Reports You Will Miss

Renamed, moved, or genuinely gone

Almost everything reported as missing falls into the first two categories.

A report exists under a different name, sits in a different section, or has to be built once from the available pieces.

A short list is genuinely different enough that no equivalent produces the same answer.

Knowing which is which decides where the remaining three weeks go, since only the third category has a deadline attached.

The ones genuinely worth exporting

• Behaviour flow and its path visualisations.
• Bounce rate as previously defined.
• Historical multi-year comparisons.
• Any custom report built years ago.

The third is the important one and is not a report at all. It is the ability to compare a year against a year four years earlier, which no new property will offer until 2027 whatever it is configured to do.

Bounce rate is the common complaint

Worth addressing directly, since it comes up more than anything else.

The metric people are used to has been replaced by a differently defined one measuring roughly the inverse, so the number is not comparable to what you were looking at.

Which is a good moment to ask whether it was telling you anything, since a visitor who read the answer and left was always counted as a bounce.

For most small business pages, the useful question was never bounce rate but whether the page produced enquiries.

Export the historical figures if you have been reporting them, and consider not replacing it.

Several of the metrics people are mourning are ones they would not have chosen if starting now.

A worked example

A business listed eleven reports they used and checked each against the new property.

Seven existed under different names or in a different section and took a few minutes each to locate.

Two could be built once from the available components and then saved.

Two had no equivalent: a path visualisation and a four-year comparison.

They exported those two, wrote down where the seven now live, and stopped worrying about the rest.

The exercise took an hour and most of it was locating things rather than losing them.

Write down where things now live

Which is the useful output of the search.

One page listing the question, where the answer used to be, and where it is now.

Where you had to build something, note that it is saved and where.

Otherwise the same search happens again in September, by whoever is looking then, and takes the same hour.

Keep it with the other records rather than in somebody's notes, since the person who needs it in September may not be the one who wrote it.

That page is worth more than any individual report, since it is what makes the new property usable by somebody who did not do the migration.

Fewer prepared reports is deliberate

Worth understanding rather than fighting.

The new version offers fewer ready-made reports and expects you to build the handful you need.

For a small business that is arguably better, since the old version's many reports were mostly unopened and the two or three that mattered had to be found among them.

Build three: one for landing pages, one for sources, one for conversions.

Save them, put them where somebody will find them, and ignore everything else in the interface.

Three saved reports is a complete setup for most small businesses.

Search console covers some of the gap

A practical point that goes unnoticed.

Query data, page performance in search, and impressions are all in a different tool that is entirely unaffected by any of this.

Several questions people are trying to answer in the wrong place are answered better there and always were.

Link the two so the data appears alongside, and remember that the search console history is not going anywhere this month.

Its own retention is limited to sixteen months, which is a separate and quieter argument for exporting it annually.

Almost nobody does, which means most businesses cannot compare this year's search queries against those from three years ago even though the tool still exists.

Do the export before the search

Since the deadline applies to one and not the other.

Locating a renamed report can be done in August with no cost.

Exporting a report that will not exist cannot.

So spend this week on the three or four genuine losses and leave the search for the quiet fortnight afterwards.

That ordering is the only thing about this that is actually time-sensitive.

Check what a supplier's report was built on

Worth asking now if somebody else produces your monthly figures.

Agency reports are frequently assembled from a template pulling specific reports, and several of those will stop returning anything after the switch.

The usual symptom is a report arriving in August with blank sections or figures that have not changed since June.

Ask them directly what their report will look like in August and whether they have rebuilt it, which is a fair question with a short answer.

A supplier who has already done it will say so immediately, and one who has not has now been given three weeks' notice.

The counter-case

Most of these were never used.

Path visualisations in particular are widely admired and rarely acted on, and exporting one produces an image nobody opens.

The genuine loss for most small businesses is the historical comparison, which the spreadsheet archive already covers.

And a business that opened its analytics twice a year is losing very little, which is worth admitting before spending a week on this.

The honest test is whether anybody would have noticed the report missing had nobody mentioned the change.

Export the three or four with no equivalent, build three reports, and write down where everything now lives.

The hour

1. List the reports you actually used.
2. Find each in the new property.
3. Mark the ones with no equivalent.
4. Export those this week.
5. Build three and save them.
6. Write down where each now lives.
7. Leave the searching until July.

Step one is the honest starting point, since the list of reports genuinely used is considerably shorter than the list somebody would miss in principle.

The earlier version of this search is covered in reports that no longer exist.

Frequently asked questions

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