Google Analytics uses a line chart across most of their pages, showing the trend of traffic over time. I guess the idea is that you can visually see trends from week to week, month to month, but that has never worked for me. The weekly bump and weekend dips make the chart busy and confusing. Is it trending up? Are Mondays always higher than Tuesdays? It needs a better visualization. How about a calendar view? Next Analytics and Excel to the rescue!
Day of Week Report for Google Analytics
It is surprisingly hard to get day-of-week information out of Google Analytics, and the ‘best’ scenario I have heard is to compare one week to another. That’s not much of a trend, but I guess it’s something. With Next Analytics for Excel, there is a simple way to get reports by day-of-week that lets you create some amazing reports. I’ll give you a hint – the pivot tab lets you pick the display format for the date.
Building One Excel Dashboard for Multiple Web Sites
There are a surprising number of people that are tracking multiple web sites with Google Analytics, and they often want to see a report or dashboard comparing and contrasting their performance. Next Analytics is one of the few products that makes this a simple task – here’s how.
Powerful Analytics Tip Every Website Should Employ
This blog article over at SEOmozBlog by Rand Fishkin professes the power of segmenting the usual trend charts by categories of pages, so it is easy to see whether traffic changes are due to blog articles or tutorial guides or whatever groupings make sense on your site. When I read the article, I immediately thought – what a simple thing to do when you have Next Analytics for Excel. So here it is…start time 2:10pm…
Monthly Metrics – Measuring your Keywords
Jim Gianoglio over at LunaMetrics posted an interesting blog yesterday, suggesting that there is value in tracking the number of keywords referencing your site over time. He laid out an interesting argument that it is supposed to give you a good indication of how well you fair on search indexing and whether there are issues with your site design. He ended with a request for someone to automate the effort for him, since his solution involved manually copying numbers month by month from the Google Analytics interface. Well, hey – that’s what we do with Next Analytics – automated web analytics! Continue reading »
Next Analytics for Excel 2.3 released
Sometimes called a Google Analytics plugin for Excel, Next Analytics delivers far more than just connectivity — it is a complete web analytics solution integrated into Microsoft Excel.
We’re always working on a new release at Next Analytics — moving the bar a little higher. Making your life a little easier. In response to feedback from people using our product, we focused this release on ease of use, especially for people with busy web sites. Also, in case you didn’t notice, we have extended our support to include Microsoft Excel 2010 as well as Excel 2003 an Excel 2007.
We started by integrating the Google Analytics query panels with our analytics forms. Now you can freely move between Dimension selection and the Pivot function. Add page titles and use the Fix functions to clean them up. View the same analysis for a different web site profile or segment. This is a whole new level of interactivity and power, fully integrated into Microsoft Excel!
How do you read this report? Are the visitors engaged?
We were talking to some people last week, and they were talking about one of our visitor engagement reports. They wanted to format the report for printing, and thought there needed to be more explanation about what was being presented. These are classic requests made about reports produced by someone else – they are never exactly what you want, and need a little tweak here, or a little extra explanation there. Next Analytics excels in situations like this…
Anatomy of a Simple Google Analytics API Query
Behind every Next Analytics dashboard and report is a series of script commands. These simple text strings start with a command name and are usually followed by comma-separated parameters. When we added the ability to make Google Analytics queries, we had to create a new script command that would translate into a full query behind the scenes. We called it uiGetGoogleAnalyticsData, and it is this script command behind our fancy UI that lets you pick the metrics and dimensions, profiles and segments, time period and unlimited row count.
Customer Intelligence from Google Analytics
I was looking at a report from a customer intelligence vendor last week and got thinking that a lot of the same data was available in Google Analytics, but it wasn’t very accessible in the normal reports that people use. Now I wouldn’t suggest we can replace the paid service entirely, but the value of an analytics tool like Next Analytics is being able to view the data you have in a number of useful ways. Way back in the early days of On-Line Analytics Processing, we used the term “rotate the cube” to describe looking at your data from a different perspective, where that different perspective just might give you valuable insight into how your business is running. It helps to get a fresh perspective every now and then.
Landing Page Performance Across Segments
In this week’s Excel dashboard, we look at website landing pages – which ones are your most effective and how different visitor groups treat them. Four major segments are shown side-by-side: direct traffic, visits from search engines, visits from referring web sites, and clicks from paid advertising. Leveraging Excel’s conditional formatting makes it easy to do a quick visual comparison between the 4 groupings. It makes it pretty easy to tell which landing pages are pulling in the referrals, and which paid campaigns are being outdone by organic search.
