14 DAY TRIAL // Last week Google debuted a new version of its popular metrics tool Analytics. It's still in testing with a selected few, but Google has started introducing some of the main improvements. One of the biggest and the first thing any user is going to see is the new Dashboard.
It's modeled after the recently introduced Google navigation toolbar, at least the top part is, and is now completely customizable.
Each component can be swapped and changed, enabling users to create a dashboard with exactly the information they want.
"For most Google Analytics users, the dashboard is the first thing you see when viewing your reports. Dashboards in the new version of Google Analytics have been redesigned to be completely widget-based and highly customizable," Yi Wang, Product Manager from the Google Analytics Team, wrote.
"There are four types of widgets: Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. This gives you the ability to choose the visualization that best suits the data you want in your dashboard. The Dashboard uses a three-column layout, and you can customize the layout by dragging and dropping the widgets as you’d like," Google explained.
Each type of widget is suitable for certain tasks. For example, a Metric widget displays the current value of a metric you're following along with a sparkline, a condensed graph, for it.
The Pie Chart widget is rather self explanatory, it makes it easy to see different values of a metric, broken down by a certain criteria. The Timeline widget is also exactly what it sounds like, any metric can be charted in time and two metrics can be displayed for comparison.
Finally, the Table widget enables you to break down a metric or two and see their values based on a certain dimension.
But Google goes further with the customization options, not only is it giving you the possibility to make the dashboard your own, you get 17 custom dashboard which you can design, each with its own metrics, and the possibility to switch between them. Since this is just the first testing release, more features and functionality are coming soon.