• Home
  • Google Analytics
    • Customizations
    • For Ecommerce
  • Speaking
  • About
    • About Me
    • Contact Me
    • Disclaimer and Privacy Policy

Analytics Talk

Digital Analytics for Business

You are here: Home / About Google Analytics / Getting to Know the New Google Analytics Admin Interface

Getting to Know the New Google Analytics Admin Interface

Posted: October 22, 2008 11 Comments

One part of Google Analytics that has seen very little love over the past few years is the administrative interface. Not any more! Google has rolled out a beta version of a new GA management tool that will have an immediate impact on how we set up and manage Google Analytics.

When you firs log in the new admin area will display a list of all accounts that you have access to.


Click to enlarge the image.

This tabular layout of accounts is new, and very helpful. If you’re an agency, or a large company, you probably have access to multiple GA accounts. This layout makes it easy to identify performance at the account level.

Key to the new layout is the addition of metrics. Available metrics in are:

* Visits
* Time on Site
* Bounce Rate
* Completed Goals

One column actually does a date comparison. Choose one of the above metrics using the drop down at the top of the column and a simple date range using the buttons at the top right corner of the screen to determine how said metric has changed over the past day, week, month or year.

Looking a bit closer, you’ll notice that each account name is a link. Clicking on the link will display all profiles within that account:


click to enlarge.

This is where things get really juicy!

GA is now grouping the profiles that have been created for each tracking code in an account. I’ve talked a lot about creating multiple profiles for a single site, and this is a great way to see all those properties in one place.

As an analyst I like the fact that I can view basic information in the admin area and do a quick performance evaluation. Would I like to see more metrics? Sure, but this is a great start. This literally turns the admin area into a basic dashboard for large groups of websites.

Another feature that I really like is the Favorites. Anyone that uses other Google products (like GMail or GDocs) will recognize this.

You can ‘star’ certain profiles and then display only those that you starred. This makes it very easy to zoom through all profiles and find the ones you regularly use. Unfortunately starring is not available in the account view, just the profile view.

Try changing the number of rows displayed using the drop down at the bottom of the table… Notice anything interesting? The new interface uses AJAX to dynamically pull back the data. Pretty slick.

Another interesting AJAX feature is the ability to rename accounts and profiles right from the table. Just click on the little pen icon next to an account name or profile name. Is this totally necessary? I’ll let you decide. But given the new interface I bet a lot of people are going to rename their accounts and profiles.

With the new layout of accounts and profiles we can eliminate the website domain name from the profile and account name and use a functional description that everyone can understand.

One thing that is missing from the new admin screen is a summary row. I think it’s critical to have a scorecard, similar to the scorecard in the reporting interface, that displays summary information for the profiles and accounts displayed.

Overall, this is a fantastic change that goes a long way to helping us manage and analyze large GA deployments.

Filed Under: About Google Analytics, Analysis Tagged With: Analysis, features, setup, v3.0

Comments

  1. itsWill says

    October 30, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    Hi Justin

    Should I be concerned? I haven’t seen the rollout of GA’s new features yet with my profile. Are your clients still playing the waiting game as well?

    Keep up the great work!

    Reply
  2. Justin Cutroni says

    October 31, 2008 at 9:17 am

    Hey Will,

    The roll out seems to be taking a good amount of time. I’m not sure why but hopefully we’ll see things soon.

    Justin

    Reply
  3. Goran Giertz says

    November 2, 2008 at 3:57 pm

    Have seen the reporting and segments but I have not seen the new interface that you talk about above. When is this happening, its awesome, a dream, quick access to all our clients information.

    Reply
  4. Jason McMinn says

    November 6, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    We need development events blogging built into charts. I want to be able to plug in key milestones (dates annd description) so that I can see how events have effected traffic.

    See it mocked up here:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmcminn/2386110453/sizes/o/

    Reply
  5. Justin Cutroni says

    November 6, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    Jason,

    As fate would have it our team just developed a note taking application for Google Analytics.

    As for the visualization you mocked up, that’s really hard to do. The data over time graph is in Flash and we can’t get into the code to add the business information.

    Thanks for reading,

    Justin

    Reply
  6. V says

    April 21, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    Hi Justin,

    I have a GA question for you. Tried using your contact form, but saw that you would prefer I use this comment form. So, here’s my question:

    I have a page on my site where the user installs a browser plugin that (almost always) requires a browser refresh. This is confirmed by the fact that the post-install page (also on the same site) shows 80% landing visitors (in Navigation Summary report). So, it looks like GA is not keeping track of this session. How can this be achieved?

    Thanks much!
    -V

    PS: I have also put up this question on the forums – http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=4835814dd25cb65b&hl=en

    Reply
    • Justin Cutroni says

      April 21, 2009 at 8:58 pm

      V,

      If the browser restarts the GA will always create a new session. Some of the GA cookies used to track visit length are session cookies. Once the browser closes those cookies are deleted, thus killing the visit. Unfortunately there is no way around this.

      What you could do is somehow use the Custom Segment cookie to get the data you need.

      Hope that helps and thanks for reading the blog.

      Justin

      Reply
  7. V says

    April 21, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    Hi Justin,

    Thank you so much for your quick reply. I am not sure I know what you mean by “custom segment cookie”. Do you mean setVar()?

    I am a bit surprised that GA can’t track this. I can think of several instances where Firefox plugins force a browser restart :)

    Thanks again,
    V

    Reply
    • Justin Cutroni says

      April 21, 2009 at 10:30 pm

      Yup, _setVar(). Maybe you can use that to get the data you need.

      Thanks again.

      Justin

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Analytics Talk » Blog Archive » Google Analytics Version 3.0 says:
    October 22, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    […] Getting to Know the New Google Analytics Admin Interface […]

    Reply
  2. Google Analytics 3.0 Excitement - Demerzel's Blog says:
    October 24, 2008 at 11:19 am

    […] User Interface Refresh: [The] tabular layout of accounts is new, and very helpful. If you’re an agency, or a large company, you probably have access to multiple GA accounts. This layout makes it easy to identify performance at the account level. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

My Books

Google Analytics by Justin Cutroni
Learn More on Amazon.com

Performance Marketing co-authored by Justin Cutroni
Learn More on Amazon.com

Recent Posts

  • Understanding the Google Analytics Cohort Report
  • Using Offline and Online data to drive Google Analytics Remarketing
  • Understanding Cross Device Measurement and the User-ID
  • Universal Analytics: Now out of beta!
  • Advanced Content Tracking with Universal Analytics

Categories

  • About Google Analytics (25)
  • Analysis (52)
  • Analytics Strategy (3)
  • Campaign Tracking (14)
  • Ecommerce (8)
  • Event Tracking (10)
  • Remarketing (2)
  • Reporting (10)
  • Resources (7)
  • Tag Management (5)
  • Tips (25)
  • Tracking (52)
  • Uncategorized (64)
  • Universal Analytics (9)
  • Web Analytics (15)

Copyright © 2023 ·News Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress