Version Five of Google Analytics imposes some interesting new changes to a system which many came to enjoy using in order to track their online campaigns. The updated look and feel has also altered the reporting in a few ways, some drastic, and some for the better.

Google is attempting to layer a Chrome-like look onto all of its tools and analytics is their latest product to receive a new coat of paint. Today we look over these changes and see how you can adapt and then easily transition to the new, shinier Google Analytics v5:

The most glaringly obvious change is the new interface which eschews stark white borders and functional text for an pleasing look which takes a few minutes to get used to; but once you are familiar with the new look analytics, the streamlined aesthetic will assist you in more easily monitoring your campaign. When you first logged into the old look analytics, there was a snapshot of your accounts with bounce rate, visits and so on; the new screen allows you to handily jump straight to the most accessed pages – visitors, traffic sources, content and conversions to be more precise.

Google analytics implemented their annotations feature at the beginning of this year, and so far most of the feedback on the tool is extremely positive as it is a genuinely useful but simple tool. The problem is, however, that many people using Google Analytics simply don’t use annotations correctly. I tried have tried a few different ways of using annotations and come to the following ideas of DO’s and DON’Ts when using annotations…

A Screenshot of annotations being used in Analytics

1. DO: Noting any technical or structural changes to your site is important. If you’ve switched servers, hosting companies, added new H1 tags, changed URL structures or anything that could affect your sites performance, by tracking these changes in Google web analytics you will get a good idea whether these changes have had a positive or negative effect on your site’s indexing and traffic.

Bizreport.com Yesterday released an article indicating that there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of budget that companies are investing in web analytics. Not only has their overall budget for web analytics increased, but they are now also spending more money on manpower to monitor analytics and cutting down on the budget for web analytics software.

Research carried out by Econsultancy/Lynchpin via survey-based research, revealed that companies are now only spending less than 30% of their budget on web analytics software, which is 8% less than last year. The financial cut on web analytics software expenditure seems to now be going towards investing more in people with web analytics tracking skills that are able to expertly utilize this software and manipulate it in order to get the desired results and reports. When it comes to finding the right person to run your web analytics, one also needs to decide whether to hire someone in-house to take care of web analytics or whether hiring an SEO Consultant would be a better idea.

I’ve read too many blogs already on the awesomeness of Google Analytics’ Site Overlay click tracking tool. Yes, it’s a great tool, there’s no doubt about that, and it’s free, but is it really as reliable and accurate as many people seem to think it is? I asked some search marketing specialists, did some research into Google’s click tracking software and then into some other specialist click tracking software and found a few interesting pros and cons of each.

Google Analytics Site Overlay

THE PROS:

The great thing about tracking clicks with Analytics’ site overlay is that if you have Analytics running on a site, you automatically have access to its click tracking software, there’s no need to pay for anything and EVERY page of your site is tracked automatically. You simply click on the “content” tab of your dashboard and you’ll be able to check out the hotspots for each page, as shown in the image below: