David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

New Google Analytics Released

May 10, 2007 @ 7:33 am · Filed under Business, Internet, Ireland

It seems Google is doing a number of releases recently. I see they have released a beta version of their new interface for Google Analytics. My first impressions is that I like it. It’s easier to use and the map overlay report is much more useful this time. You can actually see the locations people are visiting you from as opposed to before when you saw one big blob over Dublin.

What I really liked is the export facility. On the dashboard, I exported the reports to PDF. It opened a lovely 6 page report covering all the main reports for my site. Everything right there, ready for filing! :D

The navigation is much easier now as well. Before, it was a pain to try and get to the keyword report (3 clicks I think and it was hidden under a stupid name). Now, you click traffic sources (and you see a summary of keywords here as well as top traffic sources) and then keywords and you’re into the report. Then, if there are any reports you would like to view regularly, you can add them to your dashboard. This will make viewing reports much quicker and less time consuming.

About 3 months ago, I installed Mint Statistics and I found it quite good. Different to Google Analytics but nonetheless, very good. I had actually started using Mint as my main program for checking stats on a daily basis but now I think I’ll move back to Google Analytics.

After my giving out last night about Google and their mapping system in Ireland, I’m glad to be praising them on their update of Google Analytics. Good job. I’m off to play with it now for the next few hours til I get bored!!! :D

  • Created May 10, 2007 @ 7:33 am
  • Permalink
  • 821

3 Comments (post a comment)

gravatar

Louie  spacer

I have to agree with you there, indeed is a lot easier then the previous one.

May 12, 2007 @ 9:58 am
gravatar

alin rosca  spacer

I think the new Google Analytics totally sucks, and is the perfect example of what happens when computer geeks are put in charge with developing a product for business use: they just developed something cool, without understanding its purpose and the users’ needs.

They fell in love with the product & features so much, they completely forgot about the end user. The result is an application that has the coolest features, is very powerful… and very cumbersome to use. It takes twice as many steps as before to get a report.

For instance, you can’t easily see the “inside day” chart of visitors (hourly data); you can’t easily see the geolocation of the visitors: it doesn’t help to know they came from the U.S. A lot of web sites are local in nature (or they run geolocalized marketing campaigns), so how about seeing how many visitors came from Kansas City, Jacksonville or Portland? With the new Analytics, you have to go through a few steps to get that simple data, which should be on the Dashboard; Also, the Traffic Source shows “search engines” and “referring sites,” which doesn’t help: which search engines? which referring sites? Now you have to go through a couple of steps to find that out.

It doesn’t help me that the New Analytics has a bunch more features and they’re really cool, when it’s a lot more cumbersome to use. When I use a product five times a day I can’t care less about how cool it is, I care a lot more about how functional it is. And the new Google Analytics is anything but functional.

July 21, 2007 @ 5:58 am
gravatar

mandeep  spacer

I agree with alen rosca. I blindly trusted google analytics to be a blessing while i was paying 10$ per month and even more if heavy traffic. Being a webmaster for 6 years now i jumped into internet marketing too. I used every major paid stats service. So when google analytics came i immediately canceled my subscriptions to others and started using google analytics.

But now even when a NEW interface is available i think earlier one was better. BUT i noticed a major glitch in google analytics that suddenly i got reduced traffic on my all 8 sites . I saw a decrease of 35% of traffic. After2 months of being clueless , i saw a post somewhere mentioning same thing.
So what i did was use 15 day trial of my earlier stat software WEBCEO . And when i checked visitor stats on my webceo and compared with server logs they were nearly identical , but while they showed 10,000 unique visitors analytics showed 6000 something . Both webceo and awstats showed 30,000 page views analytics showed 19000!!!!!!!!

So clearly its foolish to depend upon google analytics specially if you are serious towards webstats.

August 1, 2007 @ 1:52 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment