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Google has released Advanced Analysis, a new tool that the company says will offer organizations using its Google Analytics 360 service more ways to explore and analyze website usage and performance data.
The tool is currently available in beta and incorporates three new techniques for finding data that can help website owners improve their understanding of how customers interact with their site. The goal is to help enable insights that organizations can use to improve user experience and to help them meet other business goals, according to the company.
The three new techniques that Google has introduced with Advanced Analysis are what the company calls Exploration, Funnel Analysis and Segment Overlap. Website operators can use any or all of the methods to develop a better understanding of their site audience in order to deliver more personalized experiences, said Dan Stone, Google product manager, in a blog May 17.
“For enterprises looking to better understand customer journeys, Advanced Analysis helps surface hard-to-find insights and makes it easy to put those insights into action,” Stone said.
The new data exploration feature available with Advanced Analysis basically enables “instant visualizations” of website data, according to Stone. By simply dragging and dropping variables and metrics into the analysis tool, administrators can view and compare multiple tabs in a single screen.
The Funnel Analysis technique is designed to provide web administrators and decision-makers with better visibility into the actions that users take on the site. For example, Funnel Analysis can help administrators see the specific steps that a user might take to complete a purchase in more granular detail than currently possible so they can identify more opportunities to improve the process.
Currently, Google Analytics 360 allows website owners to break the purchase process into five steps—landing on the site, adding a product to the cart, starting checkout, starting payment and completing transaction. With Advanced Analysis, administrators can break the process down into as many as 10 smaller steps, so they can have a closer look at how the process works, Stone said.
Meanwhile, the Segment Overlap feature provides more insight into how specific website audience segments that an organization might have created are behaving. For example, Segment Analysis allows website owners to figure out how many first-time buyers on their sites are returning users and might become repeat buyers in the future.
Together, the features available in Advanced Analysis give website owners a way to surface new metrics and data for helping improve site experience and drive more sales. Advanced Analysis will become available in beta to Google Analytics 360 users in all regions in the coming weeks, Stone said.
Advanced Analysis continues Google’s efforts to give website owners better analytics tools for extracting more business value from website data. The company currently allows organizations using Analytics 360 to export web session and other anonymized user data to Google’s BigQuery analytics service so they can more quickly run queries against it.
The company also offers tools such as Google Optimize, which helps organizations conduct so-called A/B tests to figure out how users react to different versions of their website.
