ANALYTICS 2.0

Google Analytics launched more updates

Its nice to hear that analytics tools providers are improving their solutions (much more when we are talking about a free one). Google has launched three new updates (or improvements depending on your point of view).

Update I: After an failed improvement attempt they are changing back the way of calculating the “Average Time on Site”. The original way of calculating this metric (and the way is now again) was dividing all the total time on the site for all visits divided by the total number of visits. The previews improvement was focused on understanding how long engaged visitors spend on your website so it hasn’t take into account the bounce visits.

All the historical is now calculated with the original methodology so if you compare today with two weeks ago it gonna make sense.

Update II: This is a very welcome improvement. As we’ve mentioned in this blog million times, there are several ways for calculating Unique Visitors based on the time out setup. So when you measure unique visitors you should know what type of UV are you comparing.
This was the original problem that Google Analytics has solved. The number of Absolute Unique Visitors displayed at the overview report did not match the number of unique visitors in the Absolute Unique Visitors report. That was because the Absolute Unique Visitor report shows data over time and was therefore summing daily unique visitors while the overview report displays the absolute unique visitors (which mean that it doesn’t count several times the same visit during the analyzed period).
I’m not saying that the none of those metrics are good or wrong but different and then not comparable.

Update III: This is a very important one that you should pay attention at. They modified the way they order the URL parameters. So this is important because if you have the following urls:

www.google.com?rooms=3&beds=2
www.google.com?beds=2&rooms=3

Google analytics will consider instead a single URL www.google.com?beds=2&rooms=3 (i.e. alphabetically ordered parameters), they will now consider these as two separate URLs (i.e. without reordered parameters). This will be very useful for users with filters or goals dependent upon parameter order.

I’m very glad that Google is improving very frequent their tool, probably if god hear me they add some other improvements like the possibility to cross data tables with drag and drop, or the possibility of generate and manage your own dashboard and….well its ok by now right now, we are talking about a free solution!!!