Oooh it’s purdy. Google has pulled out the web 2.0-fu and decided to gradient and candy up Google Analytics. However, they’ve done it with style, giving the interface a nice color pallet, (notice those link colors? What else is that color? That’s right) page restructuring and iconography. What’s new? Well, let’s take a look:
1. (almost) No Flash
And about bloody time. With mobile and tablets taking up so much attention in the business world, it’s nice to see Google breaking away from Flash. Graphs are now iframed SVG graphics that look great on my phone.
Go ahead, load up analytics.google.com on your phone or tablet and marvel in how you can see all of the charts.
Then notice that bubble charts are still flash based. Argh.
2. Precision Mode
Google has done away with the yellow “this report is based on x visits” box. Instead, you now have a slider that lets you choose between faster processing and greater precision, letting you select a greater sample size. Sadly, it looks like they may have also lowered the threshold that they report based on.
3. Dashboard Sharing
Quoth David Eckman: “Yaaaay!”
Their system shares the configuration of the dashboard, not the data, so you can create a dashboard under any account, and share it with any other. This is huge for GACP’s since that means we can set up sets of dashboards and move them into client accounts instantly.
4. Updated Visualization Options
Motion charts are back, and a little easier to deal with. They still let you piece together absurd amounts of information (since you can set one metric for the x axis, one for the y axis, and one for bubble size), but they do it a little better now. Sadly they’re still Flash, so no mobile phone usage.
5. Cached Reports
Another “about time” one. Now, when you load a report, navigate away, then return, you do not have to reload the report. Only reload the cached data.
6. Interface Tweaks
There are some obvious ones here, like the use of blue text instead of grey creating great contrast, cleaned up navigation, and more. However, the really great tweaks come in some of the more functional changes, such as a loading bar for reports, or cleaned up graphs.
Despite this being a seemingly superficial update, there are actually a lot of really great additions to GA. Check it out and let us know what you find.
