Google Analytics has definitely been one of the best services to track your website visitors. However, it has been lacking a key feature that most of its competitors like Woopra and Reinvigorate have been offering for a while now; Realtime tracking.

Realtime user tracking is a very important feature for any webmaster who wants to track campaigns in realtime without having to wait. This helps users to make business decisions quickly if something is not working. Unfortunately, prior to today, Google never had this feature.

However, that is about to change because Google has announced a new feature for Analytics which will help you track your visitors in realtime and make business decisions quickly. The new feature in Google Analytics will allow users to track how many visitors are currently visiting the site, how many users have visited in the last few minutes as well as the number of visitors visiting your website every second.

Additionally, Google Analytics will also display the source for traffic and the keywords users are using and the geographic locations they are visiting from. As a webmaster, this is a pretty cool feature since I can now just use Google Analytics instead of using other realtime analytics tracking services.

Google has definitely been ramping up their analytic services with the introduction of Google Analytics 5 which brought about a new UI, dashboard, widgets and more. Additionally, Google has also been adding some neat features to Google Analytics like heatmaps and in-page analytics among other things.

The biggest advantage of Google Analytics is that is is completely free unlike it’s competitors. However, they are now introducing a new set of premium features which users can signup and use. The new Google Analytics Premium service is targeted at business users who want in-depth data about their users and the ability to quickly make business decisions.

Some of the key features of Google Analytics Premium include:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Users can request access to premium accounts by visiting the Google Analytics Premium homepage. Realtime Google Analytics is being gradually rolled out to all users, however, you will have to use the new Google Analytics interface to have access to it. Additionally, only Analytics administrators will have access to Realtime Google Analytics.

If you don’t see the Realtime Google Analytics in your account. You can request for access to the service by filling up this form. Please note that Google Analytics will continue to remain free for webmasters including the new Realtime Google Analytics feature.

I am definitely loving the new Realtime Analytics features as it allows me to track campaigns and also understand where our traffic is coming from. Do you have access to the new Realtime Google Analytics? What do you think about it?

Google has been working on a new version of Google Analytics v5 which includes a lot of new and exciting features for users. Google Analytics 5 has been in beta for quite some time now and has been tested by thousands of users. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at the new Google Analytics 5, here is some good new. Google has rolled it out Analytics v5 to all users.

Google Analytics 5 contains a lot of new features including a new home section, a streamlined interface to make it easier to get information you want. Analytics users can also get create multiple dashboards and add widgets to it so that you can quickly view information you want on your dashboard. Users can also create event goals to track downloads or purchases and create more powerful custom reports.

However, there are a few features from the older version which are not yet available in the new version, these include:

• Exporting reports to PDF
• Emailing reports
• Migrating a custom report from the current Analytics version to the new version
• Linking a new AdWords or AdSense account
• In-Page Analytics

Google Analytics 5 is definitely better than the older version, however, I would still like to see real-time analytics in the software. Right now, I have to use some other real-time analytics tracking software to do that. It would be great if we could do it from a single interface.

How To Get New Google Analytics?

To get the new Google Analytics 5, login to your account and click on the "New Version" link on the top of the page and you will be switched to the new Google Analytics. You can always go back to the Older version by clicking on the "Old Version" on the top of the page.

Google Analytics is one of the most used analytics software. Many websites use their analytics tool to learn more about their visitors, check their AdSense payments and more.

Google Analytics provides a comprehensive set of tools including heatmaps to check user clicks, ability to drill down AdSense payments by country and ability to track outbound links among other things.

The interface for Google Analytics is overwhelming for many users, and it has almost remained stagnant for the past few years. However, Google is now testing out a new version of Analytics, dubbed Google Analytics 5, which adds some much need features to the Analytics software.

According to an early beta tester AJ, Google Analytics 5 has some new features, which include but are not limited to:

• New Home Section
• New Dashboard
• Widgets
• Updated Custom Reporting Tool
• New Admin Section
• World Cloud Visualization
• Goals as Events

I am pretty excited to see Widgets support in this version as it would allow me to add relevant sections of the reports and view them with a quick glance, rather than having to click on multiple links.

I was able to get  a screenshot (click to enlarge) of the new analytics tool, courtesy @RonakBhagdev from http://www.greatestdesigns.net. As you can see from the screenshot above, the new interface is sleeker and add more widgets to the dashboard. Users will also be able to customize these widgets.

You can sign up to become a Beta tester of the new Google Analytics by visiting this page. Watch the video of the Google Analytics 5 in action in below. Click here if you can’t see it.

As I was looking through my Google Analytics stats for yesterday, I saw a huge drop in traffic. Though most of the other statistics tool I use reported proper numbers.

I sent out an update on Twitter and @Blogsdna responded back that he is seeing similar issues with the Analytics for yesterday. It looks like Google Analytics has had some issues with traffic reporting for several blogs from yesterday.

If you see a huge drop in traffic for Google Analytics for March 15, 2011, it is not because you are hit with a farmer update penalty algorithm rolled out by Google recently. It is because of a glitch in the Analytics reporting software.

However, if you are seeing a long term traffic drop you might have been penalized. I had written up some instructions on how to find if you have been penalized by Google. Do check it out if you are seeing a consistent drop.

I have reached out to Google for a statement regarding this and will update this post.

Update: Google responded back and said that it was a known issue. The Analytics Dashboard page has more information about this.

Web design is both an art and a science. Unfortunately, the two never meet. Usually, the graphics is done in one place and the coding in another and the result is obviously lopsided. And this is not an isolated instance. No doubt you need to do a lot to optimize them. Using Google Analytics to create effective web interfaces is a neat solution.

Analyzing visitor behavior

Assuming that you have many visitors to your website, how do you know what they do while on your site? This would probably remain a mystery unless you use an analytic tool to find an answer. Google Analytics is probably the best tool available today. But understanding user behavior is not an end by itself.   You must be able to influence, control, manipulate visitors and ultimately force them to do what you want them to do. This seems a bit too autocratic and you might call me a control freak but to be effective you must exert yourself to the limit. Never let a visitor leave your site without making a purchase is my motto.

The pull of large buttons

I have always believed in the pull of large buttons. While working in a web design company, I experimented with the size of buttons. But before this, I used Google Analytics to understand the pattern of visitor behavior. I found that 80% of visitors left our website after looking at the product descriptions. Obviously there was something missing on this page. I created a lovely big button Click here for an instant discountnext to each product and there were no surprises. 10% of visitors did click on this button. Mind you, 10% was huge considering that we had a big inventory. Of course you can argue that one does not need Google Analytics to understand user behavior. Let me say that nothing is obvious where a website is concerned. User behavior can be quite complex and can have different dimensions. Geographical trends can have a huge impact on your traffic. If you are selling plus size lingerie (made famous by Oprah Winfrey) you can’t target an Asian audience. You need big gals and they come from country of big Mac. With Google Analytics you know exactly where your traffic is coming from. Sometimes you may not be able to do anything but watch the traffic march by, but that’s something you have to live with.

The bounce rate puzzle

I had a strange case where my Google AdWords campaign worked like magic. We had thousands of visitors and out payout to Google bulged beyond our budget. We should have uncorked a champagne bottle but didn’t. Actually we had to stop the campaign because very few visitors bought anything from our website. Once again Google Analytics came to my rescue. I discovered that our bounce rate (visitors leaving from the landing page without visiting another page) was abnormally high. The reason we soon found was faulty web interface. The AdWords ad and the content on the link were not the same. The visitors could not find what they were looking for. We had to redo the entire website and I am sorry to say that things never looked up.

Case for changing and chopping user interface

There is a section of web designers who believe that a website interface should not be changed often since visitors want a familiar environment to feel comfortable. I hold a contrarian view. People get used to certain features of a website and they never explore other areas. This is an opportunity loss for website owners. Once you have a loyal customer, you must ensure that you get the maximum out of him. Customers must be exposed to all your offerings. Google Analytics will reveal which pages of your website are more popular and which don’t get any traffic. You must modify your web interface in such a way that traffic becomes more democratic. This insight can only be gleaned with a tool like Google analytics.

The funnel effect

Ideally, every customer or visitor must be led to the payment gateway ultimate gratification. This is called the funnel effect. The Buy now’ button must be strategically placed so that a visitor finds easy access to it at all times. I have often seen that buyers are frustrated because they can’t find the buy button. Even a small quantity of drop off may be disastrous.

Conclusion

It is simple. Gather visitor behavior using Google Analytics and modify your web interface to make it more effective. Never rest on your laurels. You can do much more than what you have already achieved. There is always scope for improvement always scope for a few more visitors to reach the payment gateway page.

==== About the Author ====

Nitin Aggarwal is the owner of the company Offshore Ally, which is a one-stop source for quality virtual assistant and link building services. He has been blogging for a long time and is no less than an expert on SEO, SEM, technology and social media. Connect with him via Twitter.

Google AdSense is no doubt one of the biggest ad networks which is used by millions of websites. Google AdSense’s reports are real-time and provide a comprehensive view of the impressions and number of clicks a website generates. However, one important thing missing in Google AdSense is geo-location based reporting which will help a webmaster to know how AdSense performs in different countries.

Don’t Miss: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

In my experience, knowing country wise performance of advertising networks has helped me to replace certain ads in certain countries with higher performing ones, thus helping me increase my revenues. I do that using Google DFP, for which I am writing a guide, you might want to know the benefits of using Google DFP too.

Coming back to the topic, is there a way to find AdSense performance based on geo-location? Yes, there is, using Google Analytics. Before you use this trick, there are two requisites:

1. You have to use Google Analytics for your site. If you don’t sign up here.
2. You have to link your Google Analytics and Google AdSense accounts. If you don’t know how, read this help forum topic.

If you fulfill both of these requirements, dive straight into knowing the performance of Google AdSense based on geo-location below. If not, you will have to wait a few days before you can start seeing this data.

To see how AdSense is performing in any country, head over to your analytics account and view the analytics for the site you want to get this data for. Click on the “Visitors” link in the right hand side and then click on the “Map Overlay” link.

On the Map Overlay page, scroll down till you see links for the countries and click on the country you want to see the AdSense performance for. Once you do that, you will see a city/region wise breakup for that particular country.

In the country view, click on the “None” dimension link and select any of the dimensions from the available list. You can click on any one of them. Once you do that a new report will load based on that dimension.

On this page, you will now see an additional tab which displays the AdSense revenue for that particular geo-location or country to you. This data might be an estimate but it does provide you with a way to check on how AdSense is performing in a particular country, city or region.

With this data in hand, you can easily replace Google AdSense units with higher performing ones in those countries. Of course, everything is trial and error so you have to make your own judgments here. However, hopefully this guide should help you target your ads better and maximize your revenues.

Google today introduced a new feature in their Analytics software called In-Page Analytics. As the name suggests, In-Page Analytics will display heatmap click reports for your content.

In-Page Analytics is nothing but a heatmap in disguise, which will show you which content the users are clicking on. Though it is not an actual heatmap as produced by web analytics software like Crazy Egg and Reinvigorate, it will definitely help webmasters to understand their users and make changes to their content accordingly.

In addition to telling you where users are clicking, the in-page analytics also gives you detailed analysis about number of clicks, goals etc. This is definitely a useful feature for webmasters to understand which areas of their website is underperforming and make changes accordingly.

In-Page Analytics is currently in beta, and is available under "Content" in the sidebar. If you are looking to dive into the In-Page Analytics, take a look at the video below to understand how it works.

More info at the Google Analytics Blog.

If you have visited your Google Webmasters account today, you might notice some significant changes in the way you will see statistics about your website. The new significant change in Google Webmasters is for the search queries, where you will see a new field called impressions and the number of clicks it got.

Another significant change in Google Webmasters is the introduction of a Google Analytics style dashboard where you can see the stats and clicks for different search queries that were related to your site.

The good thing about the new statistics system is that you can narrow down the queries for different periods or even view statistics for certain days only and then also determine your search and keyword rankings easily. I don’t see any other significant changes with the dashboard other than this, but rest aside, this is something that will definitely be very useful to webmasters. What do you think?

Update: This information is not new and has been available for past two months, apologies for that. You can view more about it at the Official Google Webmasters blog.

Recently we got a query from one of our users who asked us on how they can delete their information from Google Analytics. Though it is not usually possible for people to do it, we wanted to give everyone a general idea on how you can disable or block Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a website tracking software which can track your IP address, browser information, operating system, country and more when you visit a website. This information is usually available with both Google and also with the website you visit.

Google Analytics is not the only one who collects such information and several websites may use different analytics software to do it, and may also have their own internal tracking. Disabling analytics cannot be done through a simple JavaScript block since many website analytics software also use image tracking.

Most of the analytics software do not provide end-users with a way to opt-out. However, Google does provide users with an option to disable Google Analytics using browser based add-ons for Firefox, IE and Google Chrome. We had written about the Google Analytics Blocker in the past and you can download the add-on for your own browser by visiting this URL.

Once you install this add-on Google Analytics will no longer track your visits to websites which make use of their service. We will keep an eye for other services which disable analytics for other services and let you know once we come across something.

Google has been taking privacy issues quite seriously these days. One of the biggest issues users face while visiting websites is that their visit are tracked back and stored, and Google itself leads the pack in web analytics tracking with their own Google Analytics software.

However, starting today, paranoid users who do not want their information to be collected by Google Analytics will be able to do so by installing a browser add-on, available for Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Once a user install this add-on the information from their visit on any site that uses Google Analytics to track users will not be tracked. Whether this is a good move or not is beyond me, as webmasters often use analytics data to track how many users are visiting a site or a post and plan things accordingly.

If every user out there starts installing the add-on Google Analytics in itself would become redundant, however, as a webmaster I can say that usually no one looks at personally identifiable information available through the web statistics program and many are only interested in tracking hits and so on.

What do you think about this move from Google? Does it make sense to you?

More info at the official Google Policy blog.