Every single problem I pointed out above can be solved with workarounds, and the ones that couldn’t – like an API, and retroactive segmentation – are now being solved by Google Analytics themselves.
I’m actually really anxious to play around with the API when it’s available. With a lead generation contract I worked for, being able to export the analytics data to their custom CRM would have done wonders in optimizing their advertising campaigns. Any clue as to when it can be open to all GA users?