Google Incorporated has revamped Google Analytics, improving and expanding the data reporting capabilities of the Web site usage monitoring service. The overall goal of this upgrade is to make the product more intuitive to use and its data clearer and easier to digest, so that it can be used effectively to make business decisions, said Brett Crosby, Google Analytics senior manager. To that end, the user interface has been redesigned to be more intuitive and the product has gained new ways of presenting Web usage information and of displaying and delivering reports, he said. Google has also added what it calls "plain language" descriptions of the data, to make it more understandable. Google Analytics also allows the scheduling of automatic creation and e-mail delivery of reports. Google will begin rolling out the Google Analytics upgrade on Tuesday, and it expects to finish it in a few weeks, Crosby said.
Knowing how people arrive at their Web sites and what they do once they are there helps webmasters make their sites more effective tools for displaying online ads, providing sales leads and generating e-commerce transactions. Google entered the Web analysis market a little over two years ago when it acquired Urchin, whose technology forms the basis for the Analytics service.