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…

First, I open Excel and Next Analytics, login to my Google Analytics account and pick the website profile and time period of interest. Then I picked the dimensions and metrics needed for the report – date, pagePath and pageviews.

That gives us all the individual pages viewed over that time period, by day. Pop over to the Pivot tab and setup a trend table, showing pagepaths by date.

Then we want to create the segments or categories of pages for the report. This is done with the ‘Fix’ feature, where we set up automated search and replace expressions for the data as it is loaded – dynamic segmentation by another name. We can use a number of matching schemes, including Exact Match, Starts With, Ends With, and even use Regular Expressions for rules-based changes. As you add rules, the display updates, showing you which pages have yet to be categorized. Work down the list until you are happy. It may take a while to get all the rules in place, but it is all saved in a file and can be reused with other reports.

We’re not done yet, though, since we would like to see the final chart showing the most popular page groups at the bottom of the stack (in a stacked bar chart). On the Analyze tab, we can pick a quick a quick Sort Last Column (Descending) action, and we’re ready for that chart. Click the Save Actions button, and we can Refresh the whole process with a simple click – including the Google Analytics query.

Flip to another worksheet and insert a chart, pick the data range to the data we just created and display. As one reader pointed out, you should properly label your chart and the axes. Finish time…2:39pm. A half-hour well spent (including writing this article and doing the screen-grabs). To get an update, simply click the Next Analytics Refresh button.

That’s how easy it is to create segmented or categorized trends charts. Pick any dimension, any metric. Create your categories and chart your results. Notice that you ca go back through history and see how things have changed — the segments are defined on-the-fly, so you can change them at any time and take a different view of last year’s data.

Create a series of charts of metrics that matter to you, refresh them daily with a single click. Send a copy to your boss once a month. Life is Good.