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New Google Analytics Dashboards

You may have noticed that there is a new version of Google Analytics available.  Perhaps this is old news (and certainly in the blogosphere that could be only minutes!) but we are loving it.  Beyond the new widget capabilities, social interaction tracking, and the new look, it seems a little easier to use.  We’ll be posting more on this later but we found this article about gaining more insights with the new Google Analytics and thought we should share!

 

How To Gain Great Insights With Google Analytics Dashboards

by Klaas Knook

 

Google recently released its new Analytics interface to all of their users. Personally, I think that one of the biggest improvements is the ability to create multiple dashboards as well as the flexibility of widgets to customize your dashboard with essential metrics. This post will elaborate further on:

  • how to create (multiple) dashboards
  • the possibilities of the new dashboards
  • a few examples for your own dashboards
  • suggestions for new features

Multiple Dashboards

Google Analytics Dashboard OverviewThe new Google Analytics gives you the power to create up to 20 custom dashboards for each profile. This makes it perfect to create a separate dashboard for each department in your organization or for each traffic source.

The figure at the right shows an example of one of my own accounts with seven different custom dashboards; one for the total overview and six dedicated to a specific traffic source.

This gives the user the possibility to get a rapid and good overview of what each traffic source is doing in terms of the selected metrics like visits, bounce rate, goals, revenue, etc.

For a deeper analysis of a specific traffic source, the user can dive deeper into the different Google Analytics reports or create custom reports.

 

Read the entire article at: Search Engine Land

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Google’s $64 Billion Economic Impact

The impact of Google and its available tools are too undeniable of a valuable asset to the small and medium sized businesses. From Google Adwords and Google AdSenese to Google Analytics and now Google Boost, a business can determine its market space on the Internet, track conversions and give to layman sophisticated tools to gain market share and increase revenue. This sounds all well and fine for most businesses, and from our point of view at Denver Media it is completely accurate. However, where is the quantifiable proof these tools have that big of an impact? From our experience running SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns, it is unquestionable and easy to see.  But most business owners are either in the dark or in denial. If one is in the dark, then we hope to help turn on the lights and show you around a bit, however if one is in denial then the earth must still be flat.

Google released it’s latest numbers showing its impact of the U.S. economy, and large increase in 2010 over 2009. Below is an article from our friends over at Search Engine Land.

 

May 16, 2011 at 4:06pm ET by Pamela Parker

In conjunction with National Small Business Week, Google is trying to burnish its image by touting the economic impact that its programs, including AdWords and AdSense, have had on the U.S. economy. According to the company, Google provided $64 billion in economic activity for American businesses and non-profits in 2010, 18% greater than the 2009 number.

The company says nearly 1 million U.S. businesses and non-profits earned income from Google tools in 2010. For every $1 a business spends on Google AdWords, the company claims, they receive an average of $8 in profit through business generated via both Google Search and AdWords. The numbers are based on a complex formula developed by Google’s chief economist Hal Varian. It starts with the assumption that every business gets $2 in business for every $1 spent on AdWords — an assumption based on data across a large pool of advertisers. Then it assumes that, for every ad click, advertisers get 5 clicks on their organic search results. More methodology from Google here.

Read Entire Article at: Search Engine Land

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Google Analytics Now Tracking Server Speed

Nothing will frustrate users more than a slow server delivering up a website.  Regardless of what might be causing the issue the user will usually blame “the Internets” or your sites, click the back button, and costing you a potential visitor.  To help in this regard Google has integrated a new speed metric into their analytics script.   This has many advantages: tracking which pages serve slow, landing page optimization, DB queries verses static web pages, dynamic media rich page load times, etc.  For us in the industry it is something that we need to look at, and has been hinted as part of the Google SERP algorithm.   On Google’s Analytics website the introduce the technology this way:

The Site Speed report measures the page load time (latency) for a sample of pageviews on your website pages. It appears in the Content section of the Analytics reports. With this report, you can see which pages load the fastest and which ones are slower. You can also analyze your overall site speed along other important dimensions in order to learn how your site speed relates to a variety of factors. For example, you can view your site speed across the following categories:

  • Content—which landing pages are slowest?
  • Traffic sources—which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
  • Visitor—how does latency compare by visitor type or geographic region?
  • Technology—does browser, operating system or screen resolution impact latency metrics?

Finally—and most importantly—you can take action to improve page load speed for slower pages and then track latency along these other dimensions to see if your actions resulted in desired improvements.

Read more at the Google Analytics Help site: Google Analytics Support

Additionally Daniel Waisberg has writting a great article breaking this down:

New Google Analytics Feature: Load Time Measurement

May 4, 2011 at 5:03pm ET by Daniel Waisberg

Since the beginning of last year, Google Analytics has been pushing a faster load time by pushing the new asynchronous tracking code to being the default code. Matt Cutts also commented on how the new Google Analytics code is slightly better in terms of search (watch video on the bottom of this article).

But now, with the addition of Site Speed to Google Analytics*, we will be able to understand how load times affect not only search ranking (or ppc quality score), but also how it affects user experience and ultimately, the conversion rates of specific pages and the site as a whole.

Google Analytics site speed
New Site Speed Report in Google Analytics – Track Page Load Time

The big value of these new metrics is that it enables us to correlate page success and load times.

This is especially important when it comes to landing page optimization, but also when optimizing pages with and without rich media, pages that query a database before loading, and others.

Read the entire article at: Search Engine Land

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