Google Analytics Intelligence

A couple of new features were released today in Google analytics, and are available for some people now – soon to be pushed out to all accounts. Google have been looking to re-position the GA for the more enterprise level customer and a number of these new features look to step up the level of data and strategic insight that users are able to glean from it.

The first of the new features is ‘Intelligence’. In what is the first of a phased roll out of new features the Intelligence report which will give user access to an algorithm-driven intelligence engine in Google Analytics. That sounds fancy, but what does it mean? Well, in essence google is now giving users the ability to automatically highlight key changes to their site metric over time. For instance the intelligence tool will be able to see if there is declining trend in conversion by comparing similar conversion points over time. So you won’t need to toggle back and forth across time to see if this weeks conversions dropped compared to the same day last week or month. the Intelligence tool will be able to spot interesting trending changes in your data automatically tell you.

As a statistics guy, I’m very excited about this – how it works is the system analyses the ebb and flow of your site’s traffic, bounce rates, and the patterns thereof.  It then looks for statistically significant deviations from this pattern, using the technique of ‘Standard Deviations’ to vary how sensitive this system of alerts is to changes in site user behavior.

In conjunction with this, Google Analytics will be releasing custom alerts.  Which ties into the Intelligence system, by allowing users to create a fully custom series of alerts that will tell you when your chosen metrics vary outside of a specified range.

The use cases for these new features are endless, but as a whole create a great new avenue for Google Analytics users to gather actionable data that they can build into strategy quickly and efficiently. There are lots of great new features being built into Google Analytics and Website Optimizer, but this is the one I’m most excited about.

---