The Big G (that’s Google) have rolled out a new interface for their free, and excellent, web based analytics engine, imaginatively called Google Analytics.
Replacing the old HTML/Ajax based interface, Google have gone down the Macromedia / Adobe Flash route across all of the site’s key content areas including charts and maps.
Improving on the old site design, the new layout starts the user on a homepage entitled "The Dashboard" which features a host of small widget like report windows displaying information like number of visits, site usage, visitor overview, map overlay, traffic sources and content overviews. The user can then choose to go further into the site stats as they choose in the same manner as before, by selecting from any of the more specific reports in the left hand menu.
One thing I’ve instantly noticed is the addition of what appears to me to be a new category of visitor in the stats, that of a bounce rate. Now, I know what a bounce rate is in terms of email marketing, but what I am not so clear on is it in terms of page visits. I’ve simply never heard it mentioned like that before (maybe it’s just me?) but, thankfully, Google have a description of all the reports on it’s site, and their description for the bounce rate is as follows…
"Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in
which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is
a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates
that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each
keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the
information and services that were promised in the ad copy."
This is interesting for a blog, as I personally imagine a lot of people come directly into a blog via the RSS feeds, of via an aggregator site like technorati. As such, single page visits don’t seem that uncommon to me, but maybe that’s because adventuresdm.com isn’t such a pull? Who knows, but it’s an interesting new stat anyway, and would certainly be of use for a site like eCommerce or so forth.
I must say that with the world overlay, I preferred the old style with the dots representing visitors to the site from around the globe. Whilst the new one is more stylish and slick looking, it’s not so instantly easy for me to see the locations, and I do like that feature.
As with their iGoogle personalised homepage, if you want you can add, remove or move around the page these reports on the dashboard in the widget style, which makes for a very usable analytics package in my opinion – especially as it’s still free.
Google Analytics doesn’t as far as I am aware, go into the level of detail that a full package like hitbox or the like can do, tagging each page and link etc., but for free it’s a very well formed and useful app that I recommend to a lot of people and clients.
You can set up goals, track paths through a site and so forth – all the stuff you would expect – but the best bit for me, as a blog author, is you can check it religiously every morning to see how popular your blog is.
Sad? Probably, but I recommend you check it out either for yourself, or for your clients.
Howard
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