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.

With Google Analytics, web analysts usually find themselves tracking aggregate numbers of visitors and totals of the pages they viewed. They also like to segment to try to identify something of interest to Marketing, but the metrics are still aggregates. There are a number of other disciplines that can benefit from access to the data, though, and a good example is the sales force. For them, it’s not about totals – it is about specifics. We have to “rotate the cube” and use a different perspective into the data. Did their prospects or customers visit the web site recently? Were they interested in the latest product announcement or did they just check the support page? After the presentation at ABC Company, did they check out the web site with mild or enthusiastic interest? Large enterprises would invest in a customer intelligence solution, but smaller businesses tend to make do with what is available and the free Google Analytics service is usually in that mix. The Next Analytics Excel add-in lets you ‘rotate the cube’ with your Google Analytics data.

This week’s free Excel workbook shows Visitors to Key Web Pages, and it lets you see who recently looked at any of 10 specific web page addresses (URL’s) on your site. With Google Analytics, we can’t actually get down to names of individuals (the terms of service actually say you aren’t allowed to), but in most cases knowing if an organization is interested is still useful information. We know the internet service provider, the country and city, and depending on your web site traffic, that might be enough to infer organizations that don’t have their own (named) internet service. If they do, then you have them by name.

The big problem with reports that use long web page addresses is how much room they take up, especially when you try to put them into column headers. With Next Analytics, we can use the ‘Fix’ feature to replace those long addresses with very short tags, making the report a lot easier to read. In this Next Analytics dashboard, we have done this by building a ‘fix’ file using simple Excel cell references to the Legend table on the report. If the source data includes a listed web address, we replace it with the short tag. Our analytics script then reports the number of pageviews for each of the listed tags. Anything that wasn’t one of the listed addresses is added to an ‘other’ category and shown using the related tag in the report.

Of course, we know things sometimes don’t go like you expect, so we also added a worksheet (data-toppages) that lists the web addresses of your most popular pages. Maybe you typed the URL’s wrong or they appear differently than you expected. On the fixes worksheet, we included a few rules that convert them all to lowercase, strip off any query parameters (anything that follows a question mark), and drop any trailing slashes (/).  These are common conversion requests, but you can change any of those rules or make your own.

The result is nice and simple – enter the web page addresses of interest into the Legend, and make some appropriately short, meaningful tags (like [h] for homepage, [p] for product page and so on), then click the Next Analytics Refresh menu. Your top visitors and the pages they viewed appear. It is easy enough that you can give it to your sales force, and they can use it on a day-to-day basis. Another bit of customer intelligence to help the sales effort.

The Microsoft Excel workbook is included with the dashboard download package and is available on the Next Analytics web site (http://www.nextanalytics.com). It requires a copy of Next Analytics to be refreshed with your data. Trial versions are available.