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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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), [...]

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 [...]