Google has come long way from its early days of basic reporting on Visits, Visitors, Pageviews etc. The early GA users used to view basic site stats and did not aim to understand customer behavior and customer intent from GA reports.
Now with advance features in GA, users can now be intelligently understand customer intent and track customer /user behavior with little bit of tweaks. GA now provides such sophisticated tools like Site Overlay, Custom/Advance Reports, Filters & Regex, Ajax Support, Outbound link tracking, event tracking and more.
Additionally the product is designed with high usability & accessibility. Users can drill from inside any report across any dimension and can view reports they would like to view. More about advance features.
A) Site Overlay: This is the most comprehensible way of displaying click stream data on webpages. It puts you in your users’ shoes. You can now view web pages the way users do view your site. The links they click, the pages they view etc. This information is extremely helpful if you can segment the click stream data for various type of users, such as users from Search Engines can be compared with Users coming Directly to your site. Similarly you can compare behavior of various segments of users such as Geography, Source of traffic, New / Returning Visitors etc.
B) Custom / Advance Segment:- This is mainly for ad hoc analysis, GA provides all metrics and dimensions in 2 different sections. A template / custom report can be created by choosing any desired value as metrics against any desired dimension (Geo, Source, Keyword etc..). This becomes your custom report. This report can be scheduled at regular intervals or as alerts in your email Inboxes.
C) Event Tracking & Outbound link tracking: GA provides facility with its new ga.jx code to track events, pageviews in Ajax powered web-pages and visits via outbound links. Suppose there are 10 links on the page, earlier we knew users were exiting from this page but not which link was clicked to exit the website. Now you can know if the user exited by closing the browser or by clicking external links.
D) Advance filters & Searches: You can use advance analytics settings to filter users and display them in new Profiles. You can try and exclude users from certain IP address, segregate visitors visiting certain section of the website into a different profile. Alternatively you can choose to recognize users from different search engines which Google is not currently aware.
There is unprecedented amount of the features and tools available for normal website owners to track almost everything desired about the user information through Google Analytics.