Google has recently revamped the design of its Analytics interface, streamlining several features that were strewn across different tabs and making it a more coherent, easy to use product. Here is a run through of the most prominent changes.
New Top Navigation and Sidebar
The most significant change involves the orange top navigation bar and sidebar. All of the report tabs that were previously listed under a main tab labelled “Home” (these include the Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events and Real Time tabs) have been streamlined under one tab called “Reporting.” As well as this, Real Time now appears under “Standard Reports”, while Intelligence Events, Shortcuts and Dashboards now appear under “My Stuff”.
It’s also worth noting that the AdWords section can be found on the Traffic Sources drop-down menu. This is where it belongs, although it was moved to its own section last year during the Google Analytics V5 update.
Oh, and you’ll notice that the top navigation floats as you scroll down the page now too!
Changes To Dashboards
The dashboards also got a facelift and now feature white widgets over a pale grey background. More significantly, you now have the ability to alter the layout of your dashboards by changing for example, the size of tables to create more room for data.
On top of that, there are now two more Widget options available: Bars and GEO maps. GEO maps allows you to create a widget that contains a country or state and colour code it based on a metric of your own choosing, giving you a great way to analyse metrics at a glance. Bars are a superior way to plot data on a graph.
It goes without saying that these changes will make it easier to create more effective dashboards. Not only that but dashboards are now “emailable”, making them easier to share and even more useful.
What do you think of the new improved Google Analytics?
