A Belfast candle company has been blown over with an incredible 1500% increase in site traffic as it cashes in on record online Christmas sales.

If like many Google Analytics users, you have been trying to avoid the new interface, then its best you take the next few weeks to get familiar with it! Google recently announced that the old version will be turned off in January 2012.

To help you get started, here’s 5 new and improved features:

Dashboard Overhaul:

Users now have the freedom to create up to 20 dashboards under one account, and each dashboard can be uniquely personalised with relevant widgets and formats. The dashboard overhaul provides more freedom and valuable insight into Google Analytics data. Want to create a customised dashboard? Simply drag and drop widgets which are displayed in metric, pie chart, table or timeline options.

Keyword Clouds:

This new feature is fantastic for SEO research. The keyword cloud is a text data visualisation tool displaying keywords with larger keywords indicating higher search volumes. Word clouds are not a new tool but they are new to GA. Rather than viewing a long list of keywords to spot trends, users can visualise keywords based on bounce rates, visits and pages per visits.

Real-Time Data:

Until recently, real time data was typically delayed up to 24 hour after the visit. With Real-Time reports this data is available as it happens. The Real-Time data reports identify currently active pages, instant referrals, keywords and geographic locations driving traffic. Real-Time reports can also be useful to test campaign tracking prior to launching campaigns.

Social Engagement:

The new Social Reports track social interaction, identifying behaviour changes for visits and the number of social actions taken for each website. Determine which content is popular, ‘shared’ and goes viral. And just last week (8th Dec 2011), Google Analytics announced Social Data Hub, inviting all social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics.

Goal flow Visualisation:

This is especially useful for ecommerce sites, the Goal Flow tool can be used to visualise the ‘flow’ of users through a site. Is your checkout process too complicated? Determine at which point people are abandoning their carts then improve the process. Goal Flow Visualisation provides a much better understanding of the entire conversion process by displaying data via interactive graphs and charts.
 
These are just a few of the improvements made to Google Analytics, for more info visit the Official Google Analytics website or sign up to our blog by filling in your email address (top right) to receive updates Google Analytics.

Where once we saw Twitter set itself apart from Facebook as an information network rather than a social network, recent updates to the model indicate the contrary.

As social media platforms continue to evolve, they often appear to take the good features from each other’s models and integrate them into their own offering. The following features in particular illustrate that Twitter is attempting to challenge Facebook’s supremacy by becoming more like Facebook!

Profile Pages

In terms of design, Twitter has started to look a lot more like Facebook since the recent launch of its new design. With the addition of video and photo sharing features within every user’s profile, Twitter is moving closer to the ‘profile page’ style which exists within Facebook and Google Plus, and further away from its original information network model, where a user’s page was primarily a list of tweets. User information such as favourites, lists and images now appear in the upper left-hand side of the page, similar to Facebook.

Brand Pages