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. [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
As noted in Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik, as well as his popular books Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, the most important aspect of any web analytics initiative is getting to the actionable insights that drive strategic decisions. He says that from raw data alone, it is impossible to deduce [...]
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 [...]