Google Analytics 2009 Updates

Google Analytics Update
Google Analytics team is constantly working to release new features and fix known issues to give you a better experience. This page is frequently updated for your information and benefit. You can also check out the official Google Analytics Blog for up-to-the-minute news about Analytics (in English or French only).

Browse through a catalog of our biggest updates below:
April 2009
Google Analytics Data Export API
One of the most widely anticipated features, the Google Analytics Data Export API, is now publicly available to all Analytics users. With the Data Export API, developers can integrate Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell, or make customized dashboards and gadgets to suit their unique reporting needs.To get started, you can read all the documentation at Google Code, sign up for announcements and feature updates through theGoogle Analytics API Notify email group, or become a part of the Google Analytics developer community to share ideas and get feedback from other developers.

Google Analytics and AdSense integration
Now anyone who uses Analytics and AdSense can link their accounts together to take advantage of integrated reports within Analytics. Below are descriptions of the reports you'll find in the 'AdSense' subsection of the Content reports after you link the two accounts together:

The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

Don't have your accounts linked together? Learn how by reading this Help Center article.March 2009
Cost data settings changes
You now have the option of changing your cost data settings from within your standalone Google Analytics account (not from the Google Analytics link within your AdWords account). To learn how to access and edit your cost data settings, please read this Help Center article.

Motion Charts
Motion Charts now has zoom capability, an option to control bubble opacity, a list to select for data points, and a bar chart view. We're also happy to introduce Motion Charts in in 12 additional languages: Swedish Danish Germany Spanish French Italian Norwegian Finnish Indonesian Nederlands Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal)

You can access Motion Charts by clicking on the 'Visualize' button in some reports (like the Keywords report).

Google Analytics IQ
Take an online course to learn all about Google Analytics, with topics ranging from simple set-up instructions to more sophisticated web analytics techniques. The course is offered free of charge, but for $50 you can take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test to prove that you are an expert.

Getting Started Guide
This is another great resource to learn more about Google Analytics. It's a basic tutorial with report overviews and how-tos, so if you're not a beginner you may want to check out the resources section at the end of the guide.

New TV ads metrics and hourly tracking
Check out the new hourly breakdown of your TV Campaigns metrics alongside your website metrics. In addition, we've included two new TV campaign metrics, Viewed Entire Ad and % Initial Audience Retained, so you can see how viewer engagement relates to your website activity.

February 2009
A new Advanced Segment just for iPhones makes it easier to track how your iPhone visitors interact with your site. Simply click on the pulldown menu for 'Advanced Segments' and select 'Visits from iPhones.' A quick tip when comparing this segment against the 'All Visits' segment: If the percentage of total visits to your site from iPhones is small, you may want to de-select the 'All Visits' segment since it will be difficult to visualize the two sets of numbers on the same graph.

January 2009
Since we've received a lot of feedback from users who say that they don't want to have bounce rates be affected by custom visitor segments, we've now stopped counting calls to the _setVar method as an interaction hit. Interaction hits will now only include pageviews, events, transactions and experiments (such as with Google Website Optimizer). There are two areas where this could affect your data:

Higher bounce rates in your reportsSingle-page visits that had previously been hidden due to the _ setVar call will now appear. For example, let's say that you've used the _setVar method to segment member vs. non-member site visitors. Previously, if a visitor came to your site and triggered the _setVar call, but viewed only one page, this would not be counted as a bounce. With this change the user defined call will not send an interaction hit and overall bounce rates will increase as this single page visit will properly be counted as a bounce.

More accurate time on page metricsTime on page metrics are normally counted by the difference in time stamps which are set by interaction hits. Prior to this change, using _setVar would cause Google Analytics to calculate the time on page metric between the time of the pageview hit and the interaction hit of the user defined variable. Now, as user-defined hits are no longer counted as an interaction hit, time on page metrics should more accurately reflect the time between one pageview and the next.