Google Analytics Changes

If you are a google analytics user, you will be happy to know that Google has opened up their new features to everyone. Below are some quick highlights and tips on applying these tools for your firm.

Create Custom Dashboards

Google analytics now allows you to create custom dashboards. This means that you not only customize the information you see, but how you see it . (think timelines versus pie charts) You also have the ability to create multiple dashboards based on your focus. That means, if you host a blog or resource section (articles, press releases, newsletters, podcasts) on your website, you can create a separate content dashboard to monitor things like downloads, traffic and more.

Event Tracking

Google analytics has always given you the ability to set goals around visits, depth of visit (think number of pages and path to those pages) and time on site. It has now added a feature that allows you to track interactions with your site. These could be things like downloading an article from your site or watching a video.

Insightful Reports

Users now have the ability to not only see how your site is perfoming over time, but what is affecting that performance. Google Analytics has added the ability to plot multiple rows. So if you are curious how much your blog posts are contributing to your site traffic you can now plot it and find out.

For more extensive explanations of the tools and features, check out the blog post from the Google Analytics Blog on the changes. If you don’t have google analytics for your website, great news it’s free. It simply requires a small amount of code be inserted into you site.