Get Your Google Analytics Data into Excel
I like to analyse stuff. Dig and poke around the bits of data that the business generates, looking for new insights. For our various web sites, we use Google Analytics, and I have been generally happy with the first-level analysis available through the web interface, but I keep running into the same brick wall – when I see something of specific interest, I can’t drill down far enough to understand what happened.
When the Google Analytics Data API was released, I saw this as an opportunity to get at the data underlying those high level reports, and see the actual pages a specific visitor looked at. There are several tools available to do this, some of which are free, but they all seemed to make the process more difficult than it needed to be or suffer from the same aggregation-only reporting paradigm. Enter Pivot Express [now called Nextanalytics for Excel].
Available as a free web site [no longer available, sorry] or as an inexpensive Excel add-in, this product can take your data and perform quick ‘pivot’ and other analytic functions, and we’ve added a Google Analytics query to both products that allows you to grab the detailed data from Google, pivot it by date or other selected dimension and dump it straight into Excel where you can do whatever you want with it.
The Excel add-in allows you to save your queries and re-run them on demand, picking the most recent time periods automatically (Past 7 days, for example). Enough fiddling with dropdowns and selection boxes, picking dates and then trying to format the results by date or country or referring site or what-have-you. No more getting aggregates when I want details. Gotta love it!
Try it yourself at www.nextanalytics.com
