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The new Google Analytics: mostly cosmetic with one HUGE change

Let's just get this out of the way first: I get excited by new Google Analytics features. Happy now? I'm a big geek. Lets move on.

It came out of the blue today to hear that Google Analytics was going to release "version five" (I didn't even know that there were versions) and was about to start testing. The official Analytics blog gave no details, but the Analytics Talk blog did. Among the new features:
  • New layout on the dashboard and more data crunching available in the widgets
  • Updated custom reports (though I've never used custom reports, so this just got a "meh" from me. If you have a suggestion for a useful custom report, comment away)
  • New visualizations, including motion charts within the reports and a term cloud visualization which seems like it may either be really useful or totally worthless
  • Renaming and reorganization of many of the metrics, which seems to be to encourage low-to-medium users as well as just logical, inevitable changes
But the HUGE change is that they'll now allow events to be set as goals. Previously, you had to have a page view to trigger a goal, which meant that all that useful event data was just sitting way off at the side. But now it'll be tons easier to have downloads and link clicks count as goals without it affecting your page views. From the looks of it, it also seems like you'll have more control over when a goal is triggered, though I can't tell if that's just for the events as goals or all goals.

The one thing that I'm concerned about is if the URLs will change along with the name changes to some of the metrics. I use an antiquated-but-useful method of importing stats from into Excel from Analytics that depends on the export report URL, and if it changes those URLs, it'll break my reports. I do realize that I should probably be using the API anyway, but I have a lot of time put into those reports, and I'd hate to see them all break.

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