The Changing Analytics User Interface

The Changing Analytics User Interface

 
Google analytics is the most useful tool when it comes to providing information regarding your online marketing strategies, and seeing how different campaigns affect your traffic. The new upgrades of the analytics user interface means that the data you see is now cleaner, clearer and more streamlined, in order to more efficiently access and understand the information provided.
 
The most recent update which occurred at the beginning of this year has brought with it an improved navigation panel which makes it easy to manage client accounts, properties and profiles. The navigation panel can now scroll independently of the main page, making it easier for you to customise all the information you need on one page, without the constant need for incessant scrolling.
 
The colour has also been removed from the main dashboard of analytics, this makes the whole interface look tidier and sharper to read, reducing the amount of clutter that previously seemed to overwhelm the page.

However the colouring hasn’t completely disappeared, by accessing the real time reports you can still opt to show different traffic sources in one graph, each one represented by a different colour. As you can see below organic is represent in blue, paid is in yellow and so on.

 

There have been name changes to some of the links within the sidebar as well to enable a clearer description of what each section contains. For example ‘Traffic Sources’ is now Acquisition, ‘Content’ is now ‘Behaviour’ and ‘Search’ is now titled ‘Keywords’. Under the keywords tab you can also find that the subheadings have been further amended to show organic and paid results separately, in order to make viewing the sources of your traffic clearer.

However, if you would prefer to see all of your data on the same page you can now go to a new section entitled ‘Overview’. This sector can display all the relevant information you might need to see at a glance, including a mixture of the main traffic sources such as paid, organic, direct, referrals and social. You can also change the channel grouping settings, as well as adding your own demographic data into the mix, like social media channels for example.
 
One of the changes Google wanted to implement was to rearrange the site to allow users to view data without having to customise numerous reports, by allowing users to add multiple metrics to a single graph. According to analytics “The main goal of this update is to bring more attention to the things that matter – your data and how you analyse it”. This has certainly been the case across analytics.
 
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