Share reports by email and export to PDF: now live in the new Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics has come a long way since it was first unveiled last March. Between multi-channel funnels, real time, flow visualization, premium, and a whole host of other incredible features, it is hard to believe that only a year has gone by.

We are excited to announce that Analytics reports can now be automatically sent to yourself or other members of your team from within the new Google Analytics. These reports can be set up to email at a variety of regularly scheduled times, including daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Reports can also be exported to PDF allowing you to save or share the insights you’ve found using Google Analytics.

Where to find Email and PDF export
Look in the newly-redesigned Utility Bar located at the top of your favorite reports for Email and PDF Export options:

In order to provide maximum flexibility, this functionality is available on standard reports, custom reports, and dashboards. Clicking on the "Email" button on a dashboard pulls up the same email scheduling dialog as in standard reports and offers the same feature set:

Why "beta"?
For those who have used the email scheduler in the old interface, this new emailer system operates independently and has enhancements in reliability and ease of use. We are putting the finishing touches on the look and feel of exported reports, and anticipate that these will be finalized soon.

Part of the transition to the new emailing system is an opportunity to "reset" your scheduled emails. Consider which scheduled emails have been most helpful and be sure to recreate those in the new interface. The new Google Analytics has some reporting differences and additional metrics that you may want to take advantage of when drafting new scheduled emails. We will provide ample notice before scheduled emails from the old Google Analytics are sunset later this year.

We would love to hear how the release of these features helps you to be efficient and derive valuable insights. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Happy exporting!

- Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team

Refining the new Google Analytics

We've been listening to your feedback about the new version of Google Analytics, and are excited to release an updated user interface featuring enhancements to nearly all aspects of the design of Google Analytics.

User interface updates
Based on input from our users, partners, and customers, we have launched several improvements to our user interface. We are particularly proud of the attention to detail that our user experience team has put into making the interface easy to use, understandable, and beautiful.

Restyled reports

The primary goal of this update is to bring more attention to the things that matter -- your data, and how you analyze it. We improved legibility of score card and table data, and refined our color palette to draw attention toward data instead of navigation elements.

We’ve also made several usability improvements:
• Improved information hierarchy
• Change the graphed metric and select a comparison metric directly from the graph
• Graph and Table options are more visible
• Improved Metric Group selection
• Added icons to left navigation

Icons in the left navigation

We would like to thank everyone for submitting excellent feedback. Please continue to provide input on how Google Analytics can best deliver the insights you need.

- The Google Analytics team

Google Analytics has learned 9 new languages

Recently we introduced the new and improved Google Analytics, so that you can quickly find even more powerful and useful data to improve your internet marketing efforts.

Now, we are proud to say Google Analytics is available in 9 new languages. This makes Google Analytics quite a Polyglot, and it is in total available in 40 languages now. Newly introduced languages are:

- Arabic
- Croatian
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Latvian
- Romanian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Ukrainian

To change the language of an Analytics account to any of these new languages, you have to activate the new interface, if you haven’t already, by clicking on the “new version” button at the top of the account. Then, navigate to the settings page where you can select the new language.

You may also enjoy reading the newly revamped Analytics help center in any of the 9 new languages.

We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts.

Happy data mining!

Google Analytics team

Email scheduler, PDF export, and a transition to the new Google Analytics interface

Two of the most requested features from the old version of Google Analytics that have been absent in the new interface are report email scheduling and PDF export.  We are happy to announce that both email scheduling and PDF export functionality will be the new interface in a few weeks.

Because there are significant differences between reports in the new and old versions of Google Analytics, we would like to use this opportunity to solicit your feedback regarding which scheduled email reports should be preserved in the new version. We suspect that many of you would like to use this opportunity to “reset” the number and types of scheduled Google Analytics emails. As we roll out the new email system in the coming few weeks, we encourage you to examine your existing scheduled emails and make a personal decision on whether to recreate a similar scheduled email report.

Every standard and custom report will have an email scheduling option, shown below in the report options bar:



Clicking on the “EMAIL” button pulls up the following email scheduling dialog:



(A more detailed blog post about the emailer and its new functionality will be available when the it is released in a few weeks.) The above email preview shows the work we have put into improving the email report setup over the older Analytics interface.

PDF export for every report will also be available within a few weeks.

With the upcoming release of both the new emailer & PDF download, we want to give you three months notice (as of today) that the old Google Analytics interface as well as all existing scheduled emails will be sunset starting in January 2012. We believe that the new Google Analytics interface provides significant advantages over the old version, including access to Real Time Analytics, Multi-Channel Funnels, Social Plugin Analytics, & Flow Visualization. And hope you'll find enough value in these new features that you'll switch to the new version well before then.

We welcome your feedback and comments.

- Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Introducing Flow Visualization: visualizing visitor flow

Many of you have shared with us difficulties you’ve experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don’t sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You’re looking for better ways to visualize and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.

The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualizing visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

This morning at Web 2.0 Summit, Susan Wojcicki & I unveiled the release of “Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualizers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualizer on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.



Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

You’ll also notice that we made the visualization highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.



This type of visualization allows you to answer important questions, such as “How successful is my new promo page?” In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the “specials” or promo page come from Google search.

To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by “exploring the traffic” through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.



We realize that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we’re providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualizer to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.

Goal Flow

Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.



You can find the Goal Flow visualizer in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.” Goal Flow helps you understand:

• The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)
• The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways
• Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined
• How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualizer. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize “backward”. Such “reverse paths” could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, “forward” paths from a page (or pages) can be visualized to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.



Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common “visitor” flows, and we’re building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.

If you don’t have goals or goal funnels already set up, don’t worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.

These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualization for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualization truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.

- Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics for everyone

Back in June, we announced a pilot program to allow users to surface Google Search data in Google Analytics by linking their Webmaster Tools accounts. We’ve been busy making some improvements and tweaks based on user feedback, and today we’re excited to make this set of reports available to all users.

The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results. We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section. The reports you’ll find there are:

• Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
• Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
• Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

Queries report

To start using the reports you first need to link your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts. You can get step by step instructions and additional information on the reports in this Help Center article. If you’re not already using Webmaster Tools, we highly recommend you start. It’s a free tool that helps you understand how Google sees your site. Sign up on the Google Webmaster Tools homepage. Enjoy the new reports, and let us know how they’re helping your analysis.


Posted by Kate Cushing, Associate Product Manager, Google Analytics team

What’s happening on your site right now?

The web is getting faster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change. Before, it was fine to build a website and modify it only when new products were launched. All of us avid Analytics users know that’s just not good enough. We need to be constantly on the lookout for problems and opportunities.

Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.




Measuring social media impact
One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.

For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.




Campaign measurement
Another way I’m using Real-Time is to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a campaign. When getting ready to launch a new campaign it’s critical to make sure your measurement plan is working before you start driving visitors to the page. With the Real-Time reports you can find out in seconds whether you’re getting the data you want in Google Analytics.

Accessing Real-Time
You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the updated interface next week) . You will have access to Real-Time reports if you are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a profile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.

We just turned the reports on for a number of you, and over the coming weeks, everyone will have access to Real-Time. If you can’t wait, sign up for early access here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/. We’d love to hear about how you are using (or planning to use) Real-Time, so please share in the comments.

Posted by John Jersin, Google Analytics Team

Design updates to the new interface coming next week

In March, we unveiled the new version of Google Analytics that included, along with many other improvements, a redesigned user interface. Since then we’ve heard from many of you on how we can improve different aspects of the design.

Designers from our User Experience team took a step back objectively asked "How can we make Analytics better?" They focused on the core organization (our information architecture) and way-finding as areas that could be improved. What followed were a series of brainstorming sessions with engineers and product managers, analysis of your feedback, customer interviews, card-sort studies, and general user testing – all done to iterate on our product while keeping our users involved in the process.

Next week we’ll release these changes. The biggest change you'll notice is that we have simplified the primary navigation into three tabs – Home, Standard Reporting, and Custom Reporting – to give you quicker access to the information that matters. We also incorporated the second layer of navigation that appeared in "My Site" throughout the Home and Standard Reporting tabs.




Here's what you can expect in each tab:

Home: The Home tab holds all reports and features that allow you to quickly understand what is happening on your site. You’ll find your custom dashboards here as well as your automatic and custom alerts from Google Analytics Intelligence.

Standard Reporting: All the built-in reports to understand your audience, advertising impact, traffic sources, conversions, content, and more are now displayed in one central place.

We're also excited about the addition of a report finder in the Standard Reporting tab. This will allow you to type the name of a report you’re interested in and quickly navigate to it without needing to hunt for it in the proper section.




Custom Reporting: Google Analytics lets you build your own reports to get exactly the data you need. With the new tab, we’re making Custom Reports a more important part of the interface. You’ll be able to access any reports you’ve created here and build new ones.

So what's next for our designers? We have a number of improvements planned to the overall Analytics interface to bring more focus on data, as well as exciting new features that will make analyzing data faster and easier.

If you'd like to help shape Google Analytics and want to participate in future user studies, please register here.

UPDATE: 10/14/2011 11:25am PST - And we're back. The design updates are back on for everyone.

UPDATE: 10/7/2011 9:30am PST - We've temporarily turned these updates off for a couple days to fix an issue. They'll be back in a couple days.

UPDATE: 10/6/2011 3:00pm PST - These updates are now live in the new version. Enjoy!

Posted by Lucas Pettinati, Lead User Experience Designer, Google Analytics team

Google Analytics Webinar: Getting started with Multi-Channel Funnels

A few weeks ago we launched Multi-Channel Funnels, a powerful tool to help you understand all the online interactions that lead your users to conversion. With five insightful reports, you can now measure the full conversion path, from first interaction to last click. More important, Multi-Channel Funnels provides actionable analysis about how your marketing channels work together, and answers key questions such as:

• How much time does the average user take between first interaction and conversion?
• How many interactions does it take to convert?
• Which of my marketing channels are “assisting” conversions and which are “closers”?

To help you get the most out of this tool, we’ve scheduled a webinar to walk through the new reports and go over common uses with Bill Kee, the Product Manager for Multi-Channel Funnels.

Title: Getting started with Multi-Channel Funnels

Date: October 11, 2011

Time: 10am PST

Register for the webinar

Have questions about Multi-Channel Funnels? Send them to us ahead of the webinar so we can make sure to answer them. You can also vote for the questions you want to see answered most. You can submit your questions on our Google Moderator page.

If you can't attend the webinar, please check the Google Analytics YouTube Channel for a recording about a week after the live event. You can also read more from the initial announcement of Multi-Channel Funnels and watch a video about the tool.

We hope that you will be able to participate!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics team

Site Speed gets an upgrade. Hello Performance tab

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. This week, we share an update to the Site Speed report to help you better understand your site's performance.

In May, we made it easier to compare your site’s business performance with your site’s actual performance with the introduction of the Site Speed report in the new version of Google Analytics. Today we want to share an update.

We’ve heard the need to get into more detail about the reporting of your page load times. We’ve introduced a new performance tab in the SIte Speed report that will allow you to see a breakdown of the samples. This allows you to move beyond the averages and better understand your site’s performance.

For example, I’m looking at the Site Speed report for the Google Analytics blog. I can see that my average page load time is 7 seconds (we have some room to improve here). Now, we know that averages can hide what’s happening underneath the surface.

With the Performance tab in the Site Speed report, I can now dig in and find those details.

Ah ha! I can now see that, almost half of my visitors (46%) are actually seeing decent load times of under 3 seconds. And another 32% are getting the page in under 7 seconds. But there’s definitely still room to improve with a full 20% seeing 7+ second load times.

Taking this a step further, I can apply an advanced segment, in this case Visits with Conversions. I have set up the blog with engagement goals. So I’m trying to see if there’s a relationship between page load time and engaging with the content here.

And looking at this data, it looks like there is. The distribution of visits with conversions is skewed towards fast-loading pages. As page load time increases, I am seeing a drop in conversions. I can actually see the business impact of a slow loading page.

Another type of segmentation to try would be by geography. To start off, try segmenting visits from your country versus visits not from your country. From there you may want to dig into specific countries and look at page load times.

You'll find the Site Speed report in the Content section of the new Google Analytics. To get site speed data, you need to make a small change to your Google Analytics tracking code. Setup instructions and more details about the Site Speed report are in the Help Center. We hope you enjoy the new Performance tab, and you can expect more updates for Site Speed coming soon.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Linking all of your AdWords accounts to Google Analytics

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. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to use multiple AdWords accounts with Google Analytics more effectively.

Previously it was only possible to link a single AdWords account to a single Google Analytics account. This made it more challenging to use auto-tagging and the AdWords reports inside of Google Analytics.

Starting today, you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account. The new data sources section in the Google Analytics account settings area makes it easy to use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import your AdWords data into Google Analytics.

Let’s take a look at how to set this up:

Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account.

If you want to link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account, you need to set the new version of Analytics as your default:

1. Sign into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.

2. Click New Version at the top right of the page.

3. Click Make this version default.

If you skip this step, you won’t see the new linking interface when you sign into AdWords.

Linking your accounts

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. Click the Reporting and Tools tab, then click Google Analytics.

3. Click the gear icon at the top right.

4. Click All Accounts at the top left of the page.

5. Click the account to which you want to link the AdWords account.

6. Click the Data Sources tab.

7. Click the AdWords tab.

8. Click Link Accounts button.

If you are linking from a My Client Center child account the process is very similar. You can more in this article: Linking Analytics Accounts to My Client Center (MCC) Accounts.

Improvements to applying AdWords account data to multiple profiles

Now that you can link multiple AdWords accounts to Google Analytics, we’ve also made it easier import your AdWords data into multiple profiles in Google Analytics. We have put together a quick video demonstrating how to do this:

If you’re less of a visual learner, you can always find instructions on how to link accounts in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Happy linking!

Gavin Doolan

Google Analytics Team

Introducing Multi-Channel Funnels: discover untapped opportunities in your conversion path

An ad is clicked, and a purchase is made. Marketers have long used Google Analytics and similar tools to see which marketing efforts drive sales and conversions. Measurement is fundamental to ROI-focused marketing. Now, we’re taking this measurability a few steps further.

When a customer buys or converts on your site, most conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked. In reality though, customers research, compare and make purchase decisions via multiple touch points across multiple channels. So marketers that measure return solely on the last channel that a customer touches before conversion are getting an incomplete picture, and potentially missing out on important opportunities to reach their customers.

That’s why we’re excited today to introduce Multi-Channel Funnels to all Google Analytics users. This set of five new reports in Google Analytics gives marketers insight into the full path to conversion over a 30 day period, not simply the last click.

By looking at interactions across most digital media channels, including clicks from paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads, you can understand how different channels work together to create sales and conversions.

We’ve been piloting Multi-Channel Funnels with several customers over the past few months, and we’ve seen our customers gain valuable insight into the buying-cycle and understand the often hidden contribution of channels like social and display to conversions.

One of our early partners in the pilot, HUGO BOSS, uncovered significant contributions from upper funnel efforts, helping to better inform marketing strategy. "Knowing more about how our customers find us is very important, and this data helps us make better decisions. We found out that nearly two out of every three conversions involves more than one touch point,” said Patrick Berresheim, Director E-Commerce/CRM for HUGO BOSS. “It's now possible to value the contributions of assisting channels, which had previously been hidden by looking only at the last click.”

If you use Google Analytics on your website, and have goals or e-commerce tracking enabled, you can begin using the reports today by clicking on the My Conversions tab, with no further setup required. If you are an AdWords customer, make sure to link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to get the most detail on your ads performance. Starting today, you’ll see complete data in the reports for the past two months, and we’ll be expanding to encompass data back through January 2011 in the coming days. Update: This data is now available in Multi-Channel Funnels reports.

To help you learn more about the type of analysis you can do using Multi-Channel Funnels, including advanced features such as conversion segments and custom channel groupings, we’ll be scheduling a free webinar - look out for the registration details on the blog in a couple of weeks or sign up here to be notified by email. We’ll be walking through the reports and common use cases and you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions - we hope you’ll be able to make it.

Update: September 1, 2011 10:30am PST - Conversions are now available in the Multi-Channel Funnel reports going back to January 2011

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Google Analytics

Improvements in Custom Reports: Better builder, more metrics, and custom navigation

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. This week, Gilles Roux, an Analytics engineer will discuss some recent improvements to custom reporting in Google Analytics.

Creating custom reports in Google Analytics is a great way to answer specific questions about how users interact with your website or keep track of the metrics that really matter to you.

Since releasing the new Analytics earlier this year you have sent us lots of great feedback. Thank You! We have been hard at work integrating some of your suggestions and adding new features that will make custom reports more useful and easier to use.

Simplified custom report builder

The custom report builder has an updated look and feel that simplifies the process of creating and editing custom reports. The sections are now clearly labeled, with optional settings at the end, and the metric groups are shown on a single page without the need to switch tabs. We have also added the ability to quickly reorder metrics and dimensions using drag and drop. We hope these improvements will help you create reports that look just the way you want, in just a few minutes.

More metrics and dimensions!

We know - when it comes to analyzing your website usage, the more metrics the better. That’s why we have enabled 45 additional metrics and dimensions inside custom reports. These cover a wide variety of areas such as mobile, social, goals, site search, e-commerce and advertising. All metrics and dimensions are now organized in categories to make the list more manageable.

When viewing a custom report that has an explorer tab, you will now be able to select a secondary dimensions, which can be useful to perform a deeper analysis of your data without having to make changes to the custom report.

Custom navigation

The custom reports overview page is the central place to view and manage all your custom reports. You will now notice a ‘New Category’ button to create your own categories, in which you can group related custom reports. You will also be able to reorder reports, for example to make sure that your most important ones are conveniently shown at the top of the navigation.

We hope these improvements will help you create powerful reports that are targeted to the specificities of your site. As always, please don't hesitate to send us feedback, and expect more features in the near future.

Posted by Gilles Roux, Google Analytics Team

+1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Cross-posted from the AdSense and Google Webmaster blogs.

It’s been a busy week for us here at the Googleplex. First we released +1 buttons to Google search sites globally, then we announced the beginning of the Google+ project.

The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.

But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.

First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
• The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
• Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.

Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.

Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.

• The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
• The Social Actions report lets you analyse the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
• The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.

Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Posted by Dan Rodney, Software Engineer

New Google Analytics: Improvements in Mobile Reporting

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. This week, we’ll discuss some recent improvements to mobile reporting in Google Analytics.

Internet traffic from mobile devices is growing rapidly with smartphones and tablets expected to outsell computers this year. Google Analytics already provides a number of ways to track this growing mobile Internet usage from standard tracking on smartphones to SDKs for embedding Google Analytics into applications in iOS and Android. We’re hard at work at delivering more.

Today you'll see small first step along our path to improve mobile reporting inside Google Analytics: a new Mobile section in Visitors reporting.

Inside the Mobile section you’ll find two new reports. The first is a Mobile Overview report, which shows the simple breakdown between mobile traffic and non-mobile traffic.

The second report is the Devices report, which provides information about the various mobile devices that visit your site. As part of this report, we’ve added three new dimensions: Mobile Device Info, Mobile Device Branding, and Mobile Input Selector. Data for all these dimensions is available starting from June 6, 2011.

Mobile Device Info is the actual hardware that visited your site. One of the nice benefits of this report is you can quickly see a picture of any device. While you’ve probably seen an iPhone in person and have an idea about how your site will look on one, that might not be the case for less common devices like for example, the Nokia E63. Click the camera icon next to any device to see pictures of it.

Mobile Device Branding lets you see the brand associated with the phone. Depending on the device this might be the manufacturer or the carrier. Mobile Input Selector shows the primary input method for the device, whether it’s a touch screen, a clickwheel (like you’ll find on a Blackberry), or even a stylus.

And if you haven’t tried out the improvements to map overlay reports that we talked about last week, give them a try in the Mobile reports to visualize where your mobile traffic is coming from.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

New Google Analytics: Improvements in Map Overlay reports

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. This week, a few engineers from our team are sharing improvements they’ve made to Map Overlay reports.

In GA, we're always looking for ways to improve existing reports. For example, we noticed that you can only see state (i.e. province/region) breakdowns if you're looking at the United States. Surely, this information ought to be available for other parts of the world?!

It seemed like something that could be done in a short amount of time and yield a big win for our users. So, we're glad to announce that as of this week's release, you can now see region level maps of over 170 countries!

To try it out, simply go to the Location report (under Visitors > Demographics) and click a country. We'll try France:

Voila! We can see at a glance that Ile-de-France sends the most visits to our site. To see cities, just click City in the Viewing: list immediately below the map. Once you're on the cities view, you can try out another feature we rolled out recently -- a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together.

Enjoy the new features in your maps. We hope they speed you on your way to gaining actionable insights and metrics. Happy analyzing!

P.S. Did you know you get map overlay in more places than just the Visitors > Demographics > Location report? Take a look at the tab on the Visitors > Technology > Mobile report

Posted by Eyal, Jerry, Yinnon, and Brian, Google Analytics Frontend Team

Pilot the Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics integration

Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools, which tool should you use? For many webmasters and online marketers, the answer is both. Much of the data in Google Analytics is about what happens after a user chooses to visit your site; whereas, Webmaster Tools reports are more focused on data from before the user makes that choice.

We’ve heard from many of you that an integration between Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics is at the top of your wishlists. So, today we’re happy to announce that we’re starting a limited pilot of just such an integration.

The initial release will be a set of reports in Google Analytics using search data from Google Webmaster Tools. This includes query information, clicks, impressions, clickthrough rate, and average position. You’ll also be able to use Google Analytics advanced data filtering and visualizations with this data.

We hope this will be the first of many ways to surface Webmaster Tools data in Google Analytics to give you a more thorough picture of your site’s performance. We’re looking forward to working with members of the pilot to help us identify the best ways to make this happen. If you’re interested in using these reports, please sign up for the pilot (see below).

Update July 15th, 2011, 2:25pm PST: We've closed the sign up sheet for the pilot for now. We'll update you when we open up sign ups again.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

The Making of Google Analytics v5

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. This week we’re sharing a few new features in our Intelligence reports.

Since we launched the new Google Analytics, we've been talking to many of you about the new version, and getting your feedback. One question we got was about our goals for the new version and why we made the changes we did. So, we got a few members of the Google Analytics team together to share their stories of how the new version began, our approach, and our goals in building it. Along the way, they also share a bit about what you can expect in the future from Google Analytics.

The Making of Google Analytics v5

We also put together a second video where the team runs through a few of the many new features in Google Analytics v5:

What’s New in Google Analytics v5

You can find more information on many of these in the New Google Analytics blog series including a few that aren’t mentioned in the video like Site Speed and new overview reports. And like Sagnik says at the end of the video, there’s much more to come in Google Analytics. Stay tuned!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

What’s new about Analytics Intelligence?

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. This week we’re sharing a few new features in our Intelligence reports.

In 2009, we debuted the first iteration of our Intelligence reports. Since then, we have been enhancing these reports with more insightful information such as explanations, SMS alerts and improved alert quality.

In the past month, we have released a few enhancements to these reports. First, there is a new overview report that surface significant events for a given date range in a sortable table.

With this flexible table overview, users can perform full-text search, event sort, as well as drilling into details of each event. For example, clicking on the “Details” for row 2 above,

In this detail view, users can explore the event further, add an annotation, or drill in by clicking on Go to Report, which allows users to jump to a full report related to the dimension of interest.

Additional improvements include the ability to create and edit custom alerts without leaving the Intelligence reports:

We’ve also made significant improvements to the quality of automatic alerts by filtering similar alerts and more comprehensive measurements of importance.

As we continue to improve the Intelligence reports, we hope to surface more actionable insights to you. If you have suggestions for our effort here, we greatly appreciate your comments.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team

New Google Analytics - Overview Reports Overview

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.

This week we’re going a bit meta with an overview of the new Overview reports in the new Google Analytics. Overview reports were part of the old version of Analytics, of course, but we’ve made some changes to help your analysis.

Anatomy of the Overview Report
Each overview report consists of three sections. There's a timeline graph, some aggregate metrics, and a set of reports.

Whats inside of each of these sections depends on which report you’re looking at. For example, the Visitor Overview shows a graph of visits and metrics like New vs. Returning visitors, while Content Overview shows metrics like pageviews and average time on page.

The Graph
We’ve made a few changes to the graphs in the new Google Analytics, and we'll share them here. You can now make adjustments to the graphs you see in Google Analytics from the buttons on the top right of the graph:

• Switch a graph between Line Chart and Motion Chart
• Graph different metrics: Select from the dropdown or the scorecard

Metrics dropdown

Metrics Scorecard

• Compare two metrics: Graph an additional metric for comparison

• Graph By: Change graph from between Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and even Hourly for some reports

Reports
The bottom section of an overview reports lets you look through a subset of the reports available in that section. You can flip through these reports to see where you want to start your analysis. In the Traffic Sources Overview, we can start by looking at a report of Keywords.

From here we can go view the full report or look at another report, like Referral Sources:

Intelligence Overview
Google Analytics Intelligence automatically searches your website traffic to look for anomalies. When it finds something that's out of the ordinary it surfaces this as an alert. You can also setup your own alerts by defining custom alerts.

Now you can feel like the president of the principality of Analytica with your very own Intelligence Overview report.

The Intelligence Overview report shows you all of your automatic alerts (daily, weekly, and monthly) at a glance. From the Intelligence Overview, you can click on Details to see a graph of the alert and go directly into the GA report. You can also add or review an annotation right from the pop-up graph.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of Overview Reports. Please continue to send us feedback on the new Google Analytics. Stay tuned for next week’s installment in New Google Analytics series.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team