I ran into Brett Crosby several times at Emetrics Summit, including at the Bar and several Google Analytics shirts later (I must have taken over 10 of the new shirts - they rock - I think they say "optimize me" - they're all in the laundry now as I wore them more than anything else at Emetrics) - but I didn't actually catch the announcement - at least, not the beginning of it - came in at the end.
However, in case you haven't read it yet or don't know it - Brett Crosby announced Exciting Announcements at eMetrics and from what I saw, it was exciting, indeed. Where Google can improve Google Analytics, they do - like including Event Tracking for Video Downloads, Video Streams and Site Search Analytics. I think this is impressive. Unfortunately, I forget to ask for my accounts to be upgraded first (so I can examine the features myself - and so I think I and most of the rest of us will need to wait a little bit before the new features of Google Analytics are activated for the rest of us).
But I do want to say something about my overall reflections about Emetrics this week - this was a very productive conference and WAA Board Meeting for me (being on the Board of Directors for the Web Analytics Association - we meet in person twice yearly, at the Summit in the United States - not the European Summits). I feel the Web Analytics community is maturing and a redefinition of what Web Analytics is needed.
Having said that - while I feel Google Analytics tends to muddy up the water by stating that using Google Analytics is easy - Web Analytics, itself, is not easy - and that was highlighted again, by Eric T. Peterson in two presentations at Emetrics.
And I was able to present on Second Life Analytics at IBM, along with Jared Freedman, who presented his Advertising Platform for Virtual Worlds.
Getting back to the Google Analytics new features annoucnement:
"...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."
And I spoke to a few of the Google Analytics Channel Partners and found, again, a frustration that most people who use Google Analytics don't really want to spend money on support - even though, that's clearly needed in many cases - as the setup of many small and medium sized businesses, using hybrid products and technologies, often mirrors the complexity of larger organizations - where one expects to find tracking problems - but which are often dealt with by an overall corporate strategy for analytics data collection.
On the other hand, most small companies don't have an underlying strategy for web analytics data collection - therefore they have many of the problems in tracking data that much larger entities have, without the benefit of the strategy and experience that go with it.
Unfortunantly, Google Analytics, with the ease of it's tool (which really is not that easy to use, even now) just makes the problem even worse by unintentionally fostering the idea you can get web analytics and it's insights for free.
But what people forget is the insight come from web analysts, not the tool.
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