Google Analytics has had an overhaul and it’s looking pretty smooth.
First off, the trend of visits is a lot easier to read. I was a bit miffed that the calendar had disappeared from th left column, but Once I saw the power of the new date selections, and the ability to compare ranges I soon cheered up.
So much for the pretty charts though,how about seeing whether my advertising dollar is doing any good? Well first of all, the ROI data from my search engine marketing reports seem to have disappeared, or is at leats way harder for me to find. I had to dig along quite a way to find it, although I was pretty pleased to see that they’ve started naming come of the conversion points better.
The data on my other campaigns like banner ads and tenancies is no more useful though.
Why on earth they have still not addded click data to my non-adwords campaigns is beyond me. The numbers I’ve seen on some of the adwords stuff indicates some fairly high click fraud but with nothing to compare it with I’m just stuck for an answer.
Google’s original reason for buying Urchin and handing over this tool was to give marketers a better understanding of conversion and ROI, yet from my first half hour in the tool, this seems to have taken a back seat to crayon-sized charts and whizzy Ajax style interfaces.
My one wish for the new interface was to have a single click-by-click download of the data in the same way that Google themselves recommend breaking down each tagged link. Having to trawl across several reports to find the data, and not being able to see where the overlap is is a nightmare. Having to explain the stuff to clients afterwards is even worse. Until Google can help the experts do their jobs more easily, what hope have we got of educating the rest of their potential customer base.
So, 2 things Google:
1) Add the click data to the campaigns tab in the same way as you have done for the adwords campiagns
2) Give me a download, of a date range I select, with the same columns I use to tag my links:
- Campaign Source
- Campaign Medium
- Campaign Term
- Campaign Content
- Campaign Name
Plus the steps after each click:
- Clicks
- Visitors
- Pages
- Conversions
- Conversion Value
These will make me a happy man