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 [...]

As I was digging into some web traffic from Brazil, I happened to notice that the most popular screen resolution was 1024 x 768. OK, that makes sense, but it got me thinking…with all the huge resolution desktop screens, wide screen laptops and odd-shaped mobile devices, just what is the most common size/shape of display [...]

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 [...]

Using the unique capabilities of the Nextanalytics add-in for Excel 2007 (2003 version also available), we whipped up a quick dashboard that combines many of the key visitor-tracking metrics from Google Analytics all on one page, and it’s all yours, in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Use it as-is or customize to suit your distinctive needs. [...]

Third in the series (see Visitors overview, Traffic Sources overview) of Excel-versions of typical Google Analytics reports, the Content Overview report provides the detail on what web pages are the most popular. Starting with an overall trend chart showing page views totals by date, the report includes high-level counts and mini-trend-charts for both the page [...]