Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. Brett Crosby announced several Google Analytics features that will be rolled out over the coming weeks. Here's a rundown.
First, you'll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity. Simply edit any of your Google Analytics profiles to enable "Site Search" and you can find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead. Located in the Content section of your Google Analytics reporting interface, Site Search reports show you the keywords and search refinement keywords people use, the pages from which people begin and end their searches. You can also see how search on your site affects site usage, conversion rates, and e-commerce activity. (BTW, if you don't have a search box on your site, you might want to try the free and newly launched Google Custom Search Engine.)
We'll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics. In order to provide a way for you to define and track a wide variety of applications and interactions, there will be a new tracking module called ga.js. Using ga.js on your site instead of urchin.js means you can continue to take advantage of the latest advanced tracking enhancements (such as Event Tracking) as we release them. Although we suggest everyone upgrade to the new JavaScript, if you aren't interested in Event Tracking and you're already getting all the information you need from Google Analytics, you don't need to change your tags.
We'll also initiate a limited beta test in the coming weeks of our new Outbound Link Tracking feature. This feature will report on links visitors clicked on your site that direct them to another site. If you have already used the "Urchin Tracker" to track your outbound links, you may want to avoid changing your code twice by waiting to upgrade your JavaScript to ga.js until this feature is fully rolled out.
Finally, Brett announced the Urchin Software from Google limited beta. Urchin is a software product that you run on your own servers. Its reporting interface is similar to the previous Google Analytics interface. If you would like to participate in the limited beta, please contact one of our Authorized Consultants.
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