One of the questions I often get from clients is if the Google Analytic platform is sufficient for their needs. The answer usually depends on the nature of their site and what they would like to accomplish business-wise with it. Many B2B web sites are primarily concerned with promoting their corporate brand and lead generation. Their conversion funnels tend to be relatively simple, tracking a visitor through to a lead for example. Interestingly, many organizations only use 10-20% of the overall functionality of their web analytics platform.

The Cintas website happens to be a B2B/B2C hybrid; they have a goal of lead gen with the added complexity of wanting to track on-line e commerce sales on both the public facing ecommerce and private customer-specific fulfillment sites. We choose to implement Coremetrics on Cintas.com due to its enhanced ability to segment traffic into multiple views, ability to track conversions in terms of sales dollars and cost per lead for multi-search engine paid search programs.

Google continues to inch into the enterprise space by improving both the paid search campaign management tool and the web analytics reporting section. The latest round of improvements are a solid step in this direction. Let’s look at what Google has recently released.

Google Campaign Management

• Demographic bidding- this pertains to the Google content network. This enhancement allows for more targeted ad display based on specific gender and age segments. You can now modify your bids for a granular audience segment, such as increasing your bid for 18-24 year-old males.Secondly, and just as critical, you can now exclude your ads from displaying to demographic groups if they don’t meet your marketing goals. For instance, if you are getting clicks from college students, and they are not converting but costing you dollars, you can select to exclude them based on their demographic age range.The Demographic Reports hi-lite your campaign performance metrics (including impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion data) by the age and gender of the users who saw your ad.
• Improved views for search and content network statistics (taken from Google’s web site)
  Now you can easily check your search and content network statistics on the summary pages of your account. Use the new Statistics drop-down to see separate search and content rows for each of your campaigns and ad groups, or filter your display to view only the statistics for the network you choose.

Google Analytics

Google recently released several new features include the ability to create custom reports, audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, and the introduction of slick bubble “motion charts. Google is also working to expose the analytics data via an API – this is in the works and will greatly extend the ability of marketers to combine web anaytic data with existing sales data in their own corporate data mart.

Let’s take a quick look at each feature in this latest update.

• Enhanced Audience Segmentation - Audience segmentation has long been a key feature that separated GA from the commercial enterprise level WA products. This will give you the ability to slice the analytic data by visitor demographic. For instance, we often isolate search engine (both organic and paid) and look for variable user behavior in each. Other ways to slice the data would be by region (west coast, south, etc), by visiting domain, by time segment of the visit, by page visited (we often isolate a particular page on the site, i.e., contact form, and only report on the visitors that hit that page during a visit.) This allows us to see of there is a common path or page that lends itself to the visitor filling out the contact us form.
• Custom Reporting – Google has enhanced the reporting to allow greater levels of customization and criteria setting. Reports can now be based on a larger set of data than the captive set previously available.
• Bubble Charts- Motion charts allow you to visualize data across five dimensions (x axis, y axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, and position over time). To get a look at this new implementation go here Google Bubble Charts. This is a technology that Google aquired from GapMinder last year.
• AdSense Integration with GA – (taken from Google AdSense blog) – By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you’ll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site.To learn more about this significant enhancement go here : Google AdSense Blog

Google continues to improve and inch into the enterprise analytics space. They certainly have the resources and financial backing to do so. It will be interesting to see how OmniTure, CoreMetrics and the other commerical analytics vendors respond.