Tech Shout!

Google has refurbished Google Analytics, by enhancing and expanding the data reporting abilities of the website usage monitoring service.

Companies are lately trying their best to understand how people land to their websites and what they do once they are there. And products such ad Google Analytics helps in exactly going that and that’s the reason they are continuing to rise and become popular lately.

Knowing that helps webmasters make their sites more effective tools for displaying online ads, offering sales leads, and generating e-commerce transactions.

Google took over Urchin around two years ago and this is what marked the internet giant’s entry into the web analysis market. Urchin’s technology forms the basis for the Analytics service.

According to Brett Crosby, Google Analytics senior manager, on the whole the main goal of this upgrade is to make the product more responsive to use and its data clearer and easier to digest so that it can be used effectively to make business decisions.

Keeping that in mind, the user interface has been redeveloped to be more intuitive, and the product has gained new ways of presenting web usage information and of displaying and delivering reports, added Crosby. Google has also added what it calls “plain language” descriptions of the data to make it more understandable.

The American Cancer Society has been a users of the Google Analytics service for about 18 months, and has tested the latest version of the service for the past month and found it offered major enhancements, said Adam Pellegrini, the group’s online strategy director.

Improvements could be noticed especially in the fact in being able to schedule the automatic creation and e-mail delivery of reports has been a big help for the group’s two Google Analytics staffers, which initially required to manually reformat reports into PDF files and send them out via e-mail, he said.

Pellegrini added that he would like Google to add the capability to deliver Analytics reports and notifications via RSS content syndication as well as create a rich desktop application so Analytics can be used offline as well.

Google will start setting off the Google Analytics upgrade on Tuesday, and it expects to finish it in a few weeks, Crosby said. Existing users will be able to use the old version for at least 30 days after the new version becomes available to them.