For a new Next Analytics user, the tool can seem quite daunting, so in this article, I will walk through how to create a simple monthly summary report using Next Analytics version 3.0. I am going to roll in a number of common challenges, including:

Show a common metric like visit count
Show a calculated metric like [...]

Next Analytics has a growing list (over 40) of free Excel dashboards and reports that work with our product. Each was created to report on a specific time period, be it 3 days or 13 months, that moves with the calendar so all you have to do is click Refresh and the time period is [...]

While I was building one of our weekly free Excel dashboards (Traffic Source Trends), I realized that most of our dashboards include an interactive dropdown with the Google Analytics advanced segments. While this is a great capability and is similar to the GA web interface, making comparisons between segments is difficult because you have to [...]

I was building an Excel dashboard last week, this time about traffic sources from Google Analytics, when I realized it was time to bring together two of the most useful analytics functions: trends and segmentation. We get a lot of requests for segmented trends, and we’ve published an interactive workbook with the functionality (Segmented Trends), [...]

A number of people need to keep track of multiple web properties – their blog, support site, maybe a social media presence and their main web site. They may even have a series of related websites that they want to track independently. This week’s free Excel dashboard shows just how easily Next Analytics lets you [...]

When reporting Google Analytics visits by source, if you have a lot of people coming to your site from web-based email, and you aren’t using any campaign tracking parameters on your links, you may get a lot of sources that look like:
us.mg1000.mail.yahoo.com
us.mc534.mail.yahoo.com
sn117w.snt117.mail.live.com
co120w.col120.mail.live.com
There may be plenty of variants for each of the various mail servers, and [...]

While working on our free spreadsheet report for last week, splitting the Google Analytics screen resolutions into a grid view, I noticed that some of the test sites had very different profiles of popular screen sizes. At first I thought this might be due to variation of discretionary capital (a.k.a. pocket money) in various countries [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]