Some of you may have heard that Google Analytics did a major update that became mandatory in January of 2012. Much like with Facebook Timeline, Google has allowed a grace period where the old reporting style was still available (yet no longer), though with Google Analytics one had to click a link at the footer to view it. The old reporting was my preference for a quick overview of my different client accounts, but change happens so I will adjust.
From what I’ve read, the new Analytics is geared more for larger corporations that want to provide custom tracking, charting and reporting options, and for those with ecommerce sites who are tracking conversions and AdWords. The concern is that the “old reporting” scheduled emails will be discontinued soon (no actual date has been provided), so new email reports using the new interface will have to be created for each of my accounts. I note this since I am in the process of learning how the new reporting can best serve my clients, and if you don’t get your scheduled email, know that I will have it in place again soon.
As my clients know, I have scheduled their analytics report to be sent out each Monday as a PDF. But in case you were curious, there are other reporting options as well beyond PDF, which include CSV, TSV, and TSV for Excel. There is also the option to have the report emailed once, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. If you would prefer to have your report sent out in one of these formats, of course do let me know.
The new reporting definitely provides more than the old one (at least in the online view); now the standard reporting can be customized by using “advanced segments” (you are allowed to select 4 options here) which provides a much more detailed overview page. But I should note that the scheduled email report needs to be configured since the default “standard reporting” doesn’t really show much, only an overview which provides a line chart of visits over the last month, the total number of visits, number of unique visitors, page views total, page views per visit by person, avg. visit duration, bounce rate, percentage of new visits, and the language of the visitor.
As for the online options, you will find them on the left column. From top to bottom there is:
Audience. Within this category we have overview, This is what is provided in the “standard overview report” that is sent out by default as a scheduled email. This category includes demographics, behavior, technology, mobile, custom, and visitor flow. After “Overview” we have advertising, traffic sources, content, and conversions. Each of these have sub-menu options which provide additional reporting information.
As noted above, this new version has the “advanced segments” option in the standard report which allows you to select some addition values to track. For myself, I tested all visits, search traffic, referral traffic, and mobile traffic. This provided a lot more information than the simple standard report. That being said, you need the “custom reporting” options to get a detailed email report.
I am still learning here, but from what I’ve seen it works like this: In Custom Reporting you create a new report, name it, and add a report name in the provided field. Next you name the report tab, and choose the explorer or flat table option. Then you add a “Dimension” (what is being reported on) and a “Metric” (the numeric summary of the dimension). In essence, you are creating a table of the data that will be displayed. For example, your dimensions might be “city” and “count of visits” (two dimensions are allowed for) and the metric would be “pages/visits”. The challenging part is to know which fields to select from the drop-down listing to achieve the best result (Google suggests trial and error). And finally, you can limit the results further by adding a “filter”. For the above example, I added a filter for “keyword”, and then added “webdesign”. What this would provide me is a report table that would show the number of visitors by city who found my website using the keyword “webdesign”, and how many pages each visitor viewed. Note that since a filter was applied, only results which correspond to the filter will be shown.
This section is designed so that one needs to create a new report tab for every dimension (aspect you want to track). The downside is that there is no “autocomplete” or “suggestion” option, which would be a nice inclusion. And lastly, this new analtyics reporting only recently started providing the option to email or download a report. Both are still in Beta, but upon my test they did work. Based upon the many changes that have already come about, I expect more changes to follow.
You can learn more about these at the Analytics website:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsDataCalculation
https://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=98527#design

