Digithoughts

Yesterday Google rolled out two major new features: Real Time Analytics and Google Premium. Real Time Analytics further improves an already impressive offering of free Analytics tools, while Premium elevates Google Analytics to the enterprise level where they can compete with the big boys like Omniture and Webtrends.  

Google Analytics Premium
This long awaited feature opens up a new channel for Google Analytics. With a flat-rate pricing model and best-in-industry SLAs, Google Analytics Premium could be an attractive offering for companies that feel that their current solution is too expensive for the value they are getting out of it or would like to make the jump to an enterprise analytics tool.  In addition, Premium will offer a number of features out of the box, that are not available in the Standard Edition, and that are generally sold as add-ons with other tools.  Many of the benefits and features can be found in this short Google presentation.

Companies that require a large enterprise solution should absolutely consider Google Analytics Premium alongside solutions like Omniture when choosing a tool. Digitaria is a Google Analytics Certified Partner, and we are happy to chat with anyone who is interested in the benefits of Premium, or any of the additional features that are available for this tool.

Real Time Analytics
This feature allows analysts and stakeholders to view traffic to their site in real time, with Google boasting data processing and reporting times of less than two seconds. While I tend to be very excitable when it comes to new features from Google Analytics, I see this tool as being more situational, and less practical for regular analysis.  That said, I believe Real Time Analytics will be quite useful in the following areas:

Evangelism:
Let me be clear – this tool is extremely slick. There are plenty of neat visualizations, the screen is constantly blinking as the minute-by-minute and second-by-second traffic graphs are constantly updating. It also includes data on referring sources and location data. This tool can and should be shown to potential clients, not because it’s practical for analysis, but because it is exciting! There are numbers flying all over the screen, graphs bouncing up and down – it provides the exact kind of action that can win over an analytics neophyte and whet their appetite for more.

Social and Campaigns:
The main draw of this tool appears to be its ability to monitor (not measure) the impact of a campaign, a tweet, or a Facebook post as soon as it goes live. In the Social space in particular, this ability to see the real time impact of a re-tweet will allow all Google Analytics users the ability to be more agile and responsive with their social strategies.  

Site Launch Monitoring:
When a site launches, there is always a nervous 10-30 minutes period between initial QA with HttpFox or Fiddler and when the data actually comes into the UI.  Now with Real Time Analytics, data will be in the UI in seconds, allowing implementation specialists to respond to any issues quickly, maximizing the amount of accurate, complete data that is available for the launch. In addition, this is something clients can watch following launch, giving them their own “Shuttle Launch” moment – they can watch the fruition of their efforts jump to life on their screen.

Overall, I love the addition of Real Time Analytics to the standard offering, but I am wary about using it as much more than a tool for Monitoring and Evangelizing Analytics.

Adam Rosenberg Web Analyst

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