“In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing,” Google said in its big product shut-down announcement. “We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.”

Paul Muret, Director of Engineering for Google Analytics and co-founder of Urchin, talked about it a bit more on the Google Analytics blog:

When I started Urchin Software with a few colleagues back in 1998, it was hard to imagine the scale and impact that Urchin and Google Analytics would eventually have. And yet, I remember rolling out the first version of Urchin to our customers and being blown away by the response. It was clear that Urchin was filling a fundamental need to understand customer engagement in a new medium. Suddenly, it made the intangible packets of traffic flying invisibly all over the world very tangible.

The success of Google Analytics has been incredibly rewarding and humbling, and we are very thankful for the support of our early Urchin customers and investors. The Urchin Software product has now been completely overshadowed by its tremendously popular offspring. And so, it is time that we now complete the cycle by officially retiring the Urchin Software product and focus exclusively on online analytics. On behalf of the original Urchin crew and Google, we thank you and hope that we can continue to serve you with amazing products.

New sales of Urchin will stop at the end of March, but current installations will work “for years to come,” according to Muret.

“”But wait!’ you ask, ‘How can an event-which measures user interaction-be non-interactive? And why would I want that anyway?,” says Patricia Boswell of the Google Analytics Team. “The answer is simple: sometimes you want to track passive events on your pages, like images from an automatic slide show. In this case, you want such events to be excluded from bounce rate calculations because they don’t track visitor interaction. Now, you can mark these events as non-interaction events, so that they don’t affect the bounce rate for the page.”

She uses an example of an image slide show that automatically serves up 5 images in rotating order on a site’s homepage. “You want to apply an event tracking call with each movement of the slider, so that you know which images are being seen most by visitors to your home page,” says Boswell. “However, there isn’t really any interaction required on the visitors’ behalf to engage with this slider. You know that in the past, event tracking for this slider would make the bounce rate for your home page drop dramatically. Better to exclude these events from bounce rate calculation, so that the bounce rate for your home page is calculated only from pageviews for the page and not events.”

She explains how to use the code in this blog post.

There’s been a lot going on with Google Analytics this month. For one, Google announced that it would make encrypted search the default for signed in users of Google.com, meanwhile blocking specific referral data. This hasn’t gone over incredibly well with the webmaster community. There’s even a petition aimed at getting Google to reconsider.

Google also started letting Analytics users get Webmaster Tools data in their GA accounts, an extension of a previously launched pilot program.

Finally, Google announced Flow Visualization in Google Analytics, which lets you analyze insights in a visual way, to help you better understand how visitors flow throughout the pages of your site.

Several months ago, Google launched a pilot program, but now, the new set of reports is available to everyone. “The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results,” says Google Analytics Associate Product Manager Kate Cushing. “We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section.”

That includes reports for queries (impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries, Landing Pages (impressions, clicks, position and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages) and Geographical Summary (impressions, clicks and CTR by country).

Google says it has made various improvements to the reports based on feedback from the pilot program.

Perhaps these reports will help webmasters who have been affected by Google’s Panda update figure out some things.

Users must link their WMT and GA accounts obviously. To do so, go to the WMT homepage, click “manage site” next to the site you want and click “Google Analytics” property. Select the property you want to associate with the site and just save it.

If you’re a Webmaster Tools user, you can thank Google for a new “Site Health” feature. In a nutshell, it’s Google’s way of helping you prioritize what you’re doing in WMT by highlighting the “health problems” your site has. In fact, they’ve even redesigned the homepage around this concept.

Do you like the new design? Share your opinion in the comments.

The thinking is that you can see what needs attention the most, in order, according to Google. Given how much sites generally rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, whose advice would you rather take in this department?

If you don’t want to see sites listed by priority, you have the ability to view them alphabetically like before.

The new home page is only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your account, but they don’t all have to be verified. Google says it will be available for all accounts in the future. If you have over 100, you can still access Site Health info from the top of the dashboard for each site.

So what’s included in this site health data? Malware detection, important pages that have been removed with Google’s URL removal tool, and important pages that are blocked from crawling in robots.txt.

Google will provide additional info about any of these things as they’re found.

In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa writes, “A word about ‘important pages: ‘as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on ‘important pages.’ Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.”

“Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website ‘unhealthy;’ in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site,” she adds. “But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.”

It’s important to note that it may take several days for Google’s health warnings to go away after you fix the problems. Hopefully they can do something to speed that up in the future as well. If you’re still seeing it after a week, Moskwa says, the problem may not be resolved.

Feedback from webmasters about site health has been generally positive, but some still want more. For example, on Moskwa’s post, Antonio Ooi comments, “We’re more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine’s cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.”

Another commenter going by “knowj” says, “It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity. This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.”

What do you think? What else should Google show you as part of its site health feature? Let us know in the comments.

Now on the Analytics side of things…

In addition to launching a premium version of Google Analytics for bigger sites, Google announced the launch of Real-Time Analytics. What this means is that you can now see how your traffic is coming in as it happens, which could be huge for helping you shape your promotion strategies, and play to your strengths.

Essentially, it can help you do what you’re already doing with the data you get from Google Analytics and do it faster.

“One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet,” says John Jersin of Google’s Analytics team. “With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.”

“For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post,” he adds. “By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

He says he also uses real-time analytics to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a new campaign.

The new real-time reports are only available in the new version of Google Analytics. You can find a link to the new version at the top of Google Analytics if you’re not already using it. So far, only a few users have access to the reports, but they will be available for all in the coming weeks.

Do you think real-time analytics data will help you improve the your site’s traffic? Tell us what you think.

It’s called Google Analytics Real-Time (fittingly).

“One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic,” says John Jersin of the Google Analytics team. “For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

“Another way I’m using Real-Time is to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a campaign,” he says. “When getting ready to launch a new campaign it’s critical to make sure your measurement plan is working before you start driving visitors to the page. With the Real-Time reports you can find out in seconds whether you’re getting the data you want in Google Analytics.”

Users can find the reports in the new version of Google Analytics. They didn’t bother to add it to the old one. You should have access to it from a link at the top of GA. If you’re not already using the new version, this might be a feature that makes you go ahead and switch. You’re going to have to get used to the new version sooner or later anyway.

Now, if they could just get realtime search back.

Google also announced Google Analytics Premium for its biggest customers. It comes with extra processing power, advanced analysis, service/support, and guarantees. More on this here.

“Google Analytics complies with European data protection laws and is used by other European data protection authorities on their own websites.”

Reports indicated that German officials had ended talks with Google to resolve the issue, but Google said it would continue “actively working to address their concerns.”

Apparently there was some progress made, as Google has put up a post on its German AdWords blog. “While the use of Google Analytics in our opinion is not against the German and European data protection law, had German data protection authorities in the past to have a dissenting view,” says Google Data Protection Commissioner, Germany, Per Meyerdierks (as translated by Google). “We have worked closely with these authorities – represented by the Hamburg Institute for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officer – concerns regarding the collaborated and implemented a number of improvements to Google Analytics.”

Meyerdierks says the following government requirements must be met for those who wish to use Google Analytics in Germany (also as translated by Google):

• Please mention in your privacy policy that Google Analytics is used on your website.
• Implement the IP mask function instructs the Google Analytics to not save the full IP address of your users or to process.
• Instruct in your privacy policy on the possibility of disabling the Google Analytics function using a browser add-on to. End users can, if desired, to prevent very easy by installing this browser add-on that analysis information can be sent to Google. This possibility exists for over a year for Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer is now available for Safari and Opera and has proven successful and efficient solution for users.
• We have updated Terms introduced to include with the data protection authorities coordinated arrangements for data processing.

An official statement from German officials can be found here (in German).

In Analytics, conversions and ecommerce transactions are credited to the last campaign, search, or ad that referred the visitor when he or she converted,” Google says in the help center. “But what role did prior website referrals, searches and ads play in that conversion? How much time passed between the visitor’s initial interest and his or her purchase?”

“The Multi-Channel Funnels reports answer these questions and others by showing how your marketing channels (i.e. sources of traffic to your website) work together to create sales and conversions,” it says.

The reports are generated from conversion paths and sequences of interactions (clicks/referrals) from the 30 days that led up to each conversion/transaction. Conversion path data looks at paid/organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, email newsletters, display ads, custom campaigns, etc.

Here are a couple videos about Multi-channel funnels, including a walk-through:

Google Analytics users can use the reports by clicking on the My Conversions tab. AdWords customers are encouraged to link their accounts with their Analytics accounts.

Starting today, Google says, uses will see complete data in the reports for the past two months, but they’ll be expanding it to include data dating back to January over the coming days.

As it stands now, GA ends a session when over 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor, at the end of the day, and when a visitor closes their browser. In such cases, the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session.

Now, GA will end a session when over 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor, at the end of the day, and when any traffic source value for the user changes.

Google says traffic source info includes:

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_term
• utm_content
• utm_id
• utm_campaign
• gclid

Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics team says on the Analytics Blog:

This change only applies for visits going forward from today, and your historical data will not change. We’re bringing the definition of session in line with the common definition of a visit. If a visitor leaves your site and returns soon after with a different traffic source value, each visit will be measured with its own session.

Since Google Analytics will start new sessions for all new campaign information, sessions will now have the more accurate attribution information. This will be especially helpful if you use Multi-Channel Funnels. Additionally, by continuing a session when the user closes their browser for only a very short time, sessions will more accurately model a user’s engagement with the website. Overall, this change may slightly increase the number of visits. Based on our research, most users will see less than a 1% change.

Google also added some stuff to custom reports in Google Analytics this week. This includes 45 new metrics/dimensions, a simplified report builder and the ability to build entire groups of reports.

Now Google has launched a new version of Chrome where this functionality is enabled by default.

“When we can predict with reasonable confidence that you’ll click the first result, Instant Pages will begin loading the webpage early,” explains software engineer Ziga Mahkovec. “By the time you click on the result, the entire webpage will often appear to have loaded instantly.”

When Google first announced Instant Pages, it raised some questions about how it would work with Analytics. A Google spokesperson told WebProNews:

Most website analytics solutions assume that one page load is equivalent to one user “impression,” or page view. Although google.com only issues the prerender hint when it is confident that it knows where the user will click, in some cases it will mispredict, resulting in a page that has appeared to load but was never actually shown to the user.  Although this will happen relatively rarely, in some cases it is important for the webpage to know.

Analytics and advertising solutions will have to be updated to take account of prerendering via the page visibility API. In most cases the end site owner shouldn’t have to make any modifications to his page; the 3rd party will simply make a minor change to the javascript that is pulled into publishers’ pages. You should check with your analytics or advertising providers to check if their scripts are prerendering-aware.

A month ago, StatCounter released some stats indicating that Chrome now accounts for 20% of the global web browser market.

In WMT, there is a Search Impact report, which shows how +1′s affect your organic search traffic. “You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out,” says Google software engineer Dan Rodney. “Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.”

An Activity report shows how many times your pages have been +1′d, from buttons on your site, as well as on other pages like Google Search.

An Audience report will show you aggregate geographic and demographic data about who is using the +1 button with your content. Google only shows this info, however, when a “significant” number of users have +1′d pages. They don’t say what number they consider “significant” to be.

Users will find a +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page, where each of these reports will be able to be found.

Google is also showing how users share content using other buttons with Social Plugin Tracking in Google Analytics. This includes a Social Engagement report, which shows how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons and other social buttons. “This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t,” says Rodney.

Also included are the Social Actions report, which tracks the number of social actions taken on your site, and the Social Pages report, which lets you compare pages on your site to see which are driving the most social actions.

“Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Tracking for +1 in your account,” Rodney says. “You can enable tracking for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.”