At the GA summit yesterday Google Analytics has announced several updates. I still have to check the details for quite a few of these updates (especially the audience reporting sounds quite interesting), but right now I am most excited about the new column groupings and the new traffic source reports.

See aquisition, behaviour and conversion (ABC) metrics at one glance – without custom reports

It is now possible to see acquisition metrics like visits and new visits, behavioural metrics like bounce rate, pages/visit and avg. visit duration together with conversion metrics like transactions, revenue or conversion rate at one glance:

This is great because we will need much less custom reports to see all these metrics in one glance. Even better is that the conversion metrics can be switched from e-commerce to specific goals by using the small select box in the to right corner – this makes it really easy to focus on a specific goal.

This column grouping is available for most reports, e.g. traffic sources, audience demographics, mobile usage or technology.

Seeing ABC metrics by channel groups

Google Analytics has also added a new report that allows to see the abc metrics by channel grouping:

There is also a overview report that shows  bar chart – this allows a quick visual comparison:

I love these reports! However, there is one crucial feature missing: Apparently there is no way to switch to a different channel grouping (yet). It is possible to edit the default channel grouping, but what I would really like to do is to switch between different groupings on the fly – just like it can already be done for some of the multi-channel funnel reports.

Some use cases for custom channel groupings:  If you name your campaigns in a consistent matter you could easily group all display campaigns together (independent of the actual source) and compare them with the group of affiliation campaigns. Or if you have campaigns in multiple languages you could group the campaigns by language. Or you could make a channel for brand keywords and one for non-brand keywords. Or …

So I really hope that the GA team adds custom channel groupings soon – but for the moment we will have to continue using advanced segments and/or the Analytics API to see data by custom groups.