Jeffrey Veen over at the Google blog today announced a massive redesign of the already comprehensive Google Analytics stats package. Based on the original website statistics from Urchin software, Google’s feature set was comparable to many other commercial competitors but no-one could ever label Analytics of being the most user friendly web stats app out there. For instance checking out your search keywords of visitors to your site required a huge amount of clicks (if you could find the option on the first place).
Well, since the acquisition of Measure Map over 12 months ago, it seems the UI team has been working over time on this one. Analytics 2.0, for want of a better expression, appears a major improvement on the original and allows major customisation over the interface allowing you to create views that apply to your business and market. With ‘flexible graphing tool’ allowing you to compare trends over different time periods, reporting appears vastly superior and with increased integration with adwords this looks as though it will be a valuable tool to website owners and marketeers.
A feature that was lacking though, something that PulseRSS has made available, is web stats through RSS; I covered this briefly here but I for one am hoping they have made this valuable feature available.
It seem Google has learnt from the original massive demand for Analytics when originally released though and will be rolling Analytics ‘2.0′ out over the next month to everyone. So if you haven’t had the upgrade yet, in the mean time, check out the feature tour for more information.
Personally my major gripe with Analytics over the last 18 months has been the slow or patchy updating of ‘my’ data. Providing the speed issue has been addressed though then Google really could have another corner of the web covered.
