The New Google Analytics is So Not Cool
Analytics May 10th, 2007 - By Haochi
All the excitements about the new Google Analytics should be now over and let’s face it, it’s not that cool. Google claim that the new user interface will “present data more clearly”, but not in the case with me - it’s way more confusing that the previous version.
Bartheq said in the Google Blogoscoped forum,
The main dashboard graph no longer shows visits and pageviews together. To view the pageviews I have to switch to another graph and it’s impossible to compare the trends. You can only compare another range in the past.
When a single day was selected from the calendar, the graph would switch to 24 hours mode allowing to view hourly activity. Same was with month /showing days/ and year /showing months/. Now the graph always shows last 30 days /for small ranges/ or more and the selected range is highlighted.
There’s no easy way to view the stats for the whole year. In the previous version all it took was one click on the year above month list and now a range has to be entered manually.
Maybe it will take a few days for me to get used to it, but shouldn’t a good product be user friendly even for a newcomer?
May 10th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
hmm, I don’t have it yet, though I guess that it’s easier for a new user than for an old one. If you already used it, you might expect it to do things that you got used to and therefore think that it got worse. I can’t judge it yet, but I am sure that there will be further updates in the future to improve it
May 10th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I agree - new users will have no problems (: Who knows… maybe some day I’ll get used to it or it’ll be improved.
I guess the new version is still in beta. Daily PDF report, which was supposed to be sent every morning, arrived at 6 pm and the “Add to Existing” tab in email setup doesn’t seem to work at all.
Another thing I’m still missing in sharing options is allowing a person to admnister only selected website(s) instead of giving access to the whole account.
May 10th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I disagree with the last part of your last phrase.
I think the new layout is super-userfriendly.
I guess Yannick is right saying you’re used to the old interface.
And about the pageviews and visits… They’re not together in the same graph, but in my eyes that’s also a thing you like because you’re used to it. Now you can add both seperate graphs to the dashboard, so they are both in the same screen.
This is a huge step forwards by Google. Bringing the best of Urchin and Measure Map together was a great choise!
May 10th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I kinda like it now as I am getting used to it… Anyway, there are goods and bads.
May 11th, 2007 at 12:30 am
I’m not saying it’s not super-userfriendly, but it could be both this and have some of the old useful features (:
I already put pageviews graph next to visits /custom dashboard is a great feature/ and I’m trying to get used to it, but I can’t get over the 24 hour graph which was very useful.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:30 am
My view: It’s good, but it’s missing a few pieces still. Add to the lack of 24-hour view (which was vital to me) that when you export keywords you have to manually edit the URL to get the full list using “&trows=1000″ (Thanks for Anayltics Support for that - they’ve been great which is very important in itself);
SO I am still using the old view day to day at the moment - but I think with good feedback from the community they will fix any issues like this and it will end up pretty quickly be a benefit. They have a lot of ‘goodwill credits’ left over from making it free after all!
May 11th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Totally agree. I’m sticking with the old version until they get rid of it for good.
May 11th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I’m bouncing between the two until I can get used to the new interface. I tried REAL hard not to, but this morning I couldn’t find something and found myself backing into the old interface.
Just give us some time. I’m sure we’ll grow into it and Google will fix some of the quirks.
May 11th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Having been using Analytics for a very low-traffic website (http://jaywalkersunite.googlepages.com/home), there are a few features that have changed that the low-volume people (or at least the people I know) use the most. The biggest annoyance is the geo-map overlay changes. With the old one, it automatically came up in the “city” detail level. Yes, I have changed it so that it is in the city view on the “dashboard”. However, with the old version you could hover your mouse over the dot representing the city and have the city name appear. One plus I have noticed is a much faster load time than the old version, which took 20-30 seconds with my DSL connection.
May 12th, 2007 at 3:59 am
It takes some time to get used to it, but the drill down goes a loot deeper then in the old version (I use it for Adwords), and yes, speed has taken up substantially. No more coffee breaks for me while loading a report.
May 12th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
What? The new version is noticeably slower than the old one… (for me, on a DSL connection)
The old version was kinda AJAXy that only refreshes the data-displaying section, and the new version freshes the whole page almost every time you click on something. (except the Flash files, of course)
May 13th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I’ve really tried to get used to the new version, but it’s not easy at all.
I liked the hourly breakdown graph and also showing which keywords came from which search engine (not found this yet on new version), plus the new date range selection thing crashes my Firefox sometimes - annoying!
Hopefully it’ll get better before we lose the old version though.
May 14th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
I am so happy to see an honest post about this horrible new tool - Google has spammed the internet with happy blogs about their beautiful new product.. “damn the user” is so right.. if you are a low volume user it probably will not matter much to you but with 5ook visitors a month and 55k kw’s i need to be able to easily get to my data.. this is a mess! here are just some of the issues I have found.. I wonder about others….
1. Buggy in Firefox
2. Graphics are too large and text is equally as obnoxious
3. Data that used to be viewable on the front page are now 3-5 levels deep
ex. New maps - I used to be able to look at the executive summary and see where people came from and numbers right there. Now I have to do region/country/city before I can see anything - this is huge esp when monitoring activity of 500k visitors
4. no network location cross-reference data
– includes kw (no data)
5. Cannot see all goal data at the same time
6. Cannot compare visits, pageviews and conversions at the same time
7. Not organized well - things do not follow a logical progression
8. Items are difficult to locate
9. No real navigational elements
10.Can only view 100 items at a time instead of 500 not bad on small sites, but on a large site where we get 1/2 a million visitors a month it is severely restrictive
11. cannot sort data a all.. if it gives you back the lowest ranked kw there is now way to switch to the largest.. so with 55k kw’s i have no way to access data.. that is simple.. etc etc etc…
and this is just from the first 15 mins of using it.
I will go back to the old til they force the new, but I think they made a horrible mistake - along the lines of IE 7 - it is a lousy product! Only people who use analytics for cursory data will be ok with this - if you are a heavy user for a corporate or high trafficked site these changes are going to severely limit your business model. I think it is time to reconsider our options.
May 15th, 2007 at 3:35 am
Hi,
It’s still a free tool. If you’re a heavy user, you can always switch to one of the paying ones.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:40 am
Sorry - not trying to sound harsh, but I shouldn’t have to as I was fine using this tool and it took my team a lot to implement the analytics into our pages..in addition, our adwords are heavily tied in - all 50k — and pardon my hubris, but I think those 50k keyword buys gives me a right to have some say in the product.. besides this is poor UI and should be fixed —
BTW my suggestion to anyone with issues would be to a) make a bug report to google b) contact Jeffery Veen on his site as he is the UI Team Lead on this project
If those things don’t get reported in both places, there is not much chance they will be fixed.. as they seem to think they have it spot on…
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000965.html
good luck!
May 15th, 2007 at 4:43 am
That is indeed a good idea and a positive approach.
May 15th, 2007 at 5:00 am
thanks - I hope people will really use it because in the brief number of comments I see on the Veen page I can tell they are resistant to hearing that this product is not wonderful and so will take a lot of people telling them the issues if there are going to be changes made.. otherwise we will be stuck with it as is… at least that is my impression
May 15th, 2007 at 5:08 am
I am searching for a searching engine keyword
May 16th, 2007 at 2:19 am
this one made me laugh but sadly how very true…
from veen’s blog
” To Matt the one who posted about ecommerce - I am betting that it is people like us with ecommerce sites (and the ones most in need of the analytics for monetary decisions) are the ones who are really finding this site deficient- all the “wow its so cool and shiny” people are not trying to view visits, bounce, page view and conversion rates all on the same table (which you cannot get to anymore), or bulk export 10’s of thousands of lines of information in a report, or who need to use network location for cross reference or who need hrly reports to make informed decisions, or who need to see country data instantly not 5 clicks down, or who need keyword and landing page data cross referenced or who are going to create so many dashboards that they will spend all day scrolling because the architecture is so poorly designed for us.. nope shiny happy bloggers, small site owners and the rest are going to determine the nightmare for the rest of us.. I physically get an ill feeling in my stomach every time i try to just locate the simplest of datum.. nope seems that google decided the webmaster/ecommerce director was unimportant..
so cheers to all of you who find the lack of comprehensive data so appealing - I love to hunt and peck for everything and then screen shoting it so i can review it together.. or even better making another oversized graphic for my home page that is still not comprehensive for my needs..
for me it just means more work and that makes me angry — and as an angry customer whose company spends more than a million a year in ad buy from Google….you think it would matter but it doesn’t from what i have read here.. so yay for the user who does not really need it — so glad it impresses you with it shiny oversized graphics, browser issues and lack of proper functionality for people who actually spend money on google … the 12th graders here need a product that is not geared to the kindergarten class.. but thanks to Google we are now writing on wide ruled construction paper with colored crayon - yay i am so happy about it I could just scream….
“
May 24th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Actually I really think people need to acknowledge that google analytics is the best and easiest to use FREE analytics tool.
I am a major fan, the only gripe I do have is that sometimes the page load can be really slow with their tracking code in it. I would have thought that their servers wouldn’t have any problems just recording hits etc, but occasionaly things grind for a few minutes.
I’m a happy google analytics and webmaster tools user! BTW I also use my own stats recording on my sites to supplement google. For quick views of what is happening this is often quicker to use.
May 26th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
i do not need to acknowledge that something poor is great.. and as for being FREE - hardly… We pay a lot of money to Google for ads — the tool helps us spend our money with them it is hardly FREE..
May 27th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Although the visual look of new Analytics version is quite sexy, but the problems you have mentioned are genuine.
I am also facing the same problems, to compare the traffic trends or hourly traffic I have to switched to old version.
May 28th, 2007 at 3:04 am
Thank you Myk… I read so many comments from people who don’t really use it for monetary decisions talk about how great it is when people who need it to spend money properly are missing some of even the most basic metrics.. leads google to think it is a success when it isn’t … so thank you …
June 23rd, 2007 at 3:15 am
OK since the new version was upgraded I’m much happier with it and am now using it 90% of the time, although I still like to check some things in the old version. The way the timeline shows you things like the frequency of keyword visits over time is really excellent. Overall I think they’ve done a great job now (after these fixes based on user feedback) with what is a major upgrade to a product used every day by a huge number of webmasters. Google does it again, in my opinion!