Well after some weeks of using the new Google Analytics Version I’m posting my fist analysis about it.
I was never so in love with google analytics since it born in November 2005 based on Urchin, the log file analyzer funded in December 1995 by Paul Muret and Scott Crosby (actual CEO of Google Analytics). Google analytics seems to be a Log File Analyzer that emulate a page tagging, since it is not installed in your own servers you need to tagging your site, those tags generate logs that are analyzed once a day by google analytics servers as a regular Log File Analyzer.
The former version was a very (very) basic analytics tool mainly because it was focused on providing SEM’s campaigns information to the Google clients. When I say very basic I meant it gives standard information with almost no customizing capabilities, with the aggravating of having lot of bugs both in back-end and front-end.
I was analyzing this new version and unfortunately it’s pretty soon for back-end results, but I have some findings about the front-end.
The first I found which is so evident is that this new version is focused on extending its target by reaching non professionals, mainly because that is Google SEM’s products strategy (adwords and adsence). I’m not saying this is right or wrong, because it depends on what are you looking for. In my opinion they could focus on a non professional target and at the same time have a very flexible tool that allows professionals run more complex queries.
That’s exactly what I fount on this new version of Google Analytics, they forget about the professional needs which are normally less based on front end but more flexible, like generating my own data tables, metrics and functions between other things.
This new version is 1000 times better than the former one, but I think that it could be even better if it count with two different front ends, “beginners” and “professionals”.
Regarding front-end I found very useful the drag and drop dashboard generator, with an Indextools style but not as good as it.
Last but not least, the lack of right mouse button function makes Google Analytics even less flexible. For example adding a new chart to the dashboard by clicking the right button is something that I found incredible useful and not complicated to launch at all.
Well that’s all by now, I’ll be waiting your comments.