Friday, July 24, 2009

Playing with Google Analytics Pivot Tables

Google Analytics is introducing Pivot Tables. Since not everyone is a lucky winner, here's a snapshot of Referring Domains broken down by Source of Traffic & Visitor Type, showing Visits and Bounce Rate for today's traffic on immeria.net.
  

Look for the Pivot Table button in most detailed reports:

If you combine the recently introduced slicing (advanced segmentation) with this dicing, we're in business!

What's next? My personal wishes:
  1. Visit and page level custom attributes: we need more than the current single visitor attribute. People have found creative ways to stuff more than a single value in the setVar(). What makes a web analytics platform powerful is the ability to extend it's data.
  2. Import API: once the above is solved, why not provide an import API? You will then see a number of "addons" to extend GA capabilities
  3. Addons: speaking of addons... why not provide a repository of approved and under development addons? A bit like the Mozilla Firefox addons concept. From the GA setup interface you could pick & chose various addons to be included in your tags. For example, I'm providing some code to automatically track outbound links and downloads. This would make for a nice addition to make tagging and data collection easier.