webanalytics.cl

What will you wish for?

Most of Google Analytics users really like the tool. Not only because it’s free but also because it’s a really cool solution that has evolved a lot during the last 3 years.

Since we are approaching the end of the year and Google will soon host its yearly GAACs (Google Analytics Authorized Consultant) meeting I thought it would be nice to write a post with my wish list and hopefully get some feedback.

Here is my list:

1. A better cross-segmenting report. Index Tools, acquired by Yahoo in the first semester of this year, has a report that is the perfect example of what GA could offer to extend the cross-segmenting capability. It’s like having the excel dynamic table wizard for your GA data within the tool’s GUI.

2. If you are buying CPC traffic with Adwords it would really be nice to have and automatic keyword bidding tool integrated with ROI per keyword information Google Analytics can provide. This will allow you to bid only in keywords that meet a certain optimization criteria to be set with business rules within the tool.

3. Better data visualization. Web Analytics data is complex, in many cases multidimensional, and often you need to be able to appreciate several dimensions simultaneously in order to get the right conclusions. Some tools use radar graphs to plot several variables, for example if you needed to visually analyze the quality of different traffic source you could plot page view per visit, time on site, bounce rate, % new visits, revenue per visit in a radar graph for each source and compare the figures. Other visualizations that will enrich GA reports could be treemaps, scattered and dynamic buble charts. I have included a video of WET, a visualization tool for web traffic data, that shows some of them.
   

4. Better data integration capabilities. Either with an API to provide access to most of GA data or only to  XML reports currently available for export. So far there are a couple of unofficial APIs developed by Google Analytics enthusiasts but they all are vulnerable to changes in the application.

5. The final release of the event tracking feature. Hopefully after some redesign based on what GA team has learned during the beta period. They have already change the implementation to make it more easy and it would also be nice if they could modify the reports to include more conversion data, like the insite search report. For instance it would be nice to be able to know if visitors that complete a certain event buy or fulfill goals more often than other visitors.
   

What do you think? What would you include in your list?