Secondary Dimensions and Pivoting in Google Analytics Announced

Posted by Daniel Peden on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 in Google Analytics, SEO

At this month’s eMetrics conference Google announced some advanced features which present great prospects for the more advanced analytics user.

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions allow cross-tabular analysis of data. The possibilities of this addition are huge – in Google’s example they selected keywords and used city as the second dimension. They also pivoted by source, showing all visits per city and keyword from each search engine.

Without explaining how this works and to avoid getting people confused, my best advice is to view the video below. It’s a great real world example of how this works:
The second feature announced was the ability to Share Custom Reports. In my personal opinion, this is a brilliant addition. Rather than sharing the report data, the custom report structure is shared, allowing you to apply other people’s reports to your own data. This opens up a new world of report sharing, where before you read step by step instructions on making the best custom report for SEO or PPC, it’s now simply a case of copy and pasting the URL.

This also means the user can test custom reports much quicker than before. Hopefully, this sharing ideology will help to create a community from which a “Super-SEO” report can be born – very similar to the open-source platforms where everyone helps to create a better product, I predict the same will happen with custom reports.

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