I have seen tag clouds used all over the web to visualize what keywords are the most  popular, and thought it would be a good additional to the Next Analytics dashboard collection.  Tag clouds can easily be applied to situations where you want to see what people are looking for or talking about — anywhere [...]

I made a quick little modification to the Map Overlay dashboard I described in our popular blog article, and produced the same dashboard, but focussed specifically on that USA market.

I was really disappointed this week when Hootsuite stopped telling me what Twitter messages were ‘new’ since the last time I looked. That was the number one reason I used it, and the Twitter interface is missing this valuable feature. Well, there were a few things that bugged me about both Hootsuite and even the [...]

Many of the free Excel dashboards available from Next Analytics combine the results from multiple Google Analytics queries into the various elements of one Excel “dashboard” worksheet, but it may not be obvious how you would build such a combination report from the user interface. It is actually quite easy, and in this article, I will [...]

This is the Microsoft Excel report element you’ve always wanted – showing a map of the world, highlighted to show where your website visitors come from. It is included in this week’s free dashboard, and Next Analytics will automatically create and update it. To learn more about the dashboard, see our Product pages. In this [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With all the online reports provided by Google Analytics, the one that seems to be missing, years after it was pointed out, is the What’s Changed Report. Way back in 2007, Avinash Kaushik wrote in his blog (Occam’s Razor) and his book (Web Analytics, An Hour a Day) about the wonderful value of [...]

Most of the templates and sample reports that I’ve posted simply demonstrate that Nextanalytics can produce all the same web reports you have seen elsewhere. But Nextanalytics can go so much further; we’re not just another quick and easy reporting tool – we can run with the big dogs.
In this example, we not only create [...]

Stephane Hamel of Immeria created a sample dashboard in Excel (link) that took off virally, becoming a popular starting point for others (link) (link) to create their own solutions. I applaud his work and his creativity. In the comments to his blog, though, a number of people found the complexity daunting. I am a strong [...]