Google Analytics have been migrating their users to a new interface over the last few weeks. I like analytics (something to do with an unhealthy fetish for statistics I think) so I’ve been pretty impatient waiting for my mail to come through. Anyway its here and I’ve been migrated – woohoo!

I thought it would be cool to blog about some of the functionality that is available in analytics … until I sat down to do it and realised what a very long blog post that would be. So here’s the first installment.

The dashboard

The first thing you see when you view a site’s stats in analytics is the dahsboard, and its quite a change:

The strangest thing I find about this is the changed date range – I’m accustomed to seeing my site stats on a per-week basis rather than the four weeks that it now seems to like to show. Its cool though and gives a better overall picture of what is happening, especially for people like me that often only drop in and even then not necessarily weekly!

There are so many options from this screen that I’m literally going to mention a few and save the rest for another day, making this my new mini series of blog posts¹. To start with lets take a look under that temptingly clickable date range:

You can use either of these interfaces to pick your date range, which is really nice. The timeline one has grabbable side controls, so you can slide or stretch that range as you like.

Also note the compare control on the right hand side of the box … I used this with a week’s date range selected, and it projects last weeks data onto this weeks (although both date ranges can be altered) – look!

Its a nice touch and each point on that graph is hoverable, showing the exact number that has been plotted. Its possible to display all sorts of metrics against time from this one screen, look at that “visit” button on the top right?

Hidden in there is a treasure trove of options just waiting for you to drop in and get new perspectives on your traffic trends:

This simple section of the new interface kept me entertained for quite a while (although as I said, I do like statistics so am easily entertained by this type of thing), its slick and its easy to use and the flash does add a lot. I’ve found its buggy under Linux, although that might be more to do with the flash implementation than anything else, however it is a bit disappointing. I managed to borrow the MacBook though and that was much more stable (and hence the screenshots are raken in safari!).

I do like the new interface and I’ll be writing more about some other aspects of it in the future, if there’s anything you have found particularly useful or would like to know more about, add a comment and let me know.