A small but potentially quite big change to Google Analytics has been pushed out. It relates to how sessions are handled, which you'll see in the "Visits" metric in Google analytics.

Most web analytics tools have to work out a "visit" metric to try and give you some idea of people coming to, then leaving, your site. The problem is that the analytics tools don't get a "goodbye" message when the visitor leaves the site, so they have to use other mechanisms. The traditional way is a timeout of 30 minutes without any activity from the visitor, or if the visitor closes his browser.

This change to Google Analytics introduces the idea of any change to the traffic source value resulting in a new session, that is a new visit. These values are set whenever a visitor arrives from an external site, meaning any new arrival basically, even if it happens within the previous 30 minute time-out bracket.

It's a pretty sensible change to the way the data is calculated and will affect all reports that include the "Visits" metrics. Any business wants to know how many people come through the front door, and how well they're converting them into paying customers. Even people who come through the front door more than once should be counted in that metric.

Details from Google about the change, including some rather panicky comments from users who are alarmed, can be found on the official Google Analytics blog post about the session tracking recent changes.

We're a bit slow in posting about the next version of Adobe SiteCatalyst. We haven't been asleep to it, but we also haven't had a direct reason to look into the detail of it. Now that we've got clients scheduled to move over, we've got that excuse.

Much of the change going on in this release is under the hood. Omniture are swapping out the infrastructure that drives data display in SiteCatalyst and swapping in an entirely new back-end. The new infrastructure will be more stable, more scalable, cheaper to both operate and, most importantly, cheaper to change.

Adobe may have seemed asleep as Google Analytics added more and more features that have been creeping up on the Adobe product offering, but in fact they've been busy building this new infrastructure. The new back-end changes the economics of Omniture's business, allowing them to react quickly to competitive changes in the market. Expect to see the conveyor belt of cool new stuff to accelerate as they learn how to make the most of their new toy.

Adobe hides it well, but the existing SiteCatalyst infrastructure is creaky and expensive. Remember that Adobe built a system capable of dealing with massive data volumes in very new ways before the current wave of interest in NoSQL and MapReduce. Along the way they've had to hack in fixes and work-arounds to add new functionality. This new release shows they've learnt some lessons and have taken the pain to build new foundations.

So enough about the pipeline, what do you get straight away that's going to make it worth the wait?

• Real-time segmentation
  What is your customer behaviour in only a single segment? Previously this required complex Data Warehouse queries, ASI slots or Discover. Now you can do it on-the-fly, slicing any report with a specific segment.
• Unique Visitors on any timeframe
  How many times have you had to explain that you can't grab seven Daily UV numbers and get a Weekly UV number? Nor can you change the reporting week from the Admin setting. No longer an issue. The report period is now the UV period. Awesome!
• Full subrelations
  Break down any conversion variable by any other eVar.
• Trend multiple metrics
  It's always been a bit odd that you couldn't see Page Views alongside Unique Visitors trended on the same graph. Now you can!
• Processing Rules
  A cut down version of VISTA allows you to push smarts into the data collection process. Re-map variables, pull data from one field, slice it up and push it into other fields. Very very cool.
• Data Warehouse, Discover and SiteCatalyst, together at last
  Segments you create in one product are available in the others. Finally!
• Video integrated properly
  Earlier versions seemed to have video reports as a bolted-on feature, not terribly well integrated elsewhere. In v15, videos are just an eVar, video players are just another eVar, what happens to videos are just events. And it's all available in Data Warehouse, Discover and everywhere else.

So when do I move over?
  

There's a few complex dependencies to when you can move to the new infrastructure, and some features haven't and won't be implemented. There's no ASI slots in the new version, but the real-time segmentation may solve the reason you use it anyway, and better. Video is still in beta and will require some changes. Your data will have to be moved into the new infrastructure, and you won't get all these featured on your old data.

Google Analytics just released a video with details on its brand new multi-channel funnels or media attribution solution that's currently being introduced as a limited pilot. Watch the video below to see all five new reports in the new multi-channel funnels section including the overview, assisted conversions, top conversion paths, path length and time lag reports. 

This is a good video to watch if you just want to find out about cross-channel campaign tracking and optimisation in general, quite well done and explain, but keep in mind that the solution only includes data from direct visits and not mere banner impressions (that didn't result in a click-through) which is a big limitation (but who knows what will happen with that, Google owns DoubleClick after all).

Anyway, even if you are a big display advertiser, you should sign-up for early access to the new reports, more insights can never hurt as long as they're interpreted correctly.

Google search is currently in the process of beta testing a secure search, check it out yourself at https://www.google.com.

 

Even though this might be commendable from a privacy perspective, the move could potentially have devastating effects for all search marketers and online analysts. Turning the normal Google search results into secure pages will essentially hide all usage information including the referrer string which contains data on the used search term. So if you would like to know what keywords are driving your business, you're out of luck. For all secure searches, standard analytics software packages will no longer be able to see the what domain referred the visitor (i.e. search engine) and what search term was used (see screen shots below).

 

It's rumoured that China may be part of the motivation for the switch as this will prevent filtering of certain keyword searches as well as the ability to packet sniff the usage of Google. The switch hasn't rolled out in Hong Kong yet, but you can safely assume it won't be too far away!

 

For more information check out the following Google and Wired articles.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/google-https-search/