I have been using Google Analytics for almost a year now to track the visitors to this blog and a few other sites I have. Tonight, I was slightly surprised when I logged on to my account and saw a whole new set of graphs. Google Analytics underwent an update today:

If your a user of Google Analytics, then you’ll notice the changes right away. The changes give the Analytics’ graphs a fresher look and feel. The dashboard (the first screen you see when you choose an account) has been redesigned as well. What is nice about the new dashboard is that it shows a historic line graph of your visitors for more than just the last 7 days (like the old versions). The menu options seem to be nearly the same as before, but I haven’t fully explored the new version yet (nor fully explored the old version). The only thing that I have found that I don’t like about the new analytics is that loss of granularity. Before, I could look at the stats for a single day and see when visits to my site occurred (valuable to understand what time of day vitis happened or how shortly after a blog posting that visitors arrived). This new version seems to have lost that level of granularity, now the finest grained detail I can view is a single day’s worth of traffic.

If you don’t mind sharing your site’s traffic with Google and you have a mechanism for installing the required javascript widget on all your pages, Google Analytics is a great tool for viewing and exploring your traffic. Especially if you use Google Adwords, since they are integrated. But, once you reach a certain volume of traffic you will need to sign up for the commercial version of analytics. Until then, try it out and see what you think.

Oh, and it’s not really clear if Google use this data for any other purposes…but they don’t specifically guarantee that they don’t… (see their Terms of Services, Section 6)