By Craig Cartwright, Technical Architect

Well it’s the end of an era for Google Analytics: come end of January 2012 they plan to replace the current interface we have all learnt to love and use with the new dashboard and features that they’ve been promoting for a while (Some may have already jumped shipped to the new interface as we’ve all had the chance for a while to change to the new!).

So what does this actually mean for all of us? And is it time to panic? Well I’d like to think that it’s nothing too serious to worry about, and for most, it will all be fine. But for some of the regular users like me that use some of the more obscure reports, it does mean some annoyance as they are being laid to rest (RIP).

But before running for the hills (or the likes of other great analytics packages such as Mint, etc.) be aware that some of these reports can still be found – but in the strangest of places – namely as “secondary dimensions” or via “advanced segments” for some of the traditional reports. As per the old interface these act as additional “parameters” for filtering reports. For example, the great old screen resolutions reports is now stored/shown as a secondary dimension in the browser report.

So what’s the hype or moan about? Well, with my like for spaghetti westerns – here’s my take on the good, the bad and the plain ugly….

The Good
The GA team has promised that the new interface will (and does) bring us lots of new features, and in the near future too. For example you can now benefit from the rather cool “real time” overview which shows what users are currently doing on your site. You can find out how they are getting to you and what they are currently doing – maybe a bit big brother watching, but everyone I’ve shown it to loves it.

We can now finally have more than one dashboard! I can now finally have a “set” dashboard for each of my roles: editor, admin, dev/hosting, etc. without having to either log in/out four times or sacrifice dashboard real estate for my reports.

Another great little feature are the “social” integration reports: originally you had to rely on scanning your ShareThis or AddThis reports to see how people were using your site to make social engagements e.g. social bookmarking, tweeting about an article, etc. However, the new GA interface brings this into your main system – and currently supports the two players mentioned, along with their own Google Plus buttons. You can also extend other facilities using the new “tracksocial” method on your code as well – more info can be found on Google’s Social Interaction Analytics page.

The dedicated “mobile” section is also a nice thought – though all the information contained here was readily available from the old interface, the GA team have nicely grouped it and taken it out of the main section. It keeps the mobile fans happy with being able to easily see traffic that’s hitting your site via mobiles/tablets.

My favourite feature however, (closely followed by the gimmick real time feature) has to be the visitor flow. This is a clever bit of functionality that allows you to easily see how visitors have interacted on your site – including entrance and exit pages. Personally I think it shows a lot of information in a more friendly outlay and allows you to get the information you want a lot quicker than fishing through half a dozen reports in the old interface. So definitely a thumbs up here for that report!

The bad
As you’ve guessed, the new interface isn’t all plain sailing! In fact, I’ve had a tantrum or two when unable to easily find some of the reports I used for different clients on reviews. After searching and searching, I eventually found them as secondary dimensions.

I also don’t think the GA team has done the best job to help users migrate over easily. They still haven’t created a way to migrate custom reporting over (so it looks like you’ll have to manually do that) and more worryingly, they removed the familiar “help” link which was always useful to not-so-familiar users. This would have been handy for users unfamiliar with the new reports – but instead you now need to trawl through the web for unofficial help.

And the plain ugly…
The “review” panel for the list of accounts you have has gone in favour of a god-awful search/listing feature. You no longer have a nice tabled layout showing some “brief” summary information (and whether your site has gone up/down) in traffic percentage. It’s all gone in favour of a cumbersome and ugly listing, which if you have anything more than 20 or so accounts/filters, you’ll need to rely on the search facility as you won’t be able to find jack I’m afraid.

Next, if you’re logged into GA and looking at a particular profile, don’t open another tab and load your site, as GA decides to take over that page and throw the in-page analytics all over it. Bit annoying if you forgot about it – but luckily with a quick click you can get rid of it.

Oh, and I nearly forgot: the continued reliance on flash – yep there’s more and more flash being used each time. Glad GA looked after their own “android” followers and left us “Apple” fans out in the cold. Not sure how well the apps that can be found in the app store will work after the change – can only keep my fingers crossed!

So what do you need to do?

1. Have a good look round and get yourself familiar: if any of your other departments use GA you can easily expect to have a hundred and one questions coming through shortly! Maybe a pro-active approach would be to run a GA training session on the new interface (always a great way to show off the new features).

2. While checking out the new features, make sure you’re tracking code is up-to-date and you’ve set up the account to allow cross-domain tracking and that you’ve activated the great search tracking feature they offer. You may need to speak to your developer about the search parameter to set this up, but believe me it’s worth it – those search reports are worth more than their weight in gold for improving the visitor flow on your site.

3. If you’re using any custom reporting try and take some manual copies of how you have built them as you may well need to re-build them yourself soon unless they do get the migrate tool sorted quickly.

4. Have a look at what you’re using on your site now for social engagement: if it’s not AddThis or ShareThis have a think about changing. It’ll allow you to more easily track whether they really are being used and what is being talked about from the site to social media.

5. Set up your new dashboards as they don’t come over (as far as I can see) from the old system, and remember – you can now have multiple dashboards so no need to struggle fitting everything on the one dashboard!