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!

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.


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.

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!

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

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.