The New Google Analytics – ChannelAdvisor webinar
May-2007
It’s James Scott from ChannelAdvisor here (again!) with my second ‘guest post’ on Trevor’s blog.
The reason for this one is to let you all know about an interesting webinar we’ll be hosting on Friday, with guest presenter Phil Walford from Google.
A couple of weeks ago, Google relaunched Google Analytics – the online (free) analytics solution for tracking visitors to your website. The new version has a bunch of fantastic new features so we’ve asked Google to walk us through the highlights.
Everybody is welcome – just make sure you sign up in advance to ensure you receive the details about how to login on the day. The webinar starts promptly at 2pm GMT on Friday 25th May and should last about 45 minutes.
Hope to see you there!
Analytics is a great tool…but the new version has one really annoying failure…it doesn’t allow you to click on one day and then see conversion and sales by the hour for that day. Instead, it shows you just the a single data point.
We have significant intra day fluctuations in our conversion, average selling price, so this is a very helpful report to have. So, for now, my view on the new analytics is “nice shiny new toy with lots of ajaxy widgets, but i ain’t using it til i can see my day’s performance by the hour”. Funnily, certain reports have already stopped working in old analytics (site overlay for one), presumably as the new, snazzier version on the beta has taken priority and the older version has been allowed to lapse.
Still..analytics is a cracking tool, especially given it’s free.
The new analytics is very shiny and snazzy, with lots of ajaxy toys. So far so good. However there is one big thing that it lacks that it’s less flashy predecessor had…reports by hour. A report that I used all the time was the ecommerce reports….click on one day and then you get the data (conversion rate, average order value, sales, whatever) by the hour. We have significant intra-day peaks and troughs in our business which this allows us to track and act upon.
However, in the whizzy new beta, we get just a single data point if we select only a day. ie it doesn’t support reports by the hour. Whilst old version is supposedly still up and running, i’ve noticed a couple of reports stop working properly already (eg the site overlay)…presumably the snappier new overlay in the “beta” required the data to be reformatted or something, which broke the report on the old analytics. The price of progress, eh?!
To be fair…analytics is a great tool, especially given it’s free. I’m just not converting to new one til they iron out the bugs and make it better than the old version….assuming the goog don’t just turn off the old version!
The webinar was great, and I do like the detail and ease of breakdown on the new version of analytics. This will be a simpler tool to pass onto clients with limited e-commerce and technical skills so they can still get the information they need for their Marketing Strategy.