Google Analytics Changes

Google Analytics have rolled out a series of fairly big changes to their User Interface. They do this every so often, either to incorporate extra functionality, or simply to clean up the user interface & improve user experience. (See the tweaks they made last time, for example).  This time around most of the changes are purely around the interface, though there are some large, useful functionality tweaks too.

This post covers the 9 main changes made to Google Analytics:

1. Top Navigation Changes

The top navigation (and the overall information architecture) has changed quite considerably. There are still 4 options, but they’ve altered:

Here was the old top nav:

Here’s the new top nav:

The main changes there (including the bits you can’t see) are:

1. The ‘Home’ tab has gone. (this used to house the ‘real time’, ‘dashboards’, ‘intelligence’ reports. To be honest the naming of it didn’t really make sense before, and it was really just a collection of arbitrary reports that didn’t have anywhere else to live).
2. A ‘home’ icon has been added at the far left. This is totally different to the old ‘home’ tab (which took you to the ‘real time’, ‘dashboards’, ‘intelligence’ reports). It simply takes you back to the main list of all the Google Analytics accounts you have access to.
3. The accounts dropdown (with new globe logo) has become much wider. (this is more useful than it sounds if you have lots of accounts & profiles, some with long names)
4. ‘Custom Reporting’ has been renamed’ Customization’. (UK people may dislike the addition of the American Z here!) From what I can see, the content behind the ‘customization’ tab is exactly the same as it was previously at the moment, despite the name change.  See Full Article>>>