Stubborn hold-outs, your time has come. Starting tomorrow, you’re going to have to use the new version on Google Analytics.
That’s because Google announced today that they are officially retiring the old version. To be fair the Google, they did give site owners over a year to make the transition. Plus, you should be using the new version anyway as it is about one gazillion times better.
Mostly becuase the new version of Google Analytics sports Real-Time reporting. With Real-Time, you can see your site activity right as it happens – page views per second, sources, and current active visitors.
That means that you’ll no longer see this link at the bottom of your screen, allowing you to view Analytics through the old lens:
In a blog post, the Google Analytics team reminds you why you should be happy to switch over to the new version:
- Multi-Channel Funnels provides insight on the full path to conversion over a 30 day period. The variety of marketing channels used to find your website, and not simply the last click, so you can make better decisions on your marketing investments.
- Social Reports help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on the metrics which matter to your business.
- Mobile Reports show how visitors from mobile devices and AdWords mobile campaigns engage with your website. See how many pages they visit, how much time they spend, as well as conversion and ecommerce insights to help you optimize your mobile strategies.
- Content Experiments enables you to show different versions of a page to different visitors, then using a new advanced statistical engine measures the results of each to determine which is the most effective version.
Change is good, guys.