Early this month SEO endured Google’s transformative search update “Search Plus Your World”, but this wasn’t the only home improvement endeavor Google showcased in the past year. Sandwiched between the release of Google+ and Search Plus Your World was a very important update to Google Analytics. In case you missed it, or you already forgot about it in midst of the razzle dazzle, here are a few of the most important Google Analytics improvements and what they could mean for your business.

1. New Interface and Intuitive Navigation

Personally, I think the new navigation for Google Analytics is way more intuitive and, as a result, much faster to use than the old bulky one. I greatly prefer opening my account to a display of all account information without having to scroll through an ity-bity drop-down menu. In addition to being better organized, the new navigation is also cleaner and easier to read. When dealing with numbers, pie charts and other data the new clean interface is very helpful for keeping on task.

2. Site Speed Reports

The integration of site speed reports and other Webmaster Tools can cut out extra time spent navigating between tools. In order to combine site speed reports into your normal Google Analytics work flow you need only add a small portion of code to the normal Google Analytics code. Then the site speed reports will be bundled in with your other Google analytics data. While it might not be a report you look at every week, it will be there when you need it.

3. Real Time Data

Having real time data for your website is kind of like getting a sneak preview of your birthday presents. The significance being you don’t have to wait around to get early results on campaigns. Not only does this instant gratification prove helpful for hand tailoring campaigns based on results but it can also prove as a great commodity for A/B testing.

4. Social Stats

Another newbie to the analtyics package is the Social Engagement report and plug-in. This report is jam-packed with useful information. You can tell if a browser is socially engaged with your site and via which social channel, compare data between browsers who share vs. non-sharers and track social engagement performance by page. This information will definitely show you where your site is performing best and what social networks you may want to focus on.

5. Multi Channel Funnels

Probably the most exciting improvement are the Multi Channel Funnels. Prior to the current version of Google Analytics, one could only see the last channel a browser touched before conversion. Now with multi channel funnels you get the broader picture of how conversions are acquired. Seeing the whole cause and effect of a conversion gives you a much keener insight in the effectiveness of advertisements and can even help you discern where to focus moving forward.

Overall, the update makes Google Analytics an easier tool to use and a more complete analytics solution. If you haven’t switched to the new version yet, I strongly suggest you do but make sure you have time to take it on a test run.

Think you have a healthy handle on Google Analtyics, test your know how with an online Google Analytics IQ test.

We’ve been getting a ton of questions about mobile sites these days:

• Should my company build a mobile site?
• Are many people using smart phones to conduct online business?
• Are my customers using their phones to view my site?

Well, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed on your web site to help you figure out how your visitors are using your site. If so, I we can help you answer the above questions and more. If you don’t have it installed, you should consider it. It’s free and gives you a lot of very useful information. If you’d like help or advice about getting Google Analytics or another web metrics package installed, give us a shout and we can help.

Back to the topic at hand, up until a few months ago, isolating mobile visits in a Google Analytics report was a bit trickier. However, about six months ago (at the end of 2009) the Google folks rolled out a new set of reports dedicated to tracking mobile visitors to your site. I’ll show you how to run those reports and, more importantly, what you should be looking for.

Let’s get started:

1. Step 1: Login to your Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/) with your Google account user name and password. After logging in, you should be on the “dashboard” screen of your web site.
2. Step 2: In the upper right area of the dashboard you’ll see a date range, and to the right of the ending date, you’ll see a small arrow pointing down, click on that arrow and you can change the date range.
3. Step 3: Select a start date of 01/01/2010; an end date of the most recent Saturday and click the “apply” button. You should now have a date range from the beginning of this year through the most recent full week. This should provide us with enough data to help us answer our original questions above.
   

   Select a timeframe of at least five or six months, that will give you a decent trend for growth.

4. Step 4: Immediately below the date range, you can choose whether you want to graph by daily, weekly or monthly segments; select “weekly” to give us the best view of the data for trending. (If you’re reading the blog post some time in 2011 or beyond, you can select “monthly” if you prefer.)
5. Step 5: Now, let’s navigate to the Mobile report. In the upper left corner of the dashboard, you’ll see the main navigation. Click on the “Visitors” link to expand a list of all available visitor reports.
6. Step 6: There should be a link near the bottom of the choices called “Mobile”. Click on that link and you get two sub-reports, click on the one that says “Mobile Devices”.
7. Step 7: This is our report.

This chart shows a 3x increase in mobile visits since the beginning of the year.

What are we looking for?

• Growth – Look at the trend line (chart above) to see how rapidly your audience is adopting mobile technology into their web-viewing habits.
• Percentage of Overall Site Traffic – Growth is great, but if you are experiencing 4x growth by going from one mobile visitor a month to four, you can probably put mobile initiatives behind other site needs.
• Mobile Visitor Activities – Look at your bounce rates, pages per visit, time on site, etc. If these are lower than your site average, it could mean that mobile users don’t fing your site to be as usable on a phone as on a desk top. If you do decide to build a mobile site, use these numbers as a before-and-after benchmark.

Before making any key changes to your web site, look at your analytics. Nine times out of 10, the data is there to help you make the best decision possible.