Google Analytics has a nice new interface, much more intuitive and usable, but I still miss something I think it would be really usefull: an integrated calendar of events.
I can select a range of dates at Google Analytics and get different statistics: visits, unique users, etc. But there are many events (internal and external) that may affect that data. For instance:
- Changes at the site: contents, layout, etc.
- Changes in Google Analytics configuration (for instance, in filters)
- Google Adwords campaigns linking to that site
- etc, etc.
Any webmaster would be happy to know how those events are related to the statistics, wouldn’t they?
How could Google do that? We already have a solution: Google Calendar. So we simply would associate a site monitorized by Google Anlytics to a calendar in Google Calendar. A webmaster could add events to that calendar, and they would be shown at Google Analytics.
Here’s an example; this graph shows a decrease in the number of visits on June, 2nd:
Hmmm… What happened that day? Oh, maybe that new filter to exclude inner visits. With the feature I suggest, I would link the Google Analytics account with a Google Calendar which includes events related to the site, like this:
And the event would be shown at Google Analytics, like this:
They could show events at every place where dates are used; at the date range selection too:
I think it’s not possible to create this association externally since Google Analytics has no API.
This could be only a first step, but there are many other possibilities: for instance, create events automatically from Google Analytics!
Great idea. But it could be difficult to use it, because GA account can be viewed by many people (you can grant access to GA to other people), but Calendar is owned only by you.
You can have shared calendars, but when someone want to see GA stats, the application should check if that person has access to your shared calendar.
For me, it look easier for GA to have his own calendar, and grant access to the GA user to that calendar. So you can have in your own calendar the shared GA calendar.
It is a nice feature to have in mind, like a log of changes you made on your website.