Brett Crosby, Senior Manager of Google Analytics announced some of the upcoming Google Analytics features at Washington D.C.’s eMetrics Summit. Crosby was a co-founder of the Urchin Software Corporation which was acquired by Google in late March 2005.
Over the next few weeks, Google Analytics is releasing several new features. The first feature is Site Search activity tracking. Users can track what their web site visitors are searching for on the users’ website or blog. This will also allow the user to track where their visitors are ending up.
The second upcoming feature is Google Analytics Event Tracking. This feature gives the user the ability to track how visitors interact with AJAX and Flash built into their websites. By replacing urchin.js with ga.js, Google Analytics will track the AJAX and Flash events.
And the last upcoming feature is Outbound Link Tracking. This feature gives users information about what hyperlinks caused the user to leave their website.
Many of these features are already implemented within other analytics software. For example, the Outbound Link Tracking feature has been around on SiteMeter for a long time. Out of all of these new features, I would say that the most beneficial is the Event Tracking feature.
There has been a debate about how Page Views should not be counted towards a website’s ranking since more Web 2.0 are using AJAX.
Nielsen/NetRatings announced earlier that they are now ranking sites based on time spent on the site rather than page views.
