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

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, [...]

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), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Peter O’Neill of Logan Tod posted an article outlining his requirements for an Excel plug-in for Google Analytics. After a couple of follow-up conversations with Peter, let me respond to his requirements list and show how Nextanalytics for Excel delivers the ideal solution.

By using Nextanalytics for Excel to load and pivot your data, you gain immediate access to information you can use. You don’t have to struggle with changing field formats, building transformation formulas or struggling with Excel’s complicated pivot tables.