This weekend was the first long weekend of the summer here in Canada. On Fridays before long weekends at my firm we get the after­noons off, so around 1pm everyone clears out and gets an early start on the rest of the cubicle dwellers around the Greater Toronto Area.

I took the oppor­tunity to do a little shopping for a new mouse at Future Shop. My old mouse had for whatever reason stopeped functioning properly. For the rcord, Microsoft mice have failed on me twice now, so I went with Logitech this time.

I also decided to splurge on a year’s subscription to Flickr, since it was so reasonably priced at about $25 USD. I hit the limit on the free account a while back. It’s useful as a blogger because I use it to host images I want to use in blog posts, such as the one in this post, and it doesn’t use up my bandwidth.

But I digress. Point is, when I got home from shopping, unwrapped and plugged in my shiny new mouse and by chance decided to check out my site statistics, I noticed that Google had upgraded my Analytics account to their new beta!

The whole package is still freely available to anyone who has a Google account and a website. The graphics have been tweaked, but it’s the function­ality improve­ments where the new Analytics really impresses. For example, the geographical breakdown now allows you to drill down from a map of the globe down to a specific US state or Canadian province.

Unsur­pris­ingly, most of my traffic comes from Toronto and the surrounding area. Most of my US traffic origi­nates from the most populous states: California, New York and Texas. It’s also inter­esting to see the browser and operating system breakdown of my visitors. Most still use Internet Explorer despite its deficiencies, but 31% using Firefox on all operating systems is above average:

The title of this post refers to the phasing-in of the new Analytics. Google announced the new version a few weeks ago but has been moving everyone over on a relaxed time frame, assumably to catch any bugs or glitches otherwise missed. So I’ve known for a while what was coming, but didn’t know when!

Google has also put together a video tour of the new features.