- Natural Search Blog - https://www.naturalsearchblog.com -

New Google Analytics still poor experience

Back in May I gave the new Google Analytics design a negative review [1], primarily because it made it impossible to view at a glance how many people in what area of the world are viewing your site. I’d also panned it for making one unable to view both Page Views and Visits together simultaneously.

Google Analytics Logo

Despite my griping, they rolled it out anyway with this feature unchanged, and they made it impossible to view the data through the old UI as of July 19th. They report adding more requested features [2], but how about adding back some of the functionality they destroyed? Perhaps they’re more involved in getting the daily data processing issues [3] resolved, and admittedly I’d agree that would surely be a higher priority. I’m just still flummoxed because it seems so unnecessary to revoke good functionality in the first place.

I’ve found yet another irritating change that I consider to be even more serious: you apparently can’t view the data in monthly units – only daily:

Google Analytics graphs don't display monthly figs
(click to enlarge)

Why did they revoke the ability to visually compare monthly periods?!? Most search marketers I know like to compare overall figures from month to month since it tends to reduce some of the spikiness of short-term bursts, and lots of folks are using monthly billing cycles and such.

If I’m mistaken and there’s some where to set the period to display monthly, I hope someone will let me know. I hunted and hunted, and checked their help section to no avail. If they really did revoke monthly display, I can only reiterate further how bad this so-called “upgrade” really was! All glitz with little beneficial substance.

The Analytics team should borrow some of the members of the Google Maps team, since comparatively the Maps team seems to get it right a lot more lately.

bad boys blue a train to nowhere lyrics [4]