Analytics is one of the most important tools for most marketers, and the most common option for this is Google Analytics. This set of tools from Google has long been used by millions of people, and has been consistently improved over the years. In order to give a more user-focused set of information, Google is pushing out four new functions to this valuable resource. The official announcement of these features was made HERE.
The first new feature is user-focused reporting, which will show specific information about users rather than just sessions. This will benefit many marketers as it will help focus the data on each visitor rather than each individual time they come to the site. Since many sales are made only after a person visits a page multiple time, this will provide valuable insights on how the final purchases are made.
The information gathered about users will then be able to be explored in more detail in the new ‘User Explorer’ feature. This will make it possible for a marketer to look at the lifetime metrics for each user. This will be based on the information gathered over the lifetime of their cookie, and will give marketers the ability to see information about users with a level of detail not previously possible. This could include information on the total number of transactions made by a customer over an extended period of time.
Audience reporting is another new feature, and it will seem familiar to those who have used AdWords. This option is now available in Analytics, and will let you publish Audiences into reports so that it is possible to see them across channels.
Finally, the Conversion Probability tool will use machine learning to calculate the likelihood that a user is going to convert to a sale at some point in the future. Sites that get sufficient data will be able to more accurately predict sales going forward, which is very valuable to any marketers. It will also be possible to see conversion probability for specific sources of traffic, which will allow marketers to invest money in specific areas with the best ROI.
Overall, these new features within Analytics will be very valuable, and should certainly be something marketers start using right away.
