You're absolutely right. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the setup procedure and style of Analytics' own report feature. Over the longer term, we will add other data sources to enrich the information that Analytics provides. At that point, the difference will become clearer. Also, we made the surprising experience that even the process outlined by you can be quite challenging for some website owners who try to avoid as much hassle as possible to get to their data, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth. That's the situation we want to address by making the process as simple as possible, although (obviously) we have some work ahead of us.
As you or someone else mentioned, your service will probably not stop at just GA. If so, then this will be quite valuable - creating a unified interface to all major analytics systems. My vision was too limited when I first thought about what you were doing. Great work!
So what I'm saying is, that it is of course possible to create a report in Google Analytics but it is not that trivial. Especially for non web-savvy users.
True, but 'Dashboard' is one of the options by default... So if you're not that savvy, you're probably just looking at the Dashboard anyways.
I do agree with some other commenters that, if this is a flexible framework allowing you to peer into other services besides Analytics, it could be quite a boon.
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Interesting. How is this better than doing the following one time:
(1) Login to Google Analytics.
(2) Click 'View Reports' for the site of interest.
(3) In the lefthand menu under 'My Customizations', click 'email'.
(4) If you have one setup already, click its title to edit it. Otherwise, create one.
(5) Choose the report you want it to send you.
(6) From the Date Range/Schedule dropdown, select among Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly.
In other words, it appears to me that that this can all be done from within Google Analytics. Perhaps I'm wrong though?
You're absolutely right. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the setup procedure and style of Analytics' own report feature. Over the longer term, we will add other data sources to enrich the information that Analytics provides. At that point, the difference will become clearer. Also, we made the surprising experience that even the process outlined by you can be quite challenging for some website owners who try to avoid as much hassle as possible to get to their data, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth. That's the situation we want to address by making the process as simple as possible, although (obviously) we have some work ahead of us.
As you or someone else mentioned, your service will probably not stop at just GA. If so, then this will be quite valuable - creating a unified interface to all major analytics systems. My vision was too limited when I first thought about what you were doing. Great work!
(4) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/84641/google_analytics.jpg :)
So what I'm saying is, that it is of course possible to create a report in Google Analytics but it is not that trivial. Especially for non web-savvy users.
True, but 'Dashboard' is one of the options by default... So if you're not that savvy, you're probably just looking at the Dashboard anyways.
I do agree with some other commenters that, if this is a flexible framework allowing you to peer into other services besides Analytics, it could be quite a boon.
If people like this, they can do it for other metrics based services, and then just make one bigass report.