One new function is the use of dashboards. These allow you to pull together different stats all in one place. You can create different dashboards around certain metrics to easily analyse your website data. The dashboard is made up of widgets, which show the data you require in the format you prefer. You can create up to 20 dashboards which can contain up to 12 widgets.

The new version now handles more sophisticated goals such as tracking PDF downloads or configuring your goal to track 2 minutes play of a video. This blog shows you how you can set this up.

Google Analytics is all about the data and the new and improved custom reporting is excellent as you can tailor reports to your exact requirements. With custom reports you pick dimensions and metrics which mean something to you.

Another cool new feature is the Term Cloud visualisation. Term clouds are created to easily enable you to see the most common terms by increasing or decreasing the size of the keyword, the larger keywords are the more common.

Real Time Analytics Tracking

Google have updated the system to enable real time tracking of website visitors, this means you can see reports of people that are on your site now. The real time reports continuously updates to record page views seconds after they occur.

Everything in the world is getting faster so real time analytics tracking is a great way to immediately measure the impact from things like social media. For example tracking in real time can be used in the following way. Quite often people will tweet about their latest blog post. By using real time analytics to measure traffic driven from that tweet you can see when this traffic dies down and then know when it is time to re-tweet.

Multi-Channel Funnels

There are a variety of tools which online marketers use to promote their website, often companies will employ a mixture of banner advertising, search marketing, social media, affiliate marketing, etc. and normally conversions are attributed to the last action. In reality a conversion often happens after multi touch points with the various marketing methods utilised. Conversions can happen over time so how long did it take for the initial contact to turn into a sale.

The new multi-channel funnel reporting feature, which is still in pilot at the moment, will help to identify all the marketing methods that lead to a sale. You will be able to get an insight into which channels your customers interacted with in the 30 days leading up to the conversion. Check out this video for more detailed info on this feature.

Mobile Reports

With the ever increasing availability of smartphones and tablets people are using the mobile web more and more. The new mobile reporting feature allows you to see how visitors from mobile devices are interacting with your site and even allows you to optimise for particular devices.

In the Mobile section of Google analytics you will see the Mobile Overview, which shows the breakdown between mobile and non-mobile traffic and the Devices report, which reveals information about the mobile devices that visit your site. The Devices report also shows you a picture of the device if you click on the camera icon next to the device name.

Visitors Flow

In the new version of Google Analytics you can also see a new report called visitors flow. The report graphically shows how visitors navigate through your site by source and dimensions. This allows you to easily see the customer journey through the site and the pages where they drop off. By using this data to optimise drop off points you could increase your conversion rate. This video shows you how to use this report.

If you haven’t begun using the New Version of Google Analytics you are missing out on these cool new features. As you login to your account over the next few weeks the New Version will be set as the default, however you will still be able to access the Old Version via a link in the top right of the screen up until the early part of next year.