Omniture Site Catalyst
My Google Analytics Wish List
Google Analytics is a very robust web analytics solution that Google provides for free, but there are several features that I would love to add to my wish list for consideration in future updates:
- Ability to remove yourself from accounts. I have several old clients who still have me listed on their Google Analytics and have no way to remove myself. Being able to remove yourself from a Google Analytics account would be a great feature.
- Ability to limit access to reports. Right now Google has two account levels (Administrator and User) which is fine, but I’d love to have the ability to gradually increase the amount of reports that users new to web analytics see. Even as a standard user Google Analytics can be overwhelming, and with subsequent training users could have access to more and more reports.
- Create dashboards that encompass multiple sites. I’d love to have the ability to create a dashboard similar to what Omniture offers that is completely customizable, and offers the ability to create droplets from multiple sites within a single dashboard.
- Show me whats changed. There are third party plug ins that allow you to see what keywords have changed, but it requires Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the plug in to work. Not exactly perfect integration. I would like to see this integrated along with information reporting on increasing and decreases across top content, referring sites, etc.
- Simplify goal tracking. The difference between head, exact, and regular expression is not clearly defined in my opinion. Offer the ability to paste additional JavaScript onto your goal page similar to Adwords conversion tracking as an option to tracking conversions. Same thing could be applied to the funnel visualization as many CMS (content management system) solutions offer the ability to customize the page, but not the URL in question.
- Standardize on exact keyword tracking. Currently if you use broad or phrase match in your search engine marketing campaigns the exact keyword is not passed into your web analytics. ROI Revolution has created a great script that places this under user-defined in the visitors section of Google Analytics, but this is not a standard feature.
- Offer offline tracking integration. This one might be a stretch, but I’d love to be able to create a vanity URL through Google for my offline campaigns and then have it redirected and show up in referring sites. I do this normally through purchasing URLs and then 301 redirecting them myself, but for the majority of users this is probably a more advanced feature. Additionally using Voicestar or other solution for phone number tracking would be great.
- Segment out paid vs. organic for other search engines. Right now you have to manually tag all of your destination URLs for Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask if you want them to be segmented out. There are ways to help automate this as I’ve previously blogged about, but still not a true automation. I’d love to see a way of specifying a key that could them automatically sort the campaigns as appropriate.
- Improved site overlay. A plug in like what Omniture uses seems to work consistently better than what Google Analytics uses, especially for sites that use JavaScript, AJAX, and use of other non standard technologies.
- Creation of custom variables for future expansion. Just as how ROI Revolution came out with the exact keyword tracking I would love to have future expansion of custom variables that can be utilized.
What other features would you love for Google Analytics to include in future releases?
