BlissLogs

One of my chief complaints about Google Analytics over the past month that I’ve been using it is that navigation has been slightly less than intuitive. It wasn’t so bad that I ever considered stopping its use, but I did make comments to co-workers that I had to search for the stats that I wanted.

It looks like those days of complaining about Google Analytics may be coming to an end. Google has announced that they are releasing a new version of the tool. It will be phased in over the next several weeks to all users of Google Analytics. Once you see the update, you will still be able to use the old version for about one month, but if it is as improved as they say it is why would you? You don’t even have to login to Google Analytics to find out if your account has been upgraded yet as they will send you an email when you have.

What is changing? Here is a snippet from the Google Analytics blog with a few bullet points as to what is improving:

• 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.

I’m most looking forward to the Custom Dashboard functionality. This should solve my navigation issues that I was experiencing with the old version by putting exactly what I want to see on the dashboard. This new version is coming out at the perfect time for me as I am about to start utilizing Google Adwords to generate more traffic. I’ve never used anything like that before so the integration between the two Google services will help me get the most out of them both. Let me know when you get the update and what you think of it.

Happy Blogging.