For those of you who review your Google Analytics reports through the interface, you may have noticed some changes to the look and feel of Google Analytics, and where you traditionally access your reports.

The new interface shows a significant shift for Google and their focus on a holistic approach to how you should be analysing data. This shift is also in line with their new strategy across all their platforms – communicating to you, as the customer, that it’s not just about visitors from Adwords any more. It’s about engagement metrics, understanding goal conversions, assisted conversions and social media, and how these all intertwine to provide you with your overall success.This works for us here at Bang Online, as this is exactly what we communicate to our clients on a regular basis. And in fact, they have now pulled through a lot of the data we have had set up in the custom reports that we provide to our clients which is pretty useful stuff.Our quick and easy guide runs through some of the more important changes that you should be across.Acquisition and Behaviour Reports replace Traffic Sources and Content

Left: Old Interface Reports, Right: New Interface ReportsYou’re probably familiar with the standard reports found in the old interface called “Traffic Sources” and “Content”. Within the new interface, these reports have been renamed “Acquisition” and “Behaviour”.The Behaviour section contains the same information as the Content report in the old interface. In saying this, I would watch this space as the renaming of this section provides a hint of reports they will no doubt have in beta testing ready to implement.The Acquisition section, while containing the same “All Traffic” report as before, now includes some new reports including a report called “Channels”. The data is now represented in a slightly different format, with more focus on the conversion data. There is also a new report section called “Overview” which shows specific reports in relation to Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions (see below).

Custom Channel Reports

One of the big changes is the ability to see custom channel information, which was previously contained within the multi-funnel report. Now you can view custom channel data on the Acquisition and Channels Reports, which gives you a complete view on how your customised channels are performing (from visits to revenue). This gives you greater visibility across which performance metrics are important to you.SummaryA lot of this information was available through custom reports, however, this did require you to have an advanced knowledge of Google Analytics to manipulate the data sets. Now bringing it to the forefront allows you to quickly view statistics within the need to manipulate dimensions and metrics.In saying this, it’s always important to understand specifically what metrics allow you to firstly judge the performance of your campaign, and secondly provide you with the information you need to move forward and improve your campaign success.And that’s where we come in. We now have 3 fully qualified Google Analytics accredited professionals at Bang Online who are on hand to help you understand your metrics, and how to get the most out of your website performance. So drop us a line – we would be happy to help you make sense of your data.