We hope you’ve had a chance to take a look at the analytics beta refresh that went live over the weekend.
As promised, this is the first of a series of posts take a deep dive look at some of the new features.
My Dashboard
The new dashboard feature is really helpful, as it gives you a snapshot of what’s happening on your site without you having to run several reports before you spot anything out of the ordinary occurring with your traffic.
When you first log in, the default view contains a series of “gadgets” displaying information such as:
· A Traffic Summary – Page views, visits, repeat visits, bounce rate and visitors
· Detailed graphs showing page views and visits
· Bar graphs showing visualizations of top pages, top keywords and top referring websites
You’ll notice the calendar legend has been hidden, so if you click the + in the top right hand corner of the page above Help, the calendar will fold down and you can select any given day, month, week or a custom date-range.
Dashboard Customization
The layout of the gadgets is fully customizable. You can “drag and drop” the gadgets into a different order if you so wish. You can also remove gadgets from the dashboard by clicking on the “X” button in the top-right corner of the gadget frame if they are not relevant to your needs.
Adding more gadgets couldn’t be easier!
Simply click on “Show gadget library” and you’ll see you can add “at-a-glance” information on:
· Browsers
· Languages
· Operating systems
· Screen resolution
· Website instrumentation
Of course, the KPIs provided in the Dashboard are just top-level information.
To dig deeper, just click on the “view report” links on each of the gadgets to get more insight.
You can also add reports to the dashboard when viewing a report. Simply click on the “Add to Dashboard" button located just under the calendar view.
You might also want to know how your traffic metrics compare over different time periods. The answer is only a few clicks away.
· Make sure that the Traffic Summary gadget is showing on your Dashboard
· In the calendar select the week or month you want to compare with the previous (other than the current week or month)
· You can see that the traffic report now has a column showing a comparison of your page views, visits and visitors based on your time-period selection.
Do let us know via the adCenter Analytics Forum what you think of the dashboard feature, or if you’d like to see other gadgets to be added to the library.
Cheers Mel