While I was at Pubcon a week ago I had the opportunity to talk to Ashish Vij from Google’s Analytics team. You can read about all of my adventures and lessons learned at Pubcon. Here are some of the cool things that Google has that are new to the New Google Analytics Interface.
One of the most important take-aways from this session was when Ashish talked about making sure you take the time to understand what you want from your website and your analytics account. Why would you or anyone else implement Google Analytics if you really don’t know what you want? Take your time when figuring out what you want from your site. In google Analytics you can track pretty much anything you want to on your site.
When you track more on your site you will have a lot more fun diving into Google Analytics. You can know more what is going on with your traffic and visitors to your site. Below are some of the newer features you can see through the New Google Analytics Interface.
- Google announced that email scheduling and PDF export functionality are coming to the new interface in the next couple weeks and will be sunsetted in January 2012. All currently scheduled emails will need to be set up in the new interface over the next two months. All old interface scheduled emails will be deleted.
- You can now attribute your Facebook ads and track conversions through Google Analytics
- If you have a members area, now you can track how members interact with the site even when they aren’t logged in. You can even see how often people click on your ads.
- Starting this week anyone putting up mobile ads will start to see mobile ad performance metrics in Google Analytics. A new visual toggle is being added to all AdWords reports, showing “All”, “High-end Mobile” and “Tablet” ads. I would recommend that you put up separate campaigns for both search on computer and mobile ads.
- Custom Variables, now you can identify previous purchasers to help you maximize return on investment.
- Annotations are very powerful but easy to miss. When you notice something on your account, you should annotate the change or what’s going on to save you time and grief in the future.
- Implement site search to see if you’re missing content. This will help you to see content that you’re missing.
Keep in mind, if you need help or have something that you need in Google Analytics you can go and suggest them at https://goo.gl/5BjQS Make sure that you mention that you were here at PubCon and they will give you a little more extra attention!
