Google Analytics feature makes quantifying success easy
My main gripe with the new Analytics is that the homepage shows you none of the useful things that the previous edition did. I liked being able to see the graph of today's traffic, my top content and my top referals for the selected time period. The new edition shows numerical information similar to what I like, but the graphing is rubbish. It shows my traffic sources in a completely pointless "Referring sites vs Search engines vs Direct traffic" pie chart - which is rather unhelpful.
However, now I'm delving deeper, the quality of information has improved an awful lot
Whereas before all the information I needed was presented to me on the dashboard, I seldom went deeper because I only really want to know where visitors are coming from. Google have really opened up the level of information they collect because you can now see referal sites on a page-by-page basis and compare them to any previous day. THAT I like. A lot.
Page-by-page referal analysis is brilliant
What this allows me to do is shown nicely in the below screenshot (click on the image for a full-size version):
What you're looking at is the analytics page for my new 70 coolest free applications article which I have been trying to push. It was published on the 16th of September so I'm attempting to get it picked up by some social news sites. This feature of Analytics allows me to compare today's referal stats with yesterday's.
This is useful because it allows me to see that today's StumbleUpon has sent 155 users today whereas yesterday it only sent 9. This indicates that it might start getting stumbled tomorrow. I also get to see how this particular piece of content compares to the site average for things like "time on site" and the bounce rate.
This is excellent for analysing your marketing
The ability to quantify one article's performance on a day-by-day basis is excellent. It means I can compare today's performance against yesterday's for this one piece and that's very useful. It should allow for a greater understanding of Internet marketing and the relative performance of different sources.
If anything it allows me to see the buildup of StumbleUpon visitors day-on-day. Quite a lot of the time I'm pushing a particular piece of content so it's helpful to see how yesterday shaped up to the day before - to quantify how succesful my "pushing" is being.
I'm not in love with the new Analytics but I do really like this ability that I have just discovered. Here's hoping my content gets stumbled like I think it deserves to be!
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