If you spend a lot of time doing web analytic analysis like I do, you’ll find the two recently released enhancements by Google as welcome as a warm day is, in this chilly month of April.

Improved Diagnostics

When setting up accounts, profiles, filters, etc. it’s very important to ensure a proper setup.  Google has, in beta, a new feature to help ensure that your analytic setup is accurate and with tools to pinpoint errors.. The enhancement will automatically interrogate your site looking for issues with site tagging, account configuration, and reporting data.

The program is in beta, so if you’re interested, you’ll have to To sign up for the beta:

• Beta Signup Form
• Read more about it on the official Google Blog

Expanded Segment Capabilities – interactions

Segments, release in 2013, is a powerful tool for deep analysis on your visitor data. Prior to this update, it used sessions as the bounding box for what could be delineated. This update adds “interactions”.  In addition, new operators were added to enhance usage. All in all, a nice new addition to the toolchest.

If you’re new to using segments, you might want to do a little homework before diving in:

• Re-imagining Segmentation In Analytics – July 13, 2013
• Segments – a good introduction

The full announcement is on the official Google blog:

• New user and sequence based segments