Google Analytics has become more analytical with the addition of Google Analytics Content Experiments, which will be fully available in August 2012. The new feature for Google Analytics comes at the expense of the end of Google Website Optimizer, which will be fully integrated into Analytics.
This streamlining alignment will place more tools in a single place for understanding how successful web sites are in driving visitors and revenues. In an announcement for Google’s Analytics Blog, the company said:
“We’re excited to integrate content testing into Google Analytics and believe it will help meet your goals of measuring, testing and optimizing all in one place. Content Experiments helps you optimize for goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account, and can help you decide which page designs, layouts and content are most effective. With Content Experiments, you can develop several versions of a page and show different versions to different visitors. Google Analytics measures the efficacy of each page version, and with a new advanced statistical engine, it determines the most effective version.
“Testing and experimentation of websites may sound complicated, but we’ve worked hard to provide a testing tool that makes it as easy as possible:
– Content Experiments comes with a setup wizard that walks you step by step through setting up experiments, and helps you quickly launch new tests.
– Content Experiments reuses Google Analytics tags so that you only need to add one additional tag to the original page.
– Content Experiments helps you understand which content performs best, and identifies a winner as soon as statistically significant data has been collected.
– Since content testing is so important, we’ve placed Content Experiments just a click away from your regular diagnosis reports in Google Analytics.
“With full integration in Google Analytics, we’ll be able to grow and evolve website experimentation tools within our broader measurement platform. Initially, you’ll be able to utilize important features like optimized goal conversions, easier tagging, and advanced segmentation in reports. We’re also working hard to release page metrics, additional goal conversion options and experiment suggestions.”
Google also says more tools will soon be added to the arsenal of testing devices.
When you go beyond the corporate-speak of a company press release and dig down into real meaning, you discover the changeover won’t be automatic; some migration by hand will have to take place for any tests running on Google Website Optimizer before August. Overall, this is a positive development which will offer stronger data for understanding how well a web site is doing and will simplify more than one task into a single location.
As time marches on, so does Google as it seeks to continue to dominate the Internet. While some functions currently available for advanced users under the old system will not be initially available, most likely Google is working to develop another new set of features to roll out in the coming weeks and months.