Google Analytics anounced some new features this week, so I thought I’d just put down a few of my ideas on how people can benefit from them.

First up, with goal tracking, you can now have 20 goals, 4 sets of 5 goals. You can also set goals based on time spent on the site aswell as pages/visit. So for those of you out there with blogs, you may wish to set a minimum of 2 page views as a goal – the more posts someone reads the more likely they are to signup to something. Also you could set a minimum time on site of 1 or 2 minutes, that way you can ensure they have actually read your post.

They’ve also added better tracking for mobile phone based web browsing – the only problem with this is that you need to include server side scripts as it can’t always support javascript (interestingly enough, I wonder why they don’t do this for all GA visits – I’m sure we would all like to see the improvement in accuracy). So if you have a mobile version of your site setup you may want to take advantage of this straight away.

They’ve also brought in an option to analyse a table using a pivot table. Basically this means you can break down things into smaller categories – such as a breakdown of the people searching for a particular keyword in a particular country. I’m sure this will be useful in the future, but I’ve not quite figured out what for, as soon as I find something I’ll let you know!

The big thing that I think will be popular with most people is the use of multiple custom variables – this is an advanced feature that I’m still getting to grips with. Finally there is also options to share segments and custom reports with others – which should come in useful for reporting on your clients’ work!  Don’t be disappointed if you don’t see the updated changes yet, they are rolling it out across all accounts over the next few weeks – so keep an eye out!