Google announced a package of new features for Google Analytics service at the annual conference held in the nation's capital on October 20, 2009.

There are some quite useful features in those updates, including more powerful reporting capabilities, greater customization options and a new “intelligence engine” that Google says can help search marketers drive smarter data insights.

Advanced Intelligence and Custom Alerts

New Intelligence Engine at Google Analytics comes with default alerts that will show you interesting trends in the data: it surfaces insights. Exactly how the algorithm that does this works is not clear, but it certainly takes into consideration many variables, in a very Googly manner. This can be a great way to start your day looking for insights—a kind of a conversation initiator for web analysts.

When something unusual happens in your analytics, Google will send you an email alerting you to the change. One example of an alert is when traffic spikes by a large percentage. You can set your own parameters for when you get an alert and there are also automatic alerts.

New Goals

Two new goal types are added, they will “allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site.” With these goals you can set thresholds for time spent on site by visitors and pages per visit for example. And now you can have upto 20 goals for profile.

Expanded Mobile Reports

Now you can use Google Analytics to track you site usage in mobile devices. The mobile device which can run JavaScript in the browser can already do this with Google Analytics regular code. For phones that don’t have JavaScript tracking possibility Google introduced a server side code snippet that will do the magic of tracking the usage. Currently they support PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release.

Multiple Custom Variables

The Google Analytics tracking API will offer developers the ability to define and track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes, and by page-level attributes.

Advanced Filters and Table Analysis Features

These new features help you manage vast amount of data, great for larger sites. If you're looking at large lists of keywords, for example, you can break it down by multiple filters and factors.