Google Analytics Gets a New Look

I must say I am pretty excited to get my hands on the new Google Analytics interface! It looks gorgeous and should make all the data mining a wee bit easier both on the eyes and on the time clock. If there is one thing that I am continually impressed about in relation to Google are the FREE tools they offer to the web community and the fact that they are attentive to these tools. From what I’ve seen (here too) there are some Ajax elements which allow of on the page restructuring as well as some enhanced reporting goodies that should help in making sense of the numbers…

I received an email this morning and Google lists out some of the new features:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.
• The new interface has everything the previous interface had and more. In addition, links within reports make it easier to navigate related information and explore your data.

This new Google Analytics interface should also make it much easier to work with the AdWords accounts to which they are associated. Some of the reports in this area (Marketing Optimization>Search Engine Marketing) are a great help in identifying where are where not to focus your CPC efforts.

On this same subject here is a great article posted on Stone Temple Consulting (inspired by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz) concerning an analytics shoot out between some key analytics providers. It’s a good experiment with some worth while conclusions about the providers performance as well as the overall issues facing getting good analytical data on the Internet. (Especially notable is the 13% variance in reporting data between first party and third party cookies.) Keep in mind however that this is only an interim report, the full report should be out sometime in July 2007.

Having good analytics for your website is absolutely essential if you are to make educated and helpful decisions about how to improve the usability of your interface. If you are new to the area of analytics I highly recommend Eric Peterson’s book â€Å”The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators” as a good jump starting point. The book also includes a very handy excel spreadsheet.