This morning, I woke up to a surprise: Google Analytics has changed in a major way. Gone are “traffic sources” reports and in come “Acquisition” reports with some new ways you can analyze. This really is going to have an impact on webmasters and SEO agencies alike.
In a nutshell the new Google Analytics report helps you take a more detailed overview of your site performance that isn’t centric to one main metric. For example:
Here we’re seeing where a visitor came from (Acquisition), they behave on the site (such as bounce rate, pages/visit and average visit duration, and conversions from a range of channels all on one dashboard which allows you to quickly compare metrics across these channels for a number of criteria. You can customise it too by selecting specific conversion data such as a particular goal for example.
From this report we can see straight away the majority of traffic is coming from Paid Search which also has the lowest bounce rate and yields the most transactions. We can also see that social traffic has the highest bounce rate compared to the other channels and that direct traffic brings in the most revenue.
If we look at this data compared to the previous period:
We can see the same data compared to the previous month. At a glance we can see revenue is down by 5.22% but we can also see that that is due to revenue from the E-Mail and Referral channel is down whilst Organic and Paid Search revenue is actually up.
This information ‘at a glance’ is incredibly helpful to quickly understand how your website is performing by comparing each channel to accurately see which areas need attention.
You can delve further into each channel group by heading to the new channels section.
