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

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. [...]

Jim Gianoglio over at LunaMetrics posted an interesting blog yesterday, suggesting that there is value in tracking the number of keywords referencing your site over time. He laid out an interesting argument that it is supposed to give you a good indication of how well you fair on search indexing and whether there are issues [...]

With all the online reports provided by Google Analytics, the one that seems to be missing, years after it was pointed out, is the What’s Changed Report. Way back in 2007, Avinash Kaushik wrote in his blog (Occam’s Razor) and his book (Web Analytics, An Hour a Day) about the wonderful value of [...]

Stephane Hamel of Immeria created a sample dashboard in Excel (link) that took off virally, becoming a popular starting point for others (link) (link) to create their own solutions. I applaud his work and his creativity. In the comments to his blog, though, a number of people found the complexity daunting. I am a strong [...]

Third in the series (see Visitors overview, Traffic Sources overview) of Excel-versions of typical Google Analytics reports, the Content Overview report provides the detail on what web pages are the most popular. Starting with an overall trend chart showing page views totals by date, the report includes high-level counts and mini-trend-charts for both the page [...]

Have you ever wanted your Google Analytics reports in Excel, so you can share them with your boss? Maybe add a tweak or two to reflect your (or ‘Her’) unique needs? Well, now you can, and you don’t have to be an Excel whiz to do it! Start with our XLS file, and simply enter [...]

If you run a blog, DailyBlogTips recommends the Top 5 Google Analytics Reports for Bloggers. We’ve produced a quick dashboard using Nextanalytics for Excel to give you access to all this information in one quick overview, refreshed with the click of a button. You’ll see (1) the top traffic sources that your visitors are coming [...]

If you are looking for an Excel version of the standard Google Analytics Traffic Sources Overview, this is it, delivered using Nextanalytics for Excel. It includes the usual total visits trend and the top mediums listed on a percentage basis with micro-trends and a summary pie chart.  Across the bottom, it shows the top sources [...]

When building a dashboard for web reporting, people often want a quick summary or overview on the first sheet. In the overview, they’d like to see a few key traffic metrics as well as an indication of the trends over the period. This is easy to do with Nextanalytics and some simple Excel charting.