Next Analytics has an extensive search and replace capability (“Fix” tab) that includes regular expressions as well as partial and exact match functions. These expressions are saved into comma-separated-value (CSV) files in the user’s Documents directory structure, making them reusable from multiple spreadsheet reports. By referencing files in the file system, though, each workbook is [...]
I saw a tweet today about an old Google Analytics blog article about custom reporting, and in the comments, it seemed that everyone wanted a simple report showing the popularity of various browser versions. That is not a report you can make using Google Analytics custom reports, so it has gone unanswered…until now. Using the [...]
This is part 2 of a series for the new Next Analytics user, walking through how to create a simple monthly summary report (see Part 1). In this article, I am going to explore how to show distribution of visits over a couple of dimensions:
Show the visits by the traffic source (medium)
Show the visits of [...]
Now that Next Analytics supports the Facebook API, it’s possible to build Excel dashboards and reports that automatically refresh with your Facebook fan page activity and fan demographic information. As with all programming interfaces, the Facebook API takes a little getting used to, so in this article, I will walk you through a quick introduction [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]