New Google Analytics – Finding You The Right Data

It was only 4 years in the making, but Google has now finally launched an updated version of Google Analytics.

That's not to say that things have been standing still in the time between v2 and the latest release: a wide variety of features were 'bolted on' to the previous version, including important elements such as custom reporting, intelligence alerts, event tracking and AdWords reporting (which remained marked as being in beta for most of their existence ).

On this basis alone it was probably worth revising the tool to better integrate these key features, and a general review of the usability never hurt.

So, at first glance what's improved? Rather than try and answer that wholesale, lets drill-down and ask the question 'What's improved to help us find insightful, actionable data?

Thankfully the answer is, a few things:

Plot Rows: On the surface this is a very simple one, but makes a regular piece of analysis far simpler than before.

Looking at your traffic trends is one of the most common activities upon first look. Previously when you noticed a spike you would have to drill down, look at the sources individually and attribute the impact based on an individual graph.

Now you can simply check the sources you want to look at, hit 'Plot Rows', gain valuable insight:

Dashboards: If you weren't already using custom dashboards, now is a great time to begin. The key reasons being a) your analysis gets a flying start by presenting you with the data you need from the off, and b) you have the ability to very quickly get a snapshot of the relevant performance metrics (ensuring you are always in the loop).

The new version of GA provides a far improved dashboard functionality. They have been completely redesigned, allowing full customisation and simple creation through the implementation of widgets:

Also, the ability to create multiple dashboards is a welcome addition. GA is often used by a range of users, interested in different metrics. So now there can be a dashboard for the marketer, one for the CEO, one for the CFO and one for the Social Media team (to name but a few examples).

Events as Goals: For those of us that truly love data (did I just admit that?), Events have always been exciting part of Google Analytics, allowing insight into activities such as the playing of a video or adding a comment – in fact your imagination is pretty much the limit for Events. The giant bugbear was the inability to track these in reports like you could Goals.

Fortunately, this has all changed and is very well implemented to I must say. By selecting to match certain criteria you can now track events individually, or create buckets and categories with which to review them:

In conclusion, I'm really pleased with the way this round of changes to Google Analytics has put more emphasis on making it easy to find insightful, actionable data. Reporting for each site/activity really is unique, and the focus on customisation of reporting helps to encourage this mentality which can only be a good thing. (No doubt a certain Mr Kaushik has had a lot to say on the redesign, and it's all the better for it.)