Google Analytics is a Google Service that offers website stats for webmasters.
Today I received an Email from Google notifying me of the new beta version of Google Analytics. Let’s check it out together:
Google Analytics New Beta / Welcome message
Google still leaves the option to use the previous stats interface:
Google Analytics New Beta / Dashboard
Google Analytics New Beta / Visitors Overview
Google Analytics New Beta / Traffic Sources Overview
Google Analytics New Beta / Content Overview
Google Analytics New Beta / Evaluation
You’ve seen the screenshots - the design of the new Google Analytics beta is nice, clean and neatly arranged. Unlike at the previous version of Google Analytics, graphs and stats tables are scaling with the surfer’s screen resolution to fit to the screen horizontally.
When compared to the old version of Google Analytics, the new Google Analytics beta doesn’t introduce any remarkable new features - however it seems more lucid which leads to an increased time efficiency when viewing the stats. In other words: With the new Google Analytics, you’ll find the desired information faster. I’d definately recommend to check it out!
[…] Optimized Promotion SEO Blog has posted some nice screenshots of it: Google analytics new beta version […]
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 what is it actually useful for, and what are 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 either useless or 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, i.e. a chart with how many visitors checked the site during a particular day, at what hours of the day; 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.