Thoughts On The New Google Analytics Interface
When I saw the magical New Version link in my Google Analytics account, I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I was wrapping up my work and about to head out the door, but ended up staying at work an extra hour and a half just to play with this new, shiny gadget.
Let me preface everything below by saying that overall I absolutely love the new interface. It’s an exciting change! However, after using it for a while, I feel I’ve spotted a few bugs, or, some things that I would like changed (please note that all screenshots below were taken for the same time period, with no advanced segments, etc).
First on the list is the dashboard. There is a keyword report we had on our old dashboard that is useful, and so I built a widget (I have options now, so cool!) and added that to the new dashboard interface. The great thing is the new dashboard lets me see more than five rows of keywords at a time, and also shows an additional metric.
For comparison, here is our old dashboard widget:
And here is the new dashboard report:
WHOA! Visits and Total Goal Completions on one table! Super-awesome!! Except…well, what’s with the giant (not set) bucket? On the old report it was only 304 visits, whereas on the new report it’s 8,607 visits. That is a big difference. Especially considering that when I go to Traffic Source > Incoming Sources > Search > Overview, my total search traffic for this time period is 4,699 visits.
There are similar issues with the other visit numbers. In the old dashboard report, let’s call the first row Keyword #1. Well, Keyword #1 in the new dashboard report, seen on the second row of the new dashboard widget, has 620 visits. That’s only a 14 visit difference, but still does not make me confident and I feel like something weird is going on.
Second on my list is the All Traffic report. We advertise a niche product so there is not a ton of traffic to our websites. There is a particular media placement we found that gets a lot of fairly qualified traffic for a decent price. This runs for one week, but the problem is that it skews the graphs a lot and hides any regular patterns by flattening out the day to day traffic. Here’s an example:
You can see the two weeks this placement ran. In the old Analytics interface, we could use the filter at the end of the All Traffic Sources table to exclude this placement. It appears to not work the same way in the new interface.
So, I drop down the Search menu, I select “Exclude” and try to filter out this placement:
I hit Apply, and get this:
All it did was filter the table; the number one traffic source, with its 6,445 visits skewing my line graph, has been filtered out of the table, but it is still seen in the line graph.
This is a small issue, but something I really don’t like because it was easy to filter the line graph on the fly in the old Google Analytics interface. For instance, sometimes the marketers that send out eblasts to potential customers don’t tag the email campaigns (grrrr!!!!). So there are times where I look at the reports and see what appears to be a significant spike in direct traffic. I check the media schedule and don’t see a print ad running on that day, so I wonder if it’s an email campaign that wasn’t properly tagged. To do this in the old interface, I would test by just typing “mail” in the filter and hitting “Go.” This way, I can see the referral traffic of everyone who may have opened the eblast in GMail or Yahoo mail and clicked through to the website; if this referral traffic spiked on the same day as direct traffic, it’s easy to put the puzzle pieces together and know what happened. However, if I try the same thing in the new interface, I can’t see the patterns. And I really don’t want to create an Advanced Segment every time I want to test something. Doing that multiple times can be a pain, and the time spent doing that can really add up. [UPDATED] I tried filtering this line graph with advanced segments and it still doesn’t happen…only the table gets filtered…very frustrating :-(
Of course, any corrections two the issues I listed here are welcome; maybe I’m missing something or haven’t heard that a feature is on its way.
I must say though, the Google Analytics team has done some great work with this new interface; I appreciate all their hard work! Especially since it makes my job easier :-)
