Over the next few weeks, Google announced it will be rolling out real-time updating to Analytics users along with more sophisticated analysis tools. The new reporting and analytics tools will be rolled out to all users as “v5” of the popular free web analytics tool.

The new features had been in beta for the past several months and include a revised reporting interface as well as several new tools. Perhaps most important is the new “Real-Time” reporting, which claims to update analytics data within seconds of the page being viewed.

Traditionally, Analytics users had to wait up to several hours to see traffic on their websites reflected in the Analytics data…akin to having stock market delayed when trying to make investment decisions. This delay had been the greatest complaint amongst Analytics users, leading many to move “up” to more powerful, fee-based analytics tools with lower latency in their reporting. Real-time reporting should bring more users back to Google, which relies on Analytics data for much of its paid-advertising metrics.

Better conversion tracking

The new reporting tools include “Multi-Channel Funnels”, which Google claims will improve conversion tracking by displaying user site-activity up to 30 days prior to purchasing or conversion activity. Website owners will be able to better visualize which marketing channels are contributing to a conversion, whereas prior to this update they could only credit the last marketing interaction with the conversion.

Analytics also has new visualization tools to better capture visitors’ interactions with your website. The new “Flow Visualization” tool overlays multiple user paths simultaneously, providing better analysis of paths through the website ending or starting from the same point.

Mobile Mania with better device tracking

Google beefed up Mobile Reporting with more detailed information on mobile visitors, including which devices and mobile platforms they’re using. This information will be very valuable to website owners developing mobile versions of their websites, as well as planning and targeting advertising at specific mobile devices.

Users will be able to revert to the previous version of the Analytics interface for several months, allowing users time to migrate custom reports to the new interface.

Google’s anti-spammeister Matt Cutts announced Nov. 9 at Pubcon that the search giant is testing new algorithms to measure how much content on a page is “above the fold”, or actually relevant to the search query, vs. how much content is advertising that may be obscuring the actual content.

“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” suggested Cutts in his presentation. “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?” While Google’s Panda update already penalizes web pages with little original content, Cutts’ remarks indicate Google is further trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of relevant content.

A quandary for web revenue models

While more testing will reveal “how much is too much”, Google’s impending actions would appear to make it more difficult for content creators to generate revenue from advertising on high-ranking pages. Of course, Google itself derives 99% of its revenue from advertising, so any tweaks to content-ranking algorithms will likely be exceedingly subtle at first. Third-party advertisers and content aggregators will need to watch these developments carefully, though.