Many common analytics reports are looking for one or two dimensions trended by date, usually month or week. With the Google Analytics API, the year, month and week dimensions are independant values. This article shows how to concatenate them and pivot the resulting column.
For this example, we’ll show the visitor type trend by month. Start [...]
Using Excel to report web analytics is fraught with challenges. This article explores how Next Analytics for Excel overcomes the 6 major obstacles.
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), [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In this week’s Web Analytics TV with Avinash and Nick, Lisa C asked if it was possible to see a trend report for the top landing pages from SEO. Although Avinash agreed “I want this!”, he said this is one of those reports that is only possible through the API today. Since Next Analytics has [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]