New Google Analytics Features: Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent.

Earlier today at eMetrics in Washington, D.C., the Google Analytics team announced some awesome new features that will provide greater reporting capabilities, more flexible customization options, and add an element of insightful intelligence to your report data. How exciting!

Let’s review the newest features of the Google Analytics Product that were announced today as “Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent.”:

1. Expanded Goals - Expanded Goals now allow administrators the ability to add up to 20 Goals per profile, a 500% increase on the previous number of four goals per profile!

2. Site Engagement Goals - Site Engagement Goals now allow you to more robustly measure user-engagement and branding efforts off of your web site. Instead of only being able to define URLs as goals, you can now define the time on site or the number of page views as a goal in Google Analytics.

3. Expanded Mobile Tracking - Google Analytics will now have the ability to track mobile applications built for the iPhone and for the Android platforms. Mobile site owners will be able to install specified tracking code on their mobile site, which will allow them to analyze what actions are taken with a mobile application and what features are used.

4. Advanced Table Filtering - This will be enabled in all standard Google Analytics report tables and will allow users to filter rows based on metric conditions and combinations, just like a user can when creating an Advanced Segment.

5. Unique Visitors – This is a new metric in Google Analytics that will be available when creating a Custom Report. This makes it possible to see how many actual visitors  make up any user-defined segment in a Custom Report.

6. Multiple Custom Variables - This is a highly flexible feature that allows multiple labels to be assigned to each unique visitor. In the past, users could only specify one label via a user-defined segment using the _setVar JavaScript function. Now, users will have the ability to create multiple variables for one unique visitor. These multiple custom variables can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently.

7. Advanced Segment and Custom Report Sharing - Even though this was already announced, this option allows users to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments with each other via a permanent URL that can be forwarded or emailed to another user.

8. Intelligence Reports - Intelligence Reports will be part of a brand new report section which will feature pre-defined alerts for your Google Analytics account data. This is designed to alert a Google Analytics user to a significant change in data patterns over daily, weekly and monthly periods. This is just a part of the initial release of an algorithmic driven intelligence engine.

9. Custom Alerts - Need to set-up your own alerts with your own parameters? Now you can do just that within the Intelligence Report section of Google Analytics. Define your own set of rules and make your own determinations as to what is significant for your and your web site, and even let Google Analytics email you when an alert happens!

These features are very exciting, but they are only the beginning of greater things to come in 2010. These features are also being pushed out to users over the next few weeks, so check your Google Analytics account frequently (which you do already) and be the first person on your block to use them!