Google Analytics Gains Additional Features

Since Google introduced Google Analytics back in 2005, it has become the industry standard. A simple, free method of getting a bird's eye view into who's searching for what on the internet. Millions of business owners around the world rely on Google Analytics to make informed decisions about how to position and present the products and services they make available on the web. It is, simply put, an invaluable marketing tool.

Unfortunately, it's also a bit long in the tooth. Not only is the design of the analytics dashboard more than a little dated, the information it contains is of increasingly less immediate value.

Google isn't blind to this, of course, and recently, the company announced a major overhaul to their analytics platform that will lean heavily on recent advances in machine learning. Additionally, the coming changes will present a unified app and web reporting feature that will provide improved integration, in addition to making the analytics platform easier to use.

Vidhya Srinivasan is the VP of Measurement, Analytics, and Buying Platforms at Google.

Vidhya had this to say about the recent changes in a blog post:

"The new Analytics is designed to adapt to a future with or without cookies or identifiers. It uses a flexible approach to measurement, and in the future, will include modeling to fill in the gaps where the data may be incomplete. This means that you can rely on Google Analytics to help you measure your marketing results and meet customer needs now as you navigate the recovery and as you face uncertainty in the future."

Perhaps the most significant improvement though, comes in the form of the new alert system, that notifies Analytics users about significant trends in their data that can help greatly when attempting to calculate purchasing probability and churn.

The coming changes are exciting indeed. The company introduced the foundations of the change last year in beta and so far, they've been well-received. People who use the new, more robust platform are simply better able to manage their data, and that's a very good thing. There's no word yet on when the changes will move out of beta and into the mainstream, but stay tuned, and prepare to be impressed.