Facebook Like and Comment Sources

On an Inside Facebook article this week, Josh Constine reveals how Facebook has recently improved the Facebook Insights API so it now reveals if page likes or comments came from a mobile device. With full access to the Facebook API, we thought we should show you how Next Analytics can pull this new information and [...]

6 Challenges of Web Analytics in Excel

Using Excel to report web analytics is fraught with challenges. This article explores how Next Analytics for Excel overcomes the 6 major obstacles.

Finally – A Useful Traffic Sources Report

When Google announced the release of 127 new dimensions and metrics available from the Google Analytics API on Jan.25, 2011, there was hardly a peep about the HUGE relaxation of the rules about what dimensions and metrics could be queried together. I am amazed that no one has picked up on it since then! Well, [...]

A Google Analytics Keyword Tag Cloud in Excel

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 [...]

Twitter Friends and Followers – Comparing the Lists

One of the new Excel dashboards we released this week downloads the friends and followers of a given Twitter user, and then compares the two lists, generating a short list of friends that don’t follow and followers that aren’t friends. I have seen a number of blog articles that go into long discussions about how [...]

Batch updates of Excel web analytics dashboards

Next Analytics was already the best Excel add-in for automating your Google Analytics reporting, but with the release of version 3,1, we have included a Batch Scheduler and a Command Line Utility that take things to a whole new level of automation. And with 3.1, you can also get Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even SQL [...]

Dates From Google Analytics Year-Week Numbers

When making weekly reports from the Google Analytics API, it is most efficient to download your data using Google’s year and week dimensions. This produces a row of data for each calendar week in the report, but it leaves you with a report that contains no dates — just week numbers. Most people don’t think [...]

Embedding search and replace files in workbooks

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 [...]

Browser Version Popularity Report

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 [...]

USA Map Overlay for Google Analytics in Excel

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.