Ask what question the old report answered rather than looking for its name. Most answers are available through a different route, and a few genuinely require building a custom report.

Looking for a name instead of an answer

The frustration with the new interface is usually specific: a report somebody opened every month is not where it was, and searching for it by name produces nothing.

Which reads as features having been removed.

Mostly they have not. The reports have been reorganised around a different model, so the same information is reached differently and sometimes has to be assembled.

The productive approach is to write down the question the old report answered, and then find that answer, rather than hunting for a heading you remember.

The questions, not the reports

Six questions cover almost everything a small business asked of the old reports, and every one of them is answerable in the new interface, which makes the reorganisation an inconvenience rather than a loss.

The standard reports cover most of it

Worth knowing before anybody starts building anything custom.

Traffic sources, pages, devices, geography, and visitors over time are all present as standard reports, under different headings from before.

The main structural difference is that reports are grouped by whether they describe how people arrived, what they did, or who they were.

Once that grouping makes sense, most things are findable in a couple of clicks.

Spend twenty minutes clicking through the standard reports before concluding anything is missing, which is time better spent than searching for the old names.

Where the landing page question went

The specific one that causes the most complaints, so worth naming.

Which page somebody arrived on is a question the old system answered prominently, and it is less prominent now.

It is available, and for a period it required assembling rather than opening.

The workaround, if you need it before it appears where you expect, is a custom report built from the exploration tools using the landing page dimension.

That takes about ten minutes to build once and can be saved and reopened.

It is worth doing because for most small businesses the landing page question is one of the two or three that actually inform anything.

Build the ones you need, once

The approach for anything genuinely absent.

The exploration section lets you assemble a report by choosing what to break the data down by and what to measure.

That is more work than opening a prepared report and it produces exactly what you want, saved and reusable.

Build two or three: the landing page report, a sources report in the shape you are used to, and whatever your regular monthly report needs.

Then name them clearly and they behave like standard reports thereafter.

Doing that once removes most of the ongoing friction, and it is the step that converts the new interface from frustrating to workable.

A worked example

A business reported that the new analytics had lost half their reports and was unusable.

Asked which reports they actually used, the answer was three: traffic by source, landing pages, and a monthly visitor count.

Two of the three were present as standard reports and had simply been looked for under the old names.

The third took twelve minutes to build in the exploration section and was saved for reuse.

Total time to restore everything they had genuinely been using was under half an hour.

The perception that half the reports had gone came from the interface containing a great many things they had never opened, arranged unfamiliarly, which made the familiar ones harder to spot.

Fewer prepared reports is partly deliberate

Worth understanding, since it explains the design rather than excusing it.

The old system offered a large number of prepared reports, most of which most businesses never opened.

The new one offers fewer prepared reports and more capacity to build what you need, which suits larger organisations with specific questions and suits a small business less well.

That is a real trade rather than a mistake, and the practical response is to build your two or three once and treat those as your reports.

It is also why a small business should not attempt to explore the whole interface, most of which is aimed at situations it will never be in.

Write down where things are

A small habit that saves repeated rediscovery.

As you find each answer, note the path in a document: the question, where you found it, and any settings you had to change.

Six lines covers a small business entirely.

That matters more than usual here, because the interface is unfamiliar enough that a route found in March will be forgotten by June if it is not written down.

Keep it with your other operational notes, and it also means somebody else can produce the monthly figures without a tour.

Give it a date range that makes sense

A practical trap worth knowing, since it produces reports that look wrong.

The default period shown is short, and on a small site a few days of data is thin enough to look alarming or meaningless.

Set the range to a month or a quarter before drawing any conclusion, and use the comparison option to place it against the previous period.

Recent days are also incomplete while data is still being processed, so the last day or two frequently shows a drop that is not real.

Anybody looking at a small site's figures over seven days, ending yesterday, will see noise and read it as a trend.

The counter-case

Some of the complaints are legitimate rather than unfamiliarity.

The interface genuinely requires more clicks for some common questions, and building a report to answer something that used to be a menu item is a real cost, particularly for somebody who looks at figures once a month.

Data also takes longer to appear in some views, and sampling behaves differently, which occasionally produces figures that do not reconcile.

None of that is a reason to avoid it, and it is a reason to be patient with people who find it worse rather than telling them they are looking in the wrong place.

Build the two or three reports, write down where they are, and stop trying to reproduce the old interface.

The half hour

  1. List the reports you actually opened.
  2. Write the question each one answered.
  3. Click through the standard reports for twenty minutes.
  4. Find the answers rather than the names.
  5. Build what is genuinely missing in explorations.
  6. Save and name anything you build.
  7. Write down the path to each answer.

Step one usually reveals that the list is three items rather than the dozen the interface implies, which makes the whole exercise half an hour.

Which numbers deserve a place is covered in vanity numbers in a monthly report.

Frequently asked questions

Have reports actually been removed?

Mostly not. They have been reorganised around a different model, so the same information is reached differently and occasionally has to be assembled.

What is the productive approach?

Write down the question the old report answered, then find that answer. Hunting for a remembered heading produces nothing.

Which questions matter?

Where people came from, which pages they arrived on, what they did next, which pages produced enquiries, how many came over time, and whether phone and desktop differ.

Where did the landing page report go?

It is available, though less prominent, and for a period needed assembling. A custom report using the landing page dimension takes about ten minutes to build and can be saved.

What should I do about anything missing?

Build it once in the exploration section, name it clearly, and it behaves like a standard report thereafter. Two or three covers a small business.

Why are there fewer prepared reports?

Because the design favours building what you need over offering many prepared reports. That suits larger organisations better than small businesses, and is a real trade.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Convinced the reports have gone?

List the ones you actually opened. It is usually three, and two are present under different names.

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