The New Google Analytics
Well, wouldn't you know it: pretty much as soon as we publish a Few Good Tools article about web analytics packages, Google launches their complete interface redesign of Google Analytics. A Google staffer offers a comprehensive overview of the redesign on his blog.
Not that it changes much about what I would have said about Analytics. I'd just be even more glowing. I have to admit that the old Analytics was pretty and shiny and seemed like it *ought* to be telling you a lot of stuff, but I always found it hard to drill down to exactly what I was hoping to see. I've just started to play around with the new Analytics, but it feels amazingly more intuitive. In fact, it feels like it has much more information than it used to.... though perhaps it's just easier to access that information.
The interface design was led by Jeffrey Venn, one of the founding fathers of website interface design. You can tell. The interface is a fantastic example of giving people a high level view (with substance but not overwhelming) and allowing them to drill down where needed. You can customize your view if you want, but you don't have to customize to get something pretty useful. It really shows the difference between useful and the merely nifty.
And how's this for intuitive: I had tried to setup conversion goals in the old Analytics, to measure eNews signup and donations. I didn't have a lot of time to play around with them, and I never got them to show me anything at all. But magically, with this new release, they've just started working by themselves. So that's a huge plus for the new Analytics: a number of people have mentioned trouble with that feature, but now it appears to be within the reach of mere mortals.
Not that it changes much about what I would have said about Analytics. I'd just be even more glowing. I have to admit that the old Analytics was pretty and shiny and seemed like it *ought* to be telling you a lot of stuff, but I always found it hard to drill down to exactly what I was hoping to see. I've just started to play around with the new Analytics, but it feels amazingly more intuitive. In fact, it feels like it has much more information than it used to.... though perhaps it's just easier to access that information.
The interface design was led by Jeffrey Venn, one of the founding fathers of website interface design. You can tell. The interface is a fantastic example of giving people a high level view (with substance but not overwhelming) and allowing them to drill down where needed. You can customize your view if you want, but you don't have to customize to get something pretty useful. It really shows the difference between useful and the merely nifty.
And how's this for intuitive: I had tried to setup conversion goals in the old Analytics, to measure eNews signup and donations. I didn't have a lot of time to play around with them, and I never got them to show me anything at all. But magically, with this new release, they've just started working by themselves. So that's a huge plus for the new Analytics: a number of people have mentioned trouble with that feature, but now it appears to be within the reach of mere mortals.
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2 Comments:
And what have you learned so far? Anything to share? I also found Avanish's piece on social media metrics very interesting as well.
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/05/what_does_googl.html
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/05/measuring_your_.html
I use a lot of web analytics stuff in my work, so there's a lot of things that I find useful. You've covered the primary stuff I use in your posts: overall traffic, popular pages, referrers, search keywords. I think Google Analytics is going to be able to show me the percentage of visitors who printed each Idealware article (we have a URL for a print page template, to help in tracking this) , and the percentage who signed up for our eNews on that page, which will be really useful metrics in figuring out what articles people are finding compelling.
Another interesting thing I've found with Google Analytics is that it's easy to see the percentage of new visitors vs. returning visitors, which helps you keep things in perspective. About 80% of our site visitors are new visitors (primarily coming from Google searches). That helps me to remember that having bright and shiny new stuff on the site is not as important as helping folks new to the site find the most useful resources for them...
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