May 6th, 2011 | by Google Public Policy Blog | published in Google Public Policy
Posted by France Lamy, Program Manager, Google.org(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)Last Thursday, the Google Map Maker team, along with the World Bank and UNITAR/UNOSAT, held a unique event at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C….
May 6th, 2011 | by lcoffey | published in Google Merchant
The Google I/O developer conference is coming up next week, on May 10-11, 2011 in San Francisco, California. The first day of the conference will feature the first-ever Commerce track, and we want to give you sneak preview of the Google Shopping Applic…
May 5th, 2011 | by The App Engine Team | published in Google App Engine, Uncategorized
This post is part of Who’s at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O. It’s also cross-posted to the Google Code blog which has similar posts for all sorts of Google develo…
May 5th, 2011 | by The App Engine Team | published in Google App Engine, Uncategorized
This post is part of Who’s at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O. It’s also cross-posted to the Google Code blog which has similar posts for all sorts of Google develo…
May 5th, 2011 | by Brett Wiltshire | published in Google Blogger Buzz
Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product OperationsApril showers bring May flowers, and updates to Blogger! Here’s the run down of the latest changes available to everyone right now:Add location info to your posts with geotaggingGeotagging has been available…
May 5th, 2011 | by Tim Bray | published in Google Android
[This post is by Jim Cotugno and Nick Mihailovski, engineers who work on Google Analytics — Tim Bray]Today we released a new version of the Google Analytics Android SDK which includes support for tracking e-commerce transactions. …
May 5th, 2011 | by Jeffrey Posnick | published in Youtube API
(This is a guest blog post by Ben Moskowitz of the Mozilla Foundation.)Over the next few weeks, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla are running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world’s smartest hackers thinking about how news org…
May 5th, 2011 | by Jay | published in Google Online Security
Posted by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst(Cross-posted from the Webmaster Central Blog)Users are taught to protect themselves from malicious programs by installing sophisticated antivirus software, but they often also entrust their private inform…
May 5th, 2011 | by Nick | published in Google Analytics
Increasingly, mobile applications allow you to purchase products and virtual goods. For that reason, it’s important to track these mobile transactions in order to understand which products perform well.So today we’ve added Ecommerce tracking functi…
May 5th, 2011 | by aidanchopra | published in Google SketchUp
If you climb up on the roof of your house and cup your hands to your ears, I’ll bet you’ll hear cheering. That’s the sound of everyone in Fresno, Lake Tahoe, Austin, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego and St. Louis celebrating the arrival of better B…
Custom Reports in the new Google Analytics
May 5th, 2011 | by Shane Cassells | published in Google Conversions
This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. We’ll be discussing how to use updated custom reports.
Every website is different, yet we focus much of our time on the standard reports in our web analytics tools. Custom reports have been an integral part of Google Analytics since 2008. With the new platform, we took a close look at how we could improve the custom reports to make them more usable and powerful.
The Custom Reports tab
For starters, custom reports now live under their own tab, which you can find next to My Site in the main menu bar.
The overview shows a list of all the custom reports available for your profile. You can also view, edit, or share a custom report, and, of course, you can also build a new custom report.
Building a custom report
As with the previous version of Google Analytics, you build a custom report by picking the metrics and dimensions you want. For the new platform, we’ve made some enhancements. Let’s walk through the creation of a custom report for measuring the effectiveness of content on this blog (borrowing from one of Avinash’s awesome custom reports).
Getting the right data
We saw that custom reports were most useful when focused on subset of data. For my blog report, I’ve decided that I want to only focus on referral traffic. In the old version, I’d have to combine an advanced segment with my custom report to do this analysis. With the new platform, we’ve made it possible to make the filter part of your custom report.
You can add multiple filters to the same report, and filter on dimensions other than those you’ve chosen to use in the report. Best of all, these filters are saved as part of your custom report. As soon as you (or your boss) opens the report, you’re looking at the data you need.
Organising your report
Like the current version, you can build multiple report tabs into your custom report. This is helpful to organise your report, or build different views for people across your organisation. In the new Google Analytics, you’re no longer restricted to using the same dimensions for each report tab, which allows you to truly get all of the data you care about in one custom report. There are two types of report tabs available: Flat Table and Explorer tabs.
Explorer report tabs are similar to the report view that is used across Analytics. They allow you to drill down into data, as well as add a secondary dimension. When creating an Explorer tab, you can also create Metric Groups, which help further organise your report for easier analysis. For our example, I’ve built out an Explorer tab focused on content quality metrics with a drill down into where the traffic came from.
Flat Table report tabs allow you to look at two dimensions side by side, meaning you don’t have to click to drill down into your data. We’ve created this report view to make it easier to export the information you care about, email it to a colleague, or simply print it out. For the example report, I have a Flat Table tab focused on where the traffic came from and the quality of that traffic.
And here’s the finished report:
Sharing your custom reports
Once you’ve finished creating your report, you might want to share it with your team. One of the most widely used features of Custom Reports has been sharing, which allows you to share a link to your custom report configuration with others.
Like the current version, sharing a custom report in the new Google Analytics only shares the structure of the report, not the data from your account. There is one difference to keep in mind, when you share a custom report in the new version, the link will always reflect the state of the report when you first created the link. So, if you create a report, share it with your colleagues, and then make further changes, the link you shared will still point to the first version of the report. You can share your reports from the Custom Reports overview. Just click the share link:
And here’s a link to the custom report example we’ve referenced throughout this post:http://goo.gl/McSBl.
Finding a home for your old custom reports
Did you spend a lot of time creating the perfect custom report in the old version? Not to fear: we’ve created a migration tool to help you migrate your reports from the old version to the new Google Analytics. From the Custom Reports Overview, you’ll see a section called Migrate Custom Reports. It will let you know if you have reports to be migrated. Keep in mind that migration only works one way. Once you move your reports over to the new version, you won’t be able to use them in the old version.
Using standard reports to analyse your website can only take you so far, which is why we’ve put so much effort in making custom reports more powerful and easier for Google Analytics v5. Please continue to give us your feedback on the new Google Analytics. Happy analysing!
Posted by Kate Cushing, Google Analytics team
May 5th, 2011 | by Research Admin | published in Google Research
Posted by Yang Li, Research ScientistCross-posted with the Technical Programs and Events Blog Google has an increasing presence at ACM CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which is the premiere conference for Human Computer Interact…
May 5th, 2011 | by Thor Mitchell | published in Google Maps
When I was young, I often found myself on long car journeys with nothing to occupy me but a dog-eared UK road atlas. On the back page, there was a chart that showed the driving distance and journey time between pairs of major cities, and I would amuse…
May 4th, 2011 | by Jessica | published in Google Student Blog
Introduction: Google sponsors and participates in a variety of diversity conferences for engineering students. To learn more about Google’s involvement, we sat down with Hal Marz, a University Programs Specialist. For each of these conferences Hal pl…
May 4th, 2011 | by James Whittaker | published in Google Testing, Uncategorized
By James WhittakerNew material for the this series is coming more slowly. I am beginning to get into areas where I want to start posting screen shots of internal Google tools and describe how our infrastructure works. This is material that takes longer…