The Google Analytics team would like to shout "THANK YOU!" to our users. We are so proud of the people using this product. It's a pleasure to be associated with you and build Google Analytics for you.
Through interactions with you at meetings, conferences, in online forums, in the press, and in comments on this blog, we've discovered an intelligent, innovative and engaging group of people who are at the forefront of a fledgling industry. We couldn't be happier to be a part of this ecosystem.
And we appreciate all the feedback. Please continue posting comments, and we'll chime in too when we can.
Join us in welcoming Urchin 6.602 to the world, the long-awaited multilingual upgrade to our "run-it-yourself" web analytics package. This release adds support for all 11 of our supported languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Japanese, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), and Korean.
Read the complete Changelist for all the details, or visit our Download page to get the goods.
Urchin 6.602 also includes a bunch of significant new features, including:
1-Click Installer -- no need for an "outboard" database anymore
GeoDB user adjustments -- don't need the full GeoDB? Run fast & light with Urchin 6.602
Updated compression utility -- allows data archives greater than 2GB
Option to select which profiles (and their overview data) to display on users' default "home" screen (aka, roll-up report)
Bing.com support (hooray!)
...and lots of bug fixes and documentation updates
Urchin 6.600, released in June 2009, was a major upgrade, so you may want to revisit that blog post for more info.
Urchin 6.602 is available now as a full-featured 30-day demo from our download servers and licenses can be purchased from any of our Authorized Consultants for US$2995. Check it out!
Urchin 6.6's built-in Keyword Generator Tool makes managing your campaigns a lot easier.
Over the past few months we've received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API, and it included adding access to Google Analytics newest and most powerful features, such as advanced segments, custom variables and more. Today we want to let you know about improvements to the Google Analytics Data Export API, including the following highlights (all the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group):
Support for Advanced Segments
With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond your aggregated data and peer into the nuances of traffic and visitor activity on your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Germany is over 2 minutes.
We've added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:
Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.
This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.
Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data
With the recent Google Analytics launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data. Good call! So now, you can access 48 new metrics around goal performance. We've also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, and step names for each profile.
Take a look at this video describing how to work with goal configuration data in the API.
Custom Variables
Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we've added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you've used is now available through the Account Feed.
We've updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group. We can't wait to see the new apps that come from developers using this data. We're hoping that you spend your holiday tinkering with it :-)
Enjoy!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team
We all love the holiday season, and so now, here are a few reasons to love it even more! A few weeks ago, we announced a set of powerful, flexible, and intelligent features. Today, at SES Chicago, Phil Mui announced additional features that build on these same themes to make your life as an analyst easier. We hope you'll enjoy them.
Annotations
Do you ever wonder about an inexplicable change in your traffic? Or forget exactly when you launched something, or who was responsible? After scratching your head, did you have to chase down different departments in your company or go digging through old emails to get an answer? For instance:
Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down?
When did the new display ads campaign launch?
Who's responsible for the checkout page redesign and when did it go live?
Running around asking everyone from marketing, IT, and product doesn't scale. More and more large companies are using Google Analytics, so we wanted to cut down on the mileage you need to cover to account for everything that happens to your website and online marketing.
This week, the wild goose chase is over -- you can now easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened" with the launch of Annotations in Google Analytics.
Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers. This short video will show you how to use Annotations.
Taking its usefulness even further: Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business. So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease. No wonder this has been one of the top requested features in Analytics for such a long time!
Note: Annotations is rolling out a bit slower than planned due to the holidays. New features within Google Analytics are launched on a phased roll out due to the volume of accounts, and the demands of testing as we activate the new feature. Usually this process takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the feature. Annotations is being activated to an additional 10% of accounts each week and will be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.
Custom Variables Now Available In Advanced Segments
Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. In Google Analytics, not only are you able to define multiple custom variables, each custom variable is a name-value pair and can be assigned one of 3 scopes: page, session, or visitor. Each custom variable name and each value is an arbitrary string defined by you pertinent to your business needs.
When we announced Multiple Custom Variables in October, the only way to view metrics on these Custom Variables then was to open the standard "Custom Variables" report in the Visitors section. This week, a user can create an advanced segmentation based on any key, value, as well as key-value combination of all Custom Variables. In other words, if you've created a Custom Variable such as "Logged In Member", you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports.
The ability to create visit segments based on Custom Variables is critical in maximizing the full potential of Custom Variables. Users can now slice and dice their metrics by decorating their site traffic with the appropriate key-value pairs.
Custom Variables Available In Custom Reports
You can also create Custom Reports with any of the key or value dimensions associated with any Custom Variable. Now, you can see how a segment defined by Custom Variables behaves along any of the metrics available in Google Analytics.
New Analytics Tracking Code Setup Wizard
One of the more daunting tasks in setting up analytics on any site is to manually configure the tracking code for specialized situations, such as multiple subdomains, cross-domain tracking, mobile web tracking, PHP sites, campaign tagging, etc.
Well, fear no more. When you create a profile, you'll notice a new tracking code setup wizard in Google Analytics. This wizard automatically generates the appropriate tracking code according to the setup options specified by you.
New Version of The Analytics API
Later this week, there will be a separate announcement about a set of very exciting features to our Analytics API. Here's a little preview: Support for Advanced Segmentation will now be available through the API.
In addition, new data dimensions and metrics will be made available, including those in our recently announced features. Enjoy -- and happy holidays from the Google Analytics team!
Posted by Jeff Gillis and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team
Come to the windy city next week and catch Google Analytics' fearless Senior Product Manager Phil Mui in action at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference. Phil will be presenting at two sessions on Monday at SES:
MUST SEE: What's New and Exciting with Google Analytics - Monday at 12:45pm at the networking lunch which we're sponsoring. He'll cover the latest feature launch, AND - he might announce some new features. You never know with Phil. We really hope you can make this session - you'll want to share it with your friends, literally (hint, hint). We're not saying anything more.
If you missed the announcements or are curious about the features you're now seeing, join us in this upcoming webinar, happening next week on Wednesday. We'll provide an overview and demonstration of the features and provide tips on some best practices and uses. You'll learn how the following features have added more power, flexibility and intelligence to Google Analytics' enterprise class capabilities:
Google Analytics now provides a new Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternate way to track your website!
Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a "separate lane" to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements.
The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:
Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
Enhanced data collection and accuracy
Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded
The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Using the new tracking code is optional: your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to improve your webpage load times and fine-tune the accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you'll love this new option.
The Google Analytics team would like to shout "THANK YOU!" to our users. We are so proud of the people using this product. It's a pleasure to be associated with you and build Google Analytics for you. 
