Google Analytics, Facebook
& the Little Things Making My Life Easier
Google Analytics, Facebook & the Little Things Making My Life Easier
Technology is improving faster than we can learn how to use it. That is my honest opinion.
I feel like every time I think I have finally figured out the tools I use every day, someone goes and adds another feature, moves a button, changes an interface or suddenly gives me a completely new way of doing something.
And honestly? I’m not complaining.
Today I was busy putting together a Website Performance Report for one of my clients when I noticed something new in Google Analytics.
A little card popped up telling me I could now build dashboards with a drag-and-drop interface.
Well, of course I had to see what that was about.
And I was immediately impressed.
Google Analytics just got a little more fun
Now, to be fair, Google Analytics has allowed you to create custom reports and explorations for quite some time. You haven’t exactly been trapped using whatever charts Google decided to give you.
But this new dashboard experience makes the process feel much more intuitive.
Instead of getting lost in a sea of settings, you can essentially choose the type of visualisation you want, drag it onto your canvas and then decide what information you want that visualisation to display.
Pie chart?
Drag it in.
Bar graph?
Drag it in.
Then choose the metrics and dimensions you want to look at.
And suddenly you have a dashboard that actually makes sense for your business and the information you want to see.
As someone who builds reports for clients, I love this.
It is giving me a little bit of Power BI on steroids vibes, except you don’t have to connect a whole bunch of different data sources or start performing DAX queries because your Google Analytics data is already sitting there.
And yes, I realise that people who actually use Power BI are probably going to come for me for that comparison.
But from a practical point of view, the exciting part for me is simply this:
I can build the view I want, with the information I want, without spending ages figuring out how to get it there.
For someone who works with website performance and reporting, that is a win.
Then Facebook decided to make my life easier too
Later the same day, I was working on a Facebook post for another client and discovered something else that made me stop and think:
Wait… can we export the comments now?
HOW COOL!
If you’ve ever run a Facebook competition where the entry requirement was something along the lines of: “Tag two friends in the comments!” …you will understand why this is exciting.
Because suddenly you have 347 comments that you need to work through if you actually want to select a winner fairly.
Historically, this could become a very manual process. Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste. Try not to lose your place.
Or you had to use a third-party tool to extract the comments into something more workable like Excel or CSV.
There are now various ways and tools available to get Facebook comment data into structured formats such as CSV or JSON, depending on the type of data and workflow you’re using. Meta also provides export functionality for Facebook information and Page insights.
For a marketer, this is one of those seemingly small things that can make a surprisingly big difference.
Because the less time I spend fighting with data, the more time I can spend actually doing something useful with it. And that is really what I love about these updates. They’re just practical.
They remove a few annoying steps from something I already have to do. And sometimes that’s enough to make my day.
And yes, Google Analytics has AI too
I also noticed another feature a while ago in Google Analytics that you may already know about because, let’s be honest, AI is now apparently everywhere.
You can interact with some of the charts and ask Google Analytics for quick insights into what you’re looking at.
I’ll be honest, I don’t personally use this feature a lot. I usually want to dig into the numbers myself because I want to understand why something happened, not just be told that something happened.
But I can absolutely see the value for someone who is just starting to use Google Analytics.
If you’ve ever opened Analytics, looked at a screen full of numbers and thought: “Okay… but what am I actually looking at?” …having Analytics help point out something interesting in your data could be a pretty useful starting point.
And I think that’s where we’re heading with a lot of these tools. They’re not necessarily replacing the people who know how to use them. They’re making it easier for the rest of us to get to the useful part.
The technology is changing. Again.
I think this is probably my biggest takeaway from today.
When you work in websites, marketing and digital tools, you never really get to the point where you can say: “Right. I’ve learnt everything I need to know now.”
Because you haven’t. There will be another update tomorrow. Another feature next week. Another AI tool someone tells you that you absolutely have to use. And another button that has mysteriously moved to somewhere you swear it wasn’t yesterday.
But honestly, I quite like it. Because every now and then, you find something that genuinely makes your job easier. And today I found two.
A more intuitive way to build the Google Analytics dashboards I use for client reporting, and a much easier way to work with Facebook comment data.
Small things? Maybe. But when you’re doing this every day, small things add up.
And if technology wants to take a few tedious jobs off my plate while it’s busy evolving faster than I can keep up with it… I’ll take it.
Now, excuse me while I go play around with my new Google Analytics dashboard.