Google has just announced a new version of Google Analytics, introducing a completely new user experience. The product got a significant face lift and it now looks more enterprise-like.
The last time Google Analytics released such a major version was 1.5 years ago; we covered the release in-depth on this post, but basically the release included the intelligence engine, custom variables, expanded goals, expanded mobile reporting and others.
Below, I share a few screenshots of the new face of Google Analytics (still in closed beta) and explain how they will change product usage. The new version of Google Analytics will gradually rollout to users in phases according to Google.
Main Navigation
It is interesting to see that Google Analytics has adopted the look and feel of the new Google navigation bar released back in February. As we can see below, the new navigation bar prioritizes the following:
- Account Home: page where we can find all the accounts to which we have access to.
- Dashboards: page where we can find all dashboards from a specific account.
- My Site: the place where all reports live, which is now divided between reports and intelligence.
- Custom Reports: page where we can manage and create custom reports.
- Account Manager: links to all accounts we have access to.
- Settings: page with all the accounts in which we can change the settings (i.e., those we are granted with administrator access)
Account Home
The Account Home got a face lift in v4 (see link above), turning it into some kind of dashboard. However, it looks like Google has abandoned this idea and now we will not be able to see metrics on this page, as is currently the case.
The good news is that instead of the metrics, we now have links that can be used to jump to specific reports on a chosen profile. The icons link to the main reporting tabs: visitors, traffic sources, content, and conversions.
Multiple & Improved Dashboards
This is probably one of the biggest hits of the release: the capability to create multiple dashboards, each containing any set of graphs. This is a much wanted feature, especially for large organizations, where employees have very different needs from the tool. Now dashboards can be set by hierarchy, department, interest or any other rule.
In addition, as we can see in the screenshot below, the tool has also adopted Google’s naming convention, now all boxes are called widgets. And the widgets are significantly more customizable than in the past. Now it is possible to define which metric you want to see as well as which visualization you prefer.
The only strange change when it comes to the dashboard functionality is that they can no longer be found on the header of each report. Traditionally, there has always been a button in all reports that enabled adding the report to the dashboard; this was a good shortcut to adding interesting views directly to the dashboard, and now this process will be more difficult.
Report Nomenclature
Besides changing the UI of the product, we can also see that the names of reports have changed. For long time users, the names will sound a bit strange, but they do seem to be more accurate and intuitive. Here are a few examples:
- Network properties & browser capabilities now sit under one tab called Technology.
- Top Content is now Pages
- Goals are now Conversions
- Visit Duration and Page depth are now Engagement
User Interface Improvements
In the screenshot below we can see some of the improvements on the UI of the new Google Analytics version.
Closing Thoughts
As we have seen above, this release is very significant and I believe it is great news for users and the industry in general; once again, Google has raised the bar, especially when it comes to usability and data visualization.
However, I still believe there are some very important issues that should be addressed by Google in the near future. As I wrote on my Google Analytics Wishlist, I think the most critical improvements needed are:
- Import API for Marketing Campaign Data: the possibility to import into Google Analytics different campaign cost data from places like Bing, Facebook, Yahoo and others.
- Adsense Clicks as Ecommerce Transactions: the possibility to track adsense clicks as goals but using the amount received per click as ecommerce transactions
- Website Optimizer / Webmaster Tools integrations: being able to use one platform for online marketing activity (see my thoughts on Analytics and Webmaster tools integration)
Did you like the new look and feel? What would you like to see changed on Google Analytics?
Related Topics: Google: Analytics | Top News
Look like they’ve taken away the ability to export as a PDF. That kills me
Premium member since 03/2011
Can’t wait to use it, although really there’s nothing wrong with the current design IMO
The addition of graphs in the dashboard is a life saver. Hopefully this means less work in excel and improved usability for our clients.
Looks very useful, our digital strategists are crawling all over this right now
And the ‘killer app’, multi-touch attribution, is still missing.
Looks like some great improvements ahead.
I wish the SERP the ranking position would also be displayed on with the keyword drilldown at the time of the click as that would be a great help for SEOs and it would reduce the use of third party tools greatly.
I agree with Zachary, UI wasn’t an issue, integration with Website Optimser and Webmaster etc is much higher on my wish list.
Premium member since 01/2009
Daniel, does it work on the iPad? Currently AdWords and My Client Center have multiple critical flaws. Interestingly, Microsoft adCenter works very well on iOS.
When I go to meetings with clients the iPad is a really useful tool. Regrettably, when a client asks even a simple question about their AdWords account, or makes a simple request such as “turn on this campaign”, I can’t help them instantly.
Google needs to get with it, and stop being such a dinosaur.
Am I missing something or can you no longer export as a PDF?
Premium member since 05/2009
@ Dean and H.R.
The pdf export function was not removed. It is still missing as a result of the transition but will be back soon.
@ Neil and intextra.web and Jonathan
All the improvements you mention are extremely important and I couldn’t agree more with them. But I think the main importance of this new version is “enhance the Google Analytics platform to bring you major new functionality” (quoting the launch post). Google has worked on a major new platform which will enable faster releases and amazing new features to come…
Stay tuned :-)
Sweet! I especially like the Customized Dashboard thing… setting THAT up for all clients, let me tell you.
Thanks for the article! I’m having 2 major problems with the update, but maybe I’m missing something:
- On the new dashboard, you can’t customize anything, so you can choose to show a widget that contains “Source/Medium” but I can’t have it just show me where source is “cpc”. You mention this above by saying that you can no longer add to dashboard from a report, but what is the work around. Without that, I find the new dashboard useless.
- Similar to that, when I’m on a Source report, the search functionality no longer allows for regular expressions, so I can’t search on google|bing or cpc|organic to filter my results. This seems very strange.