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 [...]

This is the Microsoft Excel report element you’ve always wanted – showing a map of the world, highlighted to show where your website visitors come from. It is included in this week’s free dashboard, and Next Analytics will automatically create and update it. To learn more about the dashboard, see our Product pages. In this [...]

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 Excel dashboard, we look at website landing pages – which ones are your most effective and how different visitor groups treat them. Four major segments are shown side-by-side: direct traffic, visits from search engines, visits from referring web sites, and clicks from paid advertising. Leveraging Excel’s conditional formatting makes it easy to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]