Rich Page Ramblings

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As you all probably know, I am a huge fan of Google Analytics and in particular love the new interface and how easy they have made it to discover key metrics. Way better than the previous version and is a benchmark in web analytics. BUT. They still need to improve things. They just launched a few more improvements on friday, but nothing in my eyes that meaninful, so thought I would come up with my own most important ‘missing pieces’.

Here is my 10 most important missing pieces at Google Analytics:

1. The ability to click on a date in graphs and have it take you to that date’s data, rather than having to reselect using the drop down.
2. Lack of reporting depth regarding goal conversions. If you browse goal conversions by traffic source, it only tells you percentages, not actual numbers. Frustrating. 38% conversion rate could mean 12 or 120 actual conversions.
3. Continuing on the ‘goals’ area, the goals section is very shallow and doesn’t really tell you much you can’t find elsewhere, or give you other ways of exploring how goals were achieved. All the useful goal conversion details are usually found on other reports by hitting the ‘goal conversion’ tab.
4. They need to add back in the percentage clicks on the site overlay, including exit percentages. Click numbers are rather useless on their own with no context or way of showing most popular, like heatmaps. They should follow the example of crazyegg’s great site overlays and heatmaps.
5. On the traffic sources section, it shows you the top sources and keywords by percentage, but when you drill down into this area, it no longer gives you the option to show by percentages, just actual hard numbers. This would be useful to show more than just the top 5 for each in terms of percentages.
6. Make the default data view include the current days date. If, like me, you look at data many times a day, its frustrating to keep having to change the drop down to include the current date.
7. Integrate the ‘URL builder’ tool into the navigation. This is a VERY useful tool, and is essential for tracking exact sources like emails or banners on other websites.
8. Goal funnels are great, but there is no way to see comparisons over time because the ‘compare to past’ on this page doesn’t bring up comparisons. I want to able to see how funnel elements are improving after making changes, without having to keep changing the date and printing to see the difference visually in funnel drop off or exits.
9. Include more than 4 goals. I know its free, but why not up this to 10 at least? 4 is a very low number, especially if you have a number of products for sale online, or thanks pages as conversions. At least offer the ability to pay for more goal tracking.
10. Which leads me to my last missing piece. Support. I understand its free, but why don’t they offer a way of paying for premium support other than using external vendors? And their support FAQs are pretty un-useful and ‘techy’ at times, and seem just left over from the ‘Urchin’ days before they took over.

So there you have it. 10 missing pieces that would make Google Analytics simply perfect. Well, for now at least. Anyone at Google reading? I would love someone there to respond…

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