Last week Google quietly updated its Analytics tool. The updates are quite fundamental, with a brand new tag now available to replace the current tags you may be running. The original tags they ran were old Urchin tags (Google Analytics was Urchin Analytics until it was aquired.) They looked like this:
<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct = “UA-30553-21″;
urchinTracker();
</script>
The new code looks something like this…
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(”\<script src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’>\<\/script>” );
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-30532-21″);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
But we don’t really need to worry about what the tags look like, its what they do that matters.
The new tags, once installed give greater opportunity to track e commerce functions with the ability to track specific basket values (like an MDT report from Bluestreak) and allow you to place the same tag on all pages, instead of creating dedicated tags for https secure pages. This new tracking also offers more opportunities for data analysis and graphing which is helpful to compare performance of the site and various factors against different date ranges and against different criteria.
These new updates continue to boost the benefit of using Google Analytics and will certainly help in measuring the overall effectiveness of site performance against various traffic generating methods. However, we must urge caution when using this as an adserving and tracking tool. Whislt GA and other analytics tools have increasingly set themselves up to track advertising as opposed to just site traffic, they are cannot serve the ads themselves which is a challenge when wanting to track display advertising and rich media campaigns. This form of tracking is also not recognised by publishers so it is hard to use these tools as an independent audit of campaign delivery. They can, however be used in conjunction with an adserver such as Bluestreak or Doubleclick to great effect.
