The New Google Analytics
For years traditional advertising has been viewed by most businesses as a necessary evil. Necessary, because all businesses need some form of exposure in their marketplace to survive. Evil, because there really hasn’t been a good way to determine the effectiveness of advertising campaign dollars. Now in the online world, advertising and evaluating those dollars spent towards marketing is becoming more like a science.
Google has offered a FREE Analytics program for years but, in the past setting up the software services and making since from the data retrieved was a bit confusing for even the savviest technologists. With the NEW Google Analytics you can setup, implement and analyze advertising campaigns along with evaluating the return on those advertising/marketing dollars spent with relative ease. The best part is, it doesn’t leave you feeling like you just spent your time trying to push a wet rope in a straight line!
A couple a new features with the New improved Google Analytics:
1. Pretty colors and graphs – There’s a new set of graphs and charts to wow the “Suits” with upward trends and positive ROI’s.
2. Custom dashboard capabilities - Google has added the capability to add only those reports you deem useful and beneficial. Add them to your dashboard and you’ll get them every time you log-in.
3. Auto Email Reports – You don’t want to even log-in to get reports on your advertising campaigns? You can have them emailed to you whenever you want. Schedule it and go!
Category: Analytics, Advertising
June 8th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Great stuff here Jon, I came across this today and wonder what your take on how someone stealing your code would affect your site in the eyes of Google?
July 21st, 2007 at 12:01 am
I think the new Google Analytics totally sucks: 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.
March 9th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
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