If you logged into your Google Analytics account and thought it looked odd, you aren’t going crazy. There weren’t any major announcements from Google about it, but they have certainly made some significant changes in the last day or two. They did mention some new reporting options rolled out in a blog post. While it will take some getting used to in order to find the new locations of old reports, and to properly use the new ones, it seems like a positive update overall.
New Reports
The main new reporting option is called the “acquisition reports” which provide you with in depth information about your users’ Acquisition, behavior and conversion cycle (ABC Cycle). This will give marketers additional information about how you acquire new users, the type of behavior they have on your site, and what types of things they do surrounding their conversion. While further testing will certainly be needed, it seems that this could provide some valuable insight for many marketers. Understanding how customers are finding and using a website can be extremely important.
The overview report has also gotten an update, and is now more intuitive (according to Google). It will help provide an end to end view of your business operations, and includes some data pulled from the new acquisition reports as well.
Channels
Google is also introducing channels which will allow you to get a better view of your traffic acquisition in a much more detailed way. You can group similar sources together into channels so you can have a larger pool of data to review when making decisions. This is also likely going to be useful for performing comparison testing, which is essential for any successful marketer. These channels will be quite valuable for grouping data together in a logical way, which is something some people have said was missing from the analytics service in the past.
Finally, Google also gave the Google Home Page a facelift. If you’re not already logged into analytics, you’ll be brought to a new home page, which was updated in the last few weeks. It is a much fuller page, with a lot more information pushing the value of their analytics tool. Prior to this update, the page largely existed only to facilitate logging into the page.
You can see the blog post from Google concerning the new reports HERE.
