This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a small number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to more users soon. Sign up for early access.

The graph on top of most Google Analytics reports is designed to give you a quick overview of your site’s performance over time. From the graph it’s easy to spot trends and understand how your traffic has changed over time. One request we heard was the ability to quickly focus the graph on a particular row of data. While you could do this with a drill-down report or using an advanced segment, we saw this as an opportunity to provide an easy way to do quick comparisons in the new Google Analytics.

Say for example you’re examining your site’s traffic by traffic source. You can see there are peaks and valleys in the traffic, but if you want a sense of the major contributors, you need to dig into the table.



With Plot Rows, you can graph any two rows alongside the overview. You can then easily determine how much a row contributes to the whole. Or you can compare two lines against each other to look for comparison trends.



To use Plot Rows, just tick any one or two checkboxes next to the rows you want to plot, then at the bottom of the table, hits the Plot Rows button.



Remember, that some reports like New vs. Returning default to a Pie Chart view. This doesn’t mean you can’t use Plot Rows, just switch the view to Data, and you’re good to go.



Here’s a quick video showing this in action:



Usage Tips
When looking at continuous metrics, like Visits, Plot Rows is most revealing when exploring the rows of similar scale, for example to see how they contribute to the whole and change over time. When looking at rows at different scales the graph will be more informative when using percentage metrics like Bounce Rate.

In this example, we’re looking at organic search traffic driven to the Google Store from Google and Bing. One would not expect that Bing users are actively looking to buy Google merchandise (like this awesome t-shirt), so the number of visits is understandably low. Since the traffic from Bing is relatively low, the graph doesn’t share much we didn’t already know from the table.



In new version of Analytics you can quickly graph any of the metrics in the scorecard (the bar on top of the graph) by clicking on the metric in the scorecard. Looking at Bounce Rate, we can see that over time the Bounce Rate from Google search (orange) has dropped, which has reduced the overall Bounce Rate of the site (blue), while the Bounce Rate from Bing (green) has more or less stayed constant.



You can use Plot Rows in just about any report when viewed from the Table View. Let us know if you find a place you want this functionality that doesn’t already have it. Also, we’re planning to give a bunch more of you access to the new version this week. Be on the look out!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Information architecture on the web involves organising and presenting information in a way that is easy for the visitor navigate, find and understand. Information architecture is to your website what blueprints are for a building. It forms the basis onto which everything else can be built.

Well constructed, easy-to-use websites lead to greater visitor satisfaction, meaning better conversion rates and more returning customers.

In this first post of the series on information architecture I wanted to take a quick look at some techniques you can use to improve the way your content is categorised, labelled and organised.

Visitors on your site use a variety of navigation aids to find content on your site and we’ll discuss some of these in later articles. For now though lets assume we have a typical hierarchy structure on our website.

Categories and labelling

So how many categories does your website have? Or perhaps a better question: is your categorisation easy to understand or what visitors expect?

Cognitive load theory suggests that people may have difficulty storing more than “7 information chunks” in their working memory at any given time. There have been many research papers written on the topic, but the key take away is that you should gradually introduce your users to new information and not overwhelm them with too much choice especially in the beginning.



This particular cycling website has over 2000 categories listed down the left hand navigation pane (indicated by the red arrow). This makes finding products on their website extremely difficult because it’s extremely hard to recall this many items in your working memory.

What about the three click rule? The three click rule suggests that visitors should be able to find what they want in 3 clicks of the landing page, but the number is not what’s important. What is more important is that each click brings the visitor closer to their goal.

Various studies including this one conducted by Ed Chi at Xerox PARC show that visitors on a website navigate via an information scent. Much like animals stalk their prey based on scent, websites with strong information scents are good at guiding visitors to content. This is because visitors hunt for information based on clues. Once the information scent is lost, visitors will often use the browser back button to return to a page where the information scent is strong again.

The caveat is that if visitors have to repeat this process often, the information scent dries up causing visitors to leave your website altogether. Think of this as your “give up rate” metric.

Often the best clue a visitor has moving through your website in terms of information scent is navigation headings (breadcrumbs), along with the primary and secondary navigation. Which are often based on your underlying category structure.

Take the following category structure of a website. What happens if I’m looking for an MP3 player for my car? Do I look under Car Audio or MP3’s? Or what if I need new brakes for my car, do I look under Brakes or Discs? And clothing for a 2 year old child? Do I look under Children or Baby?


Too many specific categories can be confusing. Especially on smaller sites with less content. They can often lead to the information scent going cold causing the visitor to back pedal through the site and sometimes “give up”.

Guessing that there is a problem, we might decide to simplify our sites navigation and make our categories more broad like so:

On a large website however with over 100,000 products for sale this might not be enough categories and trying to cram too much content or products into a particular category could end up confusing visitors.

So how do I know if my site is difficult to navigate for visitors?

Google Analytics

You can view your content reports to get an idea of what areas of your site may not be meeting visitor expectations. Starting simple you can look at bounce rate, exit rate and top exit pages.

Top exit pages report may show you where the information scent went bad for visitors to your site. Whilst bounce rate may show that visitors arriving at a specific page had certain expectations that the site didn’t meet.

The Content Drilldown report will show you what sections (depending on your URL structure) of your site are performing like and you may find specific categories on your site are doing worse than others.



If you suspect certain pages are not meeting visitor expectations or visitors are not finding the pages you expect them to you may want to take a closer look at the navigation summary report.



This will show you what pages the visitor was previously on and what pages they most frequently view afterwards. Does this match what you would expect?



In Page Analytics reports can give you a visual view of which links or sections get the most clicks from a particular page.


Site Search reports can show you terms with a high % Search Exit rate and % Search Refinement rates. These can be useful for getting an insight into the visitors mind in terms of their vocabulary and intent. In particular take note of terms that produce 0 useful results.

Usability Studies

You may find that Google Analytics can show you what happened, but perhaps not why it happened. To learn more about your visitors sometimes you have to observe them. The best way is user testing and it’s easier than you think, you can start with just 3 or 4 participants.

Just ask Steve Krug: author of Don’t Make Me Think who has provided the User Testing chapters in PDF format on his website for you.

A simple task for your users may be to find a particular product or page on your website without using site search or external search tools like Google. Instead ask them to navigate through your site, take note of the categories they look in and perhaps the number of times they have to backtrack (i.e use the back button) before finding the content or product.

You can conduct this same test before and after your category structure improvements to see if the success rate has improved.

Surveys

Another way of soliciting feedback is via surveys. This is a good opportunity to seek advice on the organisation of your website. Even frequent users of your site may expect to find content in certain sections of your site or spend several minutes finding content they know exists but can’t recall what it’s categorised under.

Not sure what to ask your visitors? How about The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever?

There are loads of Free Survey Tools you can use to gather feedback.

How can I better categorise my content and find these potential problems?

Card sorting is 1 such technique, the idea is relatively simple, create cards that represent the content of your website then ask a group of participants to arrange that content into the most logical groupings.

Use the findings and analysis to determine the best structure for your website and its content. An interesting finding may be that a particular piece of content belongs in more than 1 category.

When it comes to card sorting you have 2 options:

Open card sort: This is where you do not define the category names, instead you present a group of cards (these cards represent your content) and you ask participants to group them using their own choice of category names.

An open card sort can be useful if you have never done a card sort before because you may find the way visitors on your site categorise content and the vocabulary they use is completely different to your existing websites category structure.

Closed card sort: This is where you have your top level categories already defined and ask your participants to place the content into the categories that they feel is best suited.

This is useful when you are adding more information to your site and have already established a category structure that works well for your audience.


How a card sort looks using a paper based approach. You will want to collect the results and enter them into a spreadsheet at some stage. So you may wish to use a program to help automate this for you.


Xsort is a free card sorting utility for Mac OSX. This view shows a completed card sort where the user has created the category boxes (in blue) and placed the cards (off-white-colour) into categories. Using a PC based program saves you having to collect the results manually. You can also export results to your favorite spreadsheet program for further analysis.

When conducting your card sort exercise take note of the following:

1. How did the majority of people group the content?
2. Did people create similar categories or groups of content?
3. Did people agree / disagree with suggested categories (in a closed card sort)?
4. Was there anything that people couldn’t categorise properly?
5. Did participants feel that content belonged in more than 1 category?

Analysing the results


This was an open card sort. So the dendogram (image above) shows the most common groupings.

We can see that certain movies above have been grouped together and from here we may decide that a logical way to group these items is by genre such as Sci Fi, Drama, Action, Nostalgic, Thriller.

Summary:

If you think that card sorting is part science, part art and a bit of reading between the lines, you would be right. There is no absolute 1 way approach. The best results are obtained by doing research. Speaking with a variety of different stake holders such as customers, sales people and support teams and asking the right questions. You also may have to conduct more than 1 card sort refining it as you go to get your final category structure.

No structure will be perfect, your overall aim however is to improve your findability rate so that the majority of visitors to your site can find what they are looking for without too much grief.

So after reading this article hopefully you will:

• Understand the importance of a category structure that is easy to navigate
• Know how to use Web Analytics to help identify potential problems
• Be introduced to the concepts of user testing and user surveys - because web analytics can’t tell you everything.
• Understand the benefits of card sorting when creating a traditional hierarchy structure
• Be more confident should you wish to employ outside help from usability experts

In this article we have assumed that information is categorised using a traditional hierarchy approach. However on the web we have far more flexibility in the way we can organise information (tagging, related items, facets) than in the real world (think of a library or video store).

We’ll explore these different ideas and concepts in the next parts of this series along with other usability aids to help make your website more user friendly, allowing you to convert more visitors into customers.

Posted By Gavin Doolan, Google Analytics Team

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a small number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to more users soon. Sign up for early access.

Today, we would like to introduce you to the new dashboards that is available in the new version of Google Analytics announced last week.


Custom Dashboards
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 customisable. There are four types of widgets: Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. This gives you the ability to choose the visualisation that best suits the data you want in your dashboard. The Dashboard uses a three-column layout, and you can customise the layout by dragging and dropping the widgets as you’d like.

• Metric: Shows the value of a metric and a sparkline of that metric over the selected time period
• Pie Chart: Best suited for displaying breakdowns of a metric by a certain dimension. E.g., Visits by Browser Type.
• Timeline: A graph of any metric over time. You can also compare two metrics in the same graph.
• Table: Think of this as a mini-custom report. You can show one dimension with two metrics and up to 10 rows of data in a table.

Multiple Dashboards
A common request we heard from you all is that one dashboard isn’t enough. You told us that wanted the ability to customise multiple dashboards for different analyses. Thanks to the new Google Analytics platform, we’re happy to give you the power to create multiple custom dashboards, up to 20 per profile. You might start with an overall “Company KPIs” Dashboard that includes the most important performance indicators for your company, then create an “SEO” Dashboard for your search engine optimisation efforts, and a “Content” Dashboard that centers around the content of your website. We’d love to hear what you do with the other 17 slots.

Going Forward
The core functionality for the new dashboards is ready for you to use, but this isn’t everything we’ve planned for dashboards in the new version. Because we are so excited about the new Dashboard, we decided to make its core features available to you first. For starters, we still need to bring some of the features from the current dashboard over, such as the ability to share, email, and export a Dashboard. We are actively working on them (along with many other improvements), so please stay tuned.

We hope you will find the Dashboards in the new Analytics easy and fun to use. Happy Dashboarding!

Posted by Yi Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics team

According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), the Western European mobile phone market grew 7.5% year on year to 50.7 million units in 3Q10. Shipments of smartphones increased to 19 million units, 109% higher than the previous year's third quarter, to represent 37% of total shipments. More and more users are moving to mobile devices capable of a full internet experience and so it is growing even more important than ever that mobile optimised websites be built to capture this growing market of users.

This is the first post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. This post focuses on content prioritisation as a means to making mobile websites quick and easy to use.

In Summary: Mobile website content needs to be prioritised for multi-tasking users on the move. Everything that helps a user to convert quickly and easily should be included. Everything else is surplus to requirements.

To understand how we should think about the content to be placed on mobile handheld devices we must first think about how these devices are used. A key to this is in the very description we use - mobile. Mobile device users are on the move. They are usually in a hurry and are accessing the net at times which are convenient to them and often for short periods only.

Desktop websites need to be optimised for small screen hand-held devices

Mobile users are task oriented. Mobile is about fast access to information and services – whatever tasks can be completed by your service quickly and on the go will be the target features for mobile users. When choosing mobile website content, focus on features which are local, mobile and easy to complete. Take a look at your website analytics and use an advanced segment for mobile users to see how they have been using the desktop features on your site. This will give you an insight into the kinds of services mobile users will want to access most on your mobile site.

Mobile users seek speedy answers. Quick convenient conversions are important to mobile users and latency is not tolerated. If a site is taking a while to load, attention may quickly move to something else. Mobile optimised sites are stripped of extraneous content as well as most advertising, videos, pictures and banners - unless they are necessary for a conversion. Flash should be avoided. Data download and streaming speeds are much slower than most home/office broadband connections. By prioritising content and building for smaller screens, it is possible to make your website accessible to users quickly.

Mobile users are likely to search. With mobile devices there is little room for navigation bars and drop down menus. Mobile users are in a hurry so they will often search rather than navigate. The search box should be big and obvious, near the top of the page. Make the search box large enough that a user can easily tap it using their thumb. Results should be easily filtered.

Mobile users scroll through content. Users will still scan but they will do so from top to bottom, scrolling with their thumb to access more information. This is becoming a convention of mobile. If your site layout obviously follows this convention, users will not think twice about scrolling. As with a desktop site, prioritise your content so that the most important features are seen first. It is also a good idea to put important information or buttons at the bottom of a page, particularly when the page is very long. Many mobile users will scroll really quickly to the bottom of a page if they don’t find what they need at the top.

Mobile users are online and offline. If you have a bricks and mortar store, mobile users may access their handsets to improve their offline experience. Store location, directions, product availability, product reservation and creating shopping lists are all things that the mobile user will need to be able to access easily on your site.

Source: eMarketer.com

To summarise, 5 points to keep in mind when prioritising content for mobile:

• Build for task oriented users
• Make site navigation fast
• Have a visible search box
• Layout content for scrolling
• Build for online/offline experience

The next post will be looking at how to use white space to improve the experience for users of a mobile website. If you have feedback, please leave a comment.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Today at the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco, we shared a look at a new version of Google Analytics. We’ve also reached out to a small group of Analytics users to participate in the testing. If you’re part of this group you’ll see a link to the new version in your Analytics account. We’re starting small, and we’ll gradually roll the new version out to everyone.

Our goals for the new version are to make it easier and faster to get to the data you want and to
enhance the Google Analytics platform to bring you major new functionality. Many of the changes in the new version are the result of your feedback. For example, you can now view multiple advanced segments without needing to also use All Visits. You’ll find some of the other most requested features like multiple dashboards in the new version as well.

We’ll be sharing many more details about what’s new along the way with a new series on the blog focused exclusively on the new Analytics. In the meantime, if you want to be considered for the test, visit the beta sign-up page. Using the new version won’t change how Google Analytics reports your website traffic, and you can continue to use the current version while testing the new Analytics.

As you start using the new Google Analytics, you should also check out the updated Google Analytics Help Center. We’ve also set up a new category in the Help Forum where you can ask questions and discuss the new version.

This release wouldn’t have been possible without your feedback. Please continue to send us your feedback as you start using the new interface.

Happy analysing!

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team