Lots of cool announcements and great people at the Google Analytics Summit. It’s at times like these that I wish I was part of the GA network.
Going from visit to visitor-based tracking in Google Analytics is a fundamental shift and one that I had not anticipated. The lack of true visitor tracking is one of the few reasons why some organizations might have chosen other analytics tools, but once this rolls out in Google Analytics you’ll be able to get true (visitor) conversion rates and do visitor segmentation and cohort analysis. Oh yeah, there is cost data import as well.
With the announcement of Universal Analytics and measurement protocol Google Analytics appears to becoming a platform, where you can send your online and offline data for processing, storage, reporting and analysis. I can see all kinds of uses outside of web analytics. How about using it for your personal analytics? Send your brain/sleep/fitness data to GA where you can then use the beautiful UI to analyze trends.
The one area that concerns me is about privacy and data usage policies. While the new measurement protocol allows you to send granular data down to individual vistor ids from your application to Google Analytics, how are you allowed to use that data once it has been processed by Google Analytics? Google is rightly very concerned about privacy and has placed restrictions on the type of data that can be sent to Google Analytics – absolutely no PII data – but also on how you can use that data if you take it out. What data will the export API allow you to retrieve and will there be restrictions on how to use that data?
Follow me on 
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Umh… would you like to send your sleep & brain pattern to Google? I’d rather have that data send to my own computer (possibly in my house) that would run on open/free software, and that nobody could access as it would reveal quite a lot of sensitive data….
For access to Visitor Level reports, while ensuring respect of your visitors privacy and your own, I always use Piwik the popular open platform for Analytics. Not quite as powerful as GA of course in terms of advanced features, it might be a good choice for data savy companies and gov agencies who cannot share the web usage data with any third party company or any foreign company -for EU where I live, many cannot use google for user data.
Regarding Universal Analytics & the other features this is a great and exciting announcement from GA. I look forward to using these since I still use GA as well as piwik on some websites
I am not saying that you should send your fitness data to Google, but that you could. Up until the last wave of product announcements, Google Analytics didn’t even have a way to send cost data to it. Now they have all these tracking API that allow you to send any kind of data, whether it’s from mobile apps or scanners.
Thanks for the tip on Piwik!