Posted on Tuesday 17th of July 2007 at 02:28 in The Internet

Say goodbye to Google Analytics as you know it

Today (17th) marks the last day that you'll still be able to access the traditional interface for Google's powerful analytics package. They rolled out the "new" Analytics more than a month ago but now the old one is being removed.

Previously you've been able to either "View Reports" (using the new style) or view the same reports in the old style, however Google are removing this feature on 18/07/07 which just so happens to be tomorrow - so say goodbye!

The old style
I'm comfortable with the old style because it allows you to access specific day information easily by clicking on that day. It doesn't hide it and it gives you a multi-point graph showing your visits/pageview hits. It gives you a pie chart of your referers and which bit of the map they're coming from. This means that when an article gains popularity I can see that it's because [something] is on a Japanese social news site. It's just easy.



The new style
In my opinion the new analytics makes really poor use of space, giving me a massively inflated graph showing me the past [x] days worth of visitors - whether I'm looking at a specific day's stats or not. Highlighting a specific day is more difficult too now they've hidden the calandar inside a drop-down. The "Site Usage" is a nice addition to summarise things but I find the massive graph found on the dashboard entirely unhelpful.



Goodbye old Analytics, I'll miss you. I'm sure I'll learn to love the new one all the same but it just seems like a raw deal to me. The old one summarised the information I needed almost entirely on the dashboard and allowed me to view yesterday's stats in one click. It's now about 3 clicks to do that in the new one.

Just a heads up incase you'd forgotten that it's all changing tomorrow.

 

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