They say change is a good thing, but it isn’t always easy. SEOs everywhere are experiencing the big change taking place with Google phasing out the old version of Google Analytics. It seems like Google is itching for the “old version” of Analytics to go away. The only way to even get to the old version currently is by clicking the link in the footer. There’s no telling when that link will go away, so make the switch ASAP if you haven’t already.
Google recently sent out emails alerting everyone that the old version of Analytics reporting will end in June 2012. We see the good in the new Analytics and there is a lot more data to play with. However, this is a headache because all of the automatic reports you set up in the old Analytics will need to be made again in the new Analytics. This is good news and bad news. It’s good because it gives you the opportunity to revisit your dashboard and customize it. Unfortunately for agencies this is bad news because all of the hundreds of reports we have automated will be gone! We encourage our clients to log into their Analytics and get familiar with the data.
Update: This is an older post and the dashboards have improved, but the real data is often difficult for most marketers to see. You can still customize their dashboards to display the data they’re most interested in seeing.
If you need a little help getting started Annielytics has written a phenomenal resource for extracting data through the API for you — Learn to create interactive dashboards with Google Analytics API data. This is a paid resource, but she also offers free tools and information in her blog. Enjoy.