It's like a tree of information, with the branches flowing and merging as users move from page to page, action to action. Wojcicki and Phil Mui from the Analytics team also demonstrated real-time analytics, announced last month, along with a premium version of the product. Google also announced nine more languages for Analytics today.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half."
- John Wanamaker

Google took inspiration from Charles Joseph Minard's 1869 graph of Napoleon's campaign in Russia:

"It shows time, it shows motion, and it tells a story," Wojcicki said. "But I can't drill down. It's static. I can't make it dynamic." To make this kind of visualization useful for Google Analytics, it has to have adjustable filters. "What happened to the people who had horses? What happened to the people who spoke Russian?" Flow Visualization lets site owners drill down to Australian visitors or IE 7 users that way.

Google took inspiration from the 19th century chart and made it dynamic. The new Flow Visualization shows the march of users across a site, but it can be sorted to look at specific kinds of users. Web administrators can compare users on different browsers or systems, or from different referrers or countries, to see how their experiences differ on the site.

These new features provide a new way to use the goals administrators can set with Google Analytics. The Flow Visualization will show which users reached site goals and which ones didn't. Read more about these new ways of reporting analytics on the Google Analytics blog.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch day 3 live here.

This is something that many people are going to be very happy about. Real-time analytics startups like Chartbeat and Woopra (whom we use here) may not be among that group of happy people, but publishers and marketers are likely going to love it. You can sign up to request priority access here.

We asked Alistair Croll, co-author of the O'Reilly book Complete Web Monitoring and the co-chair of O'Reilly's Strata conference on data, what he thinks Real Time Google Analytics means and this is what he told us:

Google Analytics has introduced an entire generation of entrepreneurs to Business Intelligence. But it's big and heavy, and until now, reports didn't show you what was happening right now, giving rise to a horde of real-time tools like Getclicky and Mixpanel. Realtime analytics might seem like a "vanity" metric--after all, we care about the number of sales that a campaign generated, which is an aggregate measurement.

But these days, marketing is flat, fast, and adaptive. A mention on Twitter can lead to a flurry of activity, and marketers want to engage with those visitors as the traffic spike is happening. Because Google Analytics is already doing the heavy lifting--visitor segmentation, ad campaign effectiveness, keyword search--it can tie the twitchy right-now realtime stuff to the long-term metrics that businesses care about.

Right Now reports will also make it easier for people to test and tweak their Google Analytics configurations in real time, which has long been a complaint with the system.

This is likely the first of a number of very big changes coming down the pipeline for Google's wildly popular analytics service - but it was also a prerequisite for many of the other things we'll see next.

For example, minutes after we posted this - Google also announced Premium accounts for Enterprise customers. Video below. Whoa. The short version: SLA, increased processing power, customer service, fixed (but undisclosed) fee for customers in United States, Canada, and the UK (ouch, sorry world).

My prediction: Google Analytics is going to become a much bigger part of the company and a much broader offering in the future than it is today. With the recent purchase of startup Postrank, Google will be able to offer real-time social media analytics soon. As the definition of the web expands into and beyond mobile, into and beyond other newly connected devices, the Google Analytics offering will expand allong with the world's understanding of information. It will organize all that information and now it has laid the groundwork do it in real time and for a fee.

Most significantly, a new report in Google Analytics called Social Engagement demonstrates the impact made on your site traffic by not only +1's, but also tweets and Facebook likes. The report shows the correlation between things like +1 button clicks and the amount of time users spend on the site, for example.

Historically, Google's analytics product has shown how much traffic came from referring sites like Twitter and Facebook, but never included this level of social analysis.

The +1 button data will be rolled out to Analytics users automatically, but to get data from other social sources, you'll need to follow their instructions for enabling social tracking.

Google has also included new social-related metrics in their Webmaster Tools product. With it, site owners can see for themselves how the +1 button impacts organic search traffic to their sites. It also shows how many +1 button clicks your site has gotten as well as some geographic and demographic data about the users doing it.

Google, it's long been said, has an economic interest in making the web better because more time spent online means more ads clicked. The company reminded Analytics users today that they too have an interest in speed, saying that page load speed impacts not just their own site conversion rates but also their AdSense offerings and standing in Google search results. It's not just browbeating, though: the new tool will allow site owners to try out different methods of optimization and track the resulting consequences in terms of load time.

• Fewer search queries per user
• Less query refinement
• Less revenue per visitor
• Fewer clicks, and lower satisfaction
• A longer time for visitors to click something
• Fewer searches per day
• Lower search engine rankings

"Google now provides even more intelligence to allow site operators to better understand conversions. This is a great thing - it helps legitimize the movement behind web performance optimization which has been growing for almost 10 years now. With more and more metrics to track, businesses will need to practice restraint. It's so easy to aimlessly look at 'metrics'; concentrating on using data to solve real business problems is all that really matters."

As the scope of Google Analytics expands, it grows more intelligent about the nature of the web and thus more capable of offering its users more and better information.

Optimization specialist Robert Kingston, however, wrote yesterday about the new feature and argued that it uses a pageview sample rate low enough that it's unlikely to surface meaningful insights to owners of small sites. That setting appears unchangeable at present, but it's hard to imagine Google letting a long tail of data go underutilized.

Google Analytics is of course wildly popular all over the web; software research firm BuiltWith has identified more than 12 million sites on the web that use the service. No other analytics service tracked by the firm has been found on as many as 1 million sites.

Services in the business of page load optimization include Strange Loop Networks, Aptimize, Crescendo Networks and many more.

You can find this new feature in the "Content" section on Google Analytics. Google currently considers this a beta feature and there are a few known bugs, but overall it seems to work just as advertised. One nice feature is a bar at the bottom of the screen that notes how many clicks on a given page occurred below the current view.

It is worth noting that other web analytics providers like ClickTale and Crazy Egg offer a similar feature by providing their users with heat maps that represent clicks on a given area on your site. The concept here is quite similar, though Google Analytics does provide more advanced data than most of these products and is available for free.

Google now also gives publishers the ability to provide their visitors with an extra level of privacy. Publishers can now choose to anonymize IP addresses sent to Google, so that a user's exact geographic location (which the IP address often reveals), will remain hidden.

Do You Care Enough to Opt Out?

Google promised to release this tool about two months ago. For publishers, this is obviously not an ideal situation, as they rely on accurate statistics to manage their sites and tweak their marketing efforts. But it remains to be seen how many users will actually install this plugin. According to Google spokesman Brian Richardson, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times earlier today, only one in 15 visitors to Google's Ads Preferences Manager actually decides to opt out of the personalized advertising program.

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn't tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn't show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn't give us any details about how it tracks a user's behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn't use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher's site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor's sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos' secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience's scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company's blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user's behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can't be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

Note: Facebook will share more information about these new analytics features during an F8 breakout session at 3:30pm PT and we will update this post once we learn more. The new Insights page is already live and getting it to work involves nothing more than adding a short meta tag to your site.

Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level

This new service, according to Facebook, will give developers "detailed analytics about the demographics of [their] users." Today's web analytics systems like Google Analytics can give publishers detailed information about how many people come to a given site and where they came from. A developer who uses Facebook for Web Sites will be able to gather more detailed demographic information about these users.

With this update, Facebook Insights isn't just about Fan pages and Social Ads anymore (where Facebook already gives publishers very detailed demographic data), but it also allows publishers to track what happens to a link once it is shared.

Partly, this also connects to Facebook's new caching policy, which now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. Until today, developers who used Facebook Connect had to delete this data after 24 hours. Now, however, when users grant an application permission to store their profile data, they give these developers their age, location, gender, number of friends and a number of other data points about them.

The new version of Insights will also now show publishers and developers where traffic to a given Facebook application is coming from (both internal FB traffic and external referrers). In addition, developers can now see how many users declined to give an app permission to access their Facebook profiles.

Privacy Implications?

This update will surely have some interesting privacy implications. Thanks to the new permissions dialog, however, it should now be easier for users to see which information they will share with a third-party application.

It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a "global browser based plugin." This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don't know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google's best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail.

Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks.

Will this Make Stats Useless?

If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts.

What About Other Analytics Tools?

It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale, Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

How to See these Stats

Getting to this data isn't easy, though. First of all, you have to use AdSense for feed or FeedBurner to track this data. Then, in Google Analytics, you have to go to Traffic Sources and click on All Traffic Sources. After this, you still have to filter your traffic by entering 'feedburner' in the search box at the bottom of the page. In the Campaigns view you can also filter stats by 'feedburner.'

In today's announcement, Google explains how to customize the way FeedBurner tags clicks it sends to Google Analytics. Google plans to create more endpoints for FeedBurner data in the near future.

More to Come

FeedBurner users will be happy to hear that Google plans to release more features in FeedBurner that will take advantage of this new functionality in the coming weeks. FeedBurner had been lying dormant for quite a while. Today's announcement hopefully signals the end of this stage in FeedBurner's development.

On its overview page, PostRank will display standard metrics like total page views, a PostRank engagement score and, optionally, the number of Twitter followers you have. PostRank Analytics also offers a wide range of additional features, ranging from daily 'Concierge' emails with a summary of your blog's engagement activity to very detailed reports about specific posts.

The most interesting data can be found under the 'analyze' tab. Here, you can see a mashed-up view of all the posts on your blog and drill down to specific metrics for every post. PostRank aggregates data from all the major social networks and sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Reddit, and digg. In addition, it also uses BackType to track conversations around posts and displays traditional metrics like number of unique visitors and bounce rates from Google Analytics.

Most of the info in PostRank Analytics can obviously be found for free on the Internet already, but getting an aggregate view of all of this data definitely gives you a new way to track engagement around your blog posts. PostRank Analytics is obviously not an enterprise-class social media tracking service like Radian6 or Sysyomos' MAP and Heartbeat, but for $9 a month, it provides a lot of value to publishers who are looking for a convenient way to track engagement around their posts across a multitude of services.

Google already gave a number of developers a preview of the API and you can see the fruits of their labor here. These tools, for example, include integration with content management systems and other analytics suites. One easy to install example for an app that uses the Google Analytics API is Polaris, an Adobe AIR widget from Desktop Reporting that displays basic information about your site.

Of course, Google Analytics, even with this API, does not give you real-time information about the traffic on your site. For that, you will still have to resort to other tools like Woopra, which uses a desktop application as it default interface, and which also offers an API.

The report also points out these advantages (from the Google help system) to switching to the newer javascript code:

• Faster, smaller source file
• Automatic detection of HTTPS
• Increased namespace safety
• More convenient set up for tracking ecommerce transactions
• More customizable code for interactive Ajax-based sites
• Enjoying new features and reports as they roll out

Examples of top-tier sites still using the old tracking code include Google properties Blogger and DoubleClick, along with Wired, FoxNews and IGN. Will these properties be given as long as they need to make the switch? We agree with the conclusion of the report, which states:

"When urchin.js is finally decommissioned, will thousands of sites be caught without working statistics? We're guessing that Google won't allow this to happen, but you never know."

Perhaps it's best to integrate the newer tracking code sooner rather than later.

Update: The Official Google Analytics Blog has a new post up today that definitively states that their urchin.js analytics script will not be decommissioned without clear advance warning first, and they in fact have no plans to do so for the immediate future. We appreciate the clarification, thanks Google!

UPDATE: Turns out the new design wasn't so great after all. SiteMeter has implemented an immediate rollback to the old design!

SiteMeter has made a switch from a codename based management system to an email based system. This means that users can now consolidate their SiteMeter accounts under one email address. In doing so, users will be required to reactivate their accounts under their email address. You can even group your premium account reports by topics to compare and contrast the data of all your sites .

Visually, the service has redesigned the way users can now view their data. Statistics can now be visually seen using charts, graphs, or a table view. Choose date ranges of data to view, export your data, view demographics and do a ton more via a sweet visual interface. SiteMeter is also reporting to have more accurate data for visitor counts and page views by differentiating between visitors and unique visitors. All of your statistics are available visually and textually for any section of the service.

Taking Notes

With some of the new features, we have to wonder if SiteMeter decided to take a couple of visual cues from Google's popular Analytics service. Whether they have or haven't, SiteMeter has certainly done a great job on an long over-due upgrade. However, we're not sure if the new features are enough to keep users from using Google Analytics for free. If you're a user of SiteMeter, let us know what you think of the site's redesign and changes in the comments section.

Piwik originates from France and almost all the attention so far has been from outside USA. It seems to be catching on in Japan and China, as well as in Europe. The team responsible for Piwik seems to be made up of interns from big companies such as Amazon, Intel and even Google.

You need PHP and MySQL to use Piwik, which is no problem for techies but any widespread adoption will need a hosted version. Some entrepreneur is likely to offer that. Plug-ins to WordPress and other blogging platforms will also be needed, but cannot be that hard.

Open source products usually get traction, even when they are raw, when the alternative is too expensive or restrictive. Google Analytics is free, so it is hard to see rapid adoption by bloggers and small media companies. It is possible that Piwik will get better traction in companies that already use one of the expensive web analytics services from companies such as Coremetrics, Omniture and Visual Sciences/Websidestory.

Larger companies may have some pause for concern before switching to Google Analytics, because of the service's Terms of Service. An analyst in the IT department is likely to point out two clauses (yes big companies DO read this stuff):

"2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including but not limited to the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly-owned subsidiaries by 3rd party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports."

So, don't go above 5 million page views without paying something to Google via AdWords. That may make one a bit uneasy, but it is the "Google may change its fees and payment policies" that will have both IT and Legal aiming to nix the deal.

Then a bit later on you get:

"6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures."

In short, they have the right to use your data. We have lived for a long time in a world where Microsoft and others charged for the software and kept it under a tight IP control, but did not try to take any use of the data. Google reversed that. Google is happy to let you use anything for free, as long as they get to use your data. That is OK for most individuals and small businesses, but totally unacceptable for large companies.

Piwik is working hard to be developer-friendly, not just relying on open source. They claim 4 big advantages:

1. Open API
2. Plug in architecture
3. Data abstraction layer
4. Customizable dashboard

But the nub of the issue for most big companies will be the data ownership issue. That is why Piwik is really a Google Analytics alternative, even if they will see few firms switching from GA initially. IT groups, under pressure to cut costs, will look at Google Analytics as an alternative to their current analytics software and reject the option based on TOS restrictions. Then some bright spark will Google the term "open source alternative google analytics" and see Piwik on top of the organic listings.