Google Analytics Is Evolving

The search engine giant has revamped some of its existing services, and introduced some new faces too.
Google is expanding and rebranding its SEO and insight tools: Webmaster Tools is now Google Search Console and Google Analytics has been cloned and upgraded for premium business use. With this facelift, new features have been added to make the data analysis an even more complete experience. How is this important for us who own our personal or business websites?
Setting up a website or blog is a very exciting and fulfilling experience for an eager online adventurer. However, once that’s done we need to start getting data about our site visitors in order to boost performance and possible sales. Depending on the scale of our ventures, we can choose the appropriate Google SEO tools for us and our businesses.
Google’s Analytics homepage now offers a menu of SEO tool choices. They are all fundamentally built on top of the existing Analytics tool, but they also have added features to boost performance. We are living in an age of big data which is set to grow even more, creating the need for more detailed analysis. Here is an overview of the new Google SEO tools:
Google Analytics 360 Suite
“The Google Analytics 360 Suite delivers the customer and advertising insights you need to set your marketing strategy, drive sales, and ultimately outperform the competition.”
It consists of six Google SEO tools, four of which are brand new: a data management platform, a website testing and optimization tool, a data analysis and visualization tool, a tool to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows, a tool for analyzing customer data and a performance analysis tool across all channels.
Google Analytics Premium
Google’s premium analytics tool is an extension of the original Google Analytics with expanded features designed to meet the specific needs of their largest customers. It features extra processing power, advanced analysis, service and support. Companies such as Gucci, Travelocity and eHarmony have all tested this new version which is now available for purchase.
Google Attribution 360 (formerly Adometry)
Google describes how “Google Attribution 360 (formerly Adometry) brings online and offline media together, for deeper insights that lead to better performance and higher return on marketing investment for cross-channel campaigns.”
In a nutshell, this tool combines all performance metrics from all available data streams to give the marketer the full picture. It can be linked with Analytics and other Google SEO tools to cover all of the available data.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the original SEO tool from Google, and is basically a set of JavaScript code tags on your website’s pages collecting data.
The code on your webpage runs on a visitor’s browser, collecting information about the visitor and their computer settings. The code leaves cookies on the visitor’s device which will inform Analytics of returning visitors, length of visits among a whole host of other information. The second step is for all of the collected data to be logged and processed by the software. This is done via tiny files, sent to Google by the code on your website. You can store a copy of all of these data files yourself as a backup. The processed data then appears on your Analytics account interface where it is split up to contain the following:
Dashboards
Shortcuts
Intelligence Events
Real-Time
Audience
Acquisition
Behaviour
Conversions
Within these sections Analytics has submenus with plenty of data and information about your website. The data ranges from geographical locations of visitors, returning versus new visitors, duration of visits, bounce rates, a real-time website overview, and a massive section of audience demographics, helping you understand your customers better.
To fully benefit from all the available Google SEO tools features, explore the features through experimentation, referring to Google Analytics Academy for any assistance.
Tag Manager 360
Tag manager is a neat way of editing and adding tags to your webpages instead of having to edit code directly on your website. It is the only customizable service via an API.
Many of the new Google SEO tools are still in their beta phase, but they are no longer free products. For the 360 services be ready to pay substantial service charges. Whether or not the upgrades are worth it we will have to wait and see.
Have you used any of Google’s new tools? Let us know what you think: Tweet us @WestHost!