Google Analytics Kicks Microsoft Analytics

Almost 1 year ago I wrote a brief article about why Microsoft Analytics sucked and today Microsoft have announced the end of Microsoft Analytics. Competition in the web analytics market place is essential and as feature sets increase, greater competition drives innovation and creative thinking.

Microsoft Analytics has remained clunky and more importantly slow - way, way too slow! So it does not come as a surprise that Microsoft has had to rethink the analytics front.

Microsoft's announcement raises 2 interesting questions:
How closely is search engine marketing tied to web analytics innovation?
Where are web analytics tools, like Google Analytics, heading?
I am not going to dwell on the first question - maybe you have some thoughts you would like to add on that topic. So I will move on to my (current) Google Analytics wish list.

Google Analytics Wish List

Google Analytics Site Overlay

The current site overlay feature is easy to hate, but aside from making it functional, I would love to see each link tracked independently and lets apply custom segments.

Google Analytics Heatmaps

Heatmaps are loveable and useful for evaluating where people think they can click and how people are interacting with your site. It may not be eye tracking, but it is definitely effective. Crazy Egg does it well, Google Analytics will rock it.

Google Analytics Realtime Tracking

Everybody wants their data now! Yahoo can do it, so, fingers crossed Google comes to the party.

Google Analytics Client Information

Who else would love to be able to tag visitors within Google Analytics and import information you have about your clients and leads? I know I would! Imagine being able to segment based on form input fields to see your clients or leads who have registered interest in a particular product or service.

Google Analytics Custom Segments For Sites

How about using the custom segments from within Google Analytics to present particular content to particular visitors on your website. While I am in this dream, why don't we combine Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics and allow us to input the targeted content straight into Google Analytics to present on our website? Oh, and lets keep it really easy to use and make it pretty!