The Logan Tod Blog

While all web analytics tools offer a range of reports in a variety of formats, sometimes you just need to get the data into Excel so that you can present the data you need in the user-accessible format you find best.  This can be for standard performance reporting or just data exploration.  Most of the paid-for tools offer an Excel plug-in for extracting data into Excel with some variation in the quality of tool – these include HBX ReportBuilder, SiteCatalyst ReportBuilder, WebTrends SmartReports, SiteStat OfficeLink, etc.

Unfortunately, thus far, Google has not released a plug-in that operates with Google Analytics.  A number of companies have stepped forward to fill this gap, using the GA API to develop and release their own version of a method to extract data from GA into Excel.  These work in a variety of ways (not all of them work exclusively as an Excel plug-in) with some being paid solutions, some open source and others just instructions for how to go about doing it yourself.  A fairly complete list of GA apps can be found at Google Analytics Labs or Brian Clifton has a detailed description of various techniques in chapter 12 of the second edition of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

We build a lot of dashboards at Logan Tod, enabling our clients to have all the information they need for performance reporting and top line performance diagnosis at their fingertips.  These are usually built in Excel meaning the ability to easily extract large chunks of data from web analytics tools (and other data sources) into Excel is critical for us.  Thus far, no solution appears to meet my needs of containing all GA API features and have a very user friendly UI (I don’t want a solution just for me, I want a solution that anyone non techy can use).  We are continuing to define the precise requirements for such a tool but for anyone that wants to make me a very happy analyst, my current list of requirements is listed below:

• Login access to ensure you can only access the accounts you know email/password to
• Account and profile selection
• Ability to select any dimensions and metrics that is available in GA
  • This would preferably be in collapsible list format, as the segmentation and custom report builders in GA (unless you can design something better)
• Ability to select and create segments
  • Can select predefined segments from the selected profile
  • Can create dynamic segments whether this is a single or multiple parameters
• Ability to select if a variable is taken from an Excel cell or is hard coded
• Variables which would need to be selectable within an Excel cell are
  • Account
  • Profile
  • Dates
  • Segment Name (pre-defined)
  • Segment filter (pre-define dimension but can enter value for dimension)
  • Filters
• Copy/paste inside Excel to run same set of queries for a different group of settings
  • This allows you to set up the one set of queries and then reuse (e.g. the same set of metrics for multiple segments)
  • Paste both absolute and relative to excel cells
• Select if want to show headings or the first column within the Excel report
  • Sometimes you need these details, sometimes you need them removed
• Ability to set filters using the full list of condition matching from within GA e.g. matches, doesn’t contain, greater than, regular expression
• Useful error checking (metrics/dimensions greyed out if that combination won’t work)
• Set date ranges e.g. last week, last month
• Ability to select a range of requests and change date range, profile, account, etc on all in one go

No tool that I have seen or used, including all of the equivalent solutions from other web analytics tools, meets this complete list of requirements.  This is not to say they are not good tools that get the job done, just that I am being quite picky and nothing is brilliant in my eyes as yet.  Some of the commonly mentioned tools that are delivering good results for people include:

• Excellent Analytics has not yet been upgraded to match the most recent GA API  although they are working on this
• Tatvic doesn’t currently have the dimension/metric selection in a collapsible list format, it is difficult to find the right metrics for what you want to do
• Shufflepoint didn’t feel as integrated with Excel as previous experiences with web analytics plug-ins although I am chatting to them further this week

My fingers remain crossed that this will all be rectified in the near future and there will be at least one solution (most likely multiple with differing features) that enables everyone to easily get data from GA to Excel.  I will provide an update if I do discover a tool that meets all or most of my list of requirements and am happy to talk to anyone developing Excel tools regarding this list.