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.

First, Next Analytics allows you to log in to Google Analytics using any number of user ID’s. If you have several that you use regularly, you can even save your password (encrypted). Just pick an account that has access to both web sites and login.

If you have several web properties, they will be listed on the Profiles, Segments, Dates tab. Pick the first Account and Profile of interest from the dropdowns. You can also choose one of several default segments or, if you have some defined, an Advanced Segment of your own.

Proceed to build your analysis report. See other articles or sample dashboards for ideas…

When you are done, switch to the Save tab, and you will notice that the application will populate two worksheets when you Save – the first gets the results of your analysis (the “data”), and the second will get the Next Analytics script commands that were used to create it (the “actions”). By default, they are named “ProcessedGoogleData” and “ProcessedGoogleData_actions”.

Change them to “Website A data” and “Common_actions”, and then click the Save Actions button. You should notice that the “Common_actions” sheet appears, and it is populated with Next Analytics script commands. If you click the Next Analytics Refresh menu item in Excel, the “Website A data” sheet will be created and populated with the results of your analysis.

To perform the same analysis on a different website, simply go back to the Profiles, Segments, Dates tab and pick a different Account and/or Profile. Switch to the Save tab, change the fields to “Website B data” (a new value) and “Common_actions” (same as entered previously). Click the Save Actions button.

Because you used the same actions sheet name, a new set of script commands will be appended to the set that was saved earlier, only this set references the new website and has a different destination for the results (“Website B data”).

Now when you click the Next Analytics Refresh menu button, two data worksheets will be populated – “Website A data” and “Website B data”. You can reference these two data worksheets from a single dashboard worksheet, comparing and contrasting the results as you see fit. This is a simple example, but you can see how easily Next Analytics for Excel can handle the task.

Footnote: if you had auto-preview enabled while you were preparing this example, there is probably a worksheet named “ProcessedGoogleData” in your workbook. This is where the results of the preview were being displayed as you selected items and performed the interactive analysis. If you have used different names for your two website data worksheets, then you can delete ‘ProcessedGoogleData” from your workbook.

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Addendum: if you don’t want to have a lot of data worksheets in your workbook, it is possible to have all the result sets saved to a common worksheet. As of this writing, you have to manually change the script commands to do this. Locate the commands that save the data to a worksheet – they look like this:

uiSaveInWorksheet,"Website B data","Website B data",overwrite,invisible,1,1,unformatted

To write the results to worksheet “Website A data” starting at row 25 in column 2 (“B”), change the command to:

uiSaveInWorksheet,"Website B data","Website A data",overwrite,invisible,25,2,unformatted

Tags: account, Dashboard, Example, Excel, Google Analytics, script, Tutorial