Google Analytics gets upgraded! New version is cool!

Posted on May 8, 2007 at 4:25 pm

If you monitor your web site or blog stats through Google Analytics, then you’ll be in for a big suprise when you log in the next time! Google has just updated their Analytics program with a whole new interface (that is really nice) and a couple of nice features such as the ability to email or export reports in PDF format, customize the main screen when you first login, and compare different time periods on one graph.

The Dashboard is what the main screen is called and has a nice flash graph for the number of page views and visitors for you site over a month period. This is similiar to the old interface, but I found that graph to be too small and by default it only displayed a week, whereas the new version spans across the page and display data for a month.

You also now will see a Site Usage section that has some very useful stats such as the number of visits, pages/visit, page views, average time per visit, and % new visits. Before you kinda had to find these stats through various menus, but now they are all in one convienent location.

The map with all the bots for each one of your visitors has now changed to something slightly different. I always found the dots to be quite useless since after a point there were too many dots on the map to really be able to “analyze” that data. With the new map overlay interface, you click on a region of the world that you would like to get more information on. And instead of lots of yellow dots, the regions with the most visits are dark green and the regions with the lowest number are white.

As you can see, most of my visitors are from the United States. Now that’s a lot easier to figure out than counting dots!! Simply click on the region and you get more specific information using the same white to dark green coloring scheme.

Clicking on the Export to Email buttons directly below the Dashboard button allows you to take the entire report and store it in PDF, CSV, XML, or TSV format.

You can even set it up so that the reports are automatically emailed to you based on a set of pre-configured schedules (daily, weekly, monthly, or quaterly)! No need to even log onto the web site anymore if you prefer do to recieve emails!

The best feature, however, is that you can CONFIGURE the main Dashboard so that if you like to keep a close eye on your Google Adwords campaign, then you can simply drill down to Traffic Sources, and choose Campaigns and then at the top under the main heading “Campaigns”, you’ll see an option for “Add to Dashboard“! Click that and your Campaigns will now show up as a new section on your Dashboard.

And except for the top graph showing page views and visits and for the Site Usage section, you can move all the other sections around and order them in the way that suits you best. You’ll see on the left side of the dark grey header bars a grid like looking box which you can click on to drag the sections to other locations.