Google Analytics in Excel · Get Started by Authorizing Data Access 2 Preparing For Your First Query 4 Establishing Your First View and Segment 5 Run The Query and Get Fresh Data

Google Analytics in Excel

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Get Started by Authorizing Data Access 2

Preparing For Your First Query 4

Establishing Your First View and Segment 5

Run The Query and Get Fresh Data 6

Create a Query 7

Choose a Web View 8

Choose a Segment (To Filter the Data On Your Report) 9

Change the Date Range 10

Choose Metrics and Dimensions (Fields) 12

Save Query Data In a Worksheet 14

How To Edit a Previously Built Query 14

How to Create a Custom “dynamic” Segment 15

How to Create a Google Filter 19

How to Build a Report that shows Multiple Web Views 20

How (and why) to Add a Time Dimension 22



Get Started by Authorizing Data Access Perform this step if this is your first time, or if you get a security error (400, 401) from Google, or if you want to change the Google Login. The Google Login controls which Web Accounts, Views, and Google-based custom segments you will see. On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. Authorize Data Access

Click Test Authorizations button.

Wait for it to complete its test.



Click Authorize Google Analytics button. Switch to your browser and follow the prompts If you have multiple Google Accounts, you will see the something that resembles the following screen in your browser (your own Google accounts will show there).

Pick the one that has access to the Google Analytics data you wan to use. Give permission to NEXT-ANALYTICS (below).



Preparing For Your First Query A query is a request to Google Analytics data servers. You specify your Web View, Segment, a Date Range, and Dimensions and Metrics. When you submit these to Google, it sends back a block of data which are placed into a worksheet after some internal processing. If you are building a scorecard or a dashboard, you will probably have more than one query. In fact, some dashboards might have twenty or more queries. So, have a plan for which worksheets are going to contain the data for each query. Being organized early will help you as your dashboard grows in sophistication. At the of each query you create, use the chapter entitled Save Query Data In a Worksheet to carefully manage where the data is placed. After opening an existing workbook, or an empty one, you’ll be establishing your default View and choosing Segment. After that, you can adjust the Date Range (e.g. LastCalendar 1 month). Then you will probably choose some metrics and maybe a dimension or two. Any of these steps can be followed by Running the Query to get a preview of the data and seeing what defaults NEXT-ANALYTICS software is using. Are you ready to start? Start with a new workbook, or if someone has provided one to you, open it and Refresh the Data.

Open a Empty Workbook If you don’t have an Excel spreadsheet with predefined queries in it, you can start from an empty workbook. If this is the case, skip to Establishing View and Segment.

Open a Workbook With Existing Queries If you want to see your data in a pre-built dashboard, then open it. If you want to start with one of our free-sample dashboards, you can download the following file and extract the spreadsheets that are in it. Open any one of them. http://www.nextanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dashboards-ga-only-2014-12-23.zip. After you extract the contents of that file, you will see over forty different spreadsheet files. Open one of them.

http://www.nextanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dashboards-ga-only-2014-12-23.zip

http://www.nextanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dashboards-ga-only-2014-12-23.zip



Establishing Your First View and Segment NEXT-ANALYTICS software will use any values stored within the open workbook, if they exist. You can override them using the following operations:

If you choose a Web View, it becomes the View for the next data refresh for all the queries in that workbook. When you get fresh data, it establishes your choice of View as the default for future queries that you create.

If you choose a Segment, it will become the segment for the Get Fresh Data. It

also gets stored with that worbkook.

When you change Dimensions, Metrics or Date Range, be sure to check tha the Chart’s Data Range match the new data results after a query has been refreshed.



Run The Query and Get Fresh Data On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. NEXT Analytics Addin -> “Get Fresh Data”

Your data will appear in the workbook after a few seconds of data downloading and processing.



Create a Query If you haven’t already, then perform the steps in Authorize Data Access. This is important if:

1. this is your first time, or 2. if you have been getting a error from Google when you attempt a data

refresh, or 3. if you want to change the Google Login to access to your Views and custom

segments. After that, come back to this chapter and follow the steps below. To create a query, start with an empty workbook. If you have a pre-existing query that you want to make changes to, then follow these steps: Edit a Previously Built Query. Then:

1. Choose the Web View 2. Choose the Segment 3. Choose a Date Range 4. Choose Metrics and Dimensions (Fields) 5. See Your Data

Any of the foregoing operations will change the values in all the queries in the open workbook. This may not be what you want, especially if you are working with multiple View IDs, or multiple Segments. If you subsequently use File Save, your changes will be saved with that workbook.

This is why we recommend you work from an empty workbook when you are creating queries. (see How To Create a Query)

And, it’s also why we recommend that you cut/paste script to an empty

workbook, if you are editing it. After you’ve made your changes, then copy/paste it back into the original workbook. (see: Edit a Previously Built Query.)

After you are satisified with your results, you can Transfer the Results into another workbook. If you’re unsure how to do this, follow the steps in How To Edit a Previously Built Query



Choose a Web View On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. NEXT Analytics Addin -> Google Analytics -> View…

Select a Web Account. Views will show underneath.

Select a view then click Save. Save will store your choice in the current workbook. If you click Get Fresh Data, then your choice will become your new default value for future queries, even in a different workbook.



Choose a Segment (To Filter the Data On Your Report) On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. NEXT Analytics Addin -> Google Analytics -> Segment…

Select a Segment. Your custom segments will be there in the list, towards the bottom.

Save will store your choice in the current workbook. If you click Get Fresh Data, then your choice will become your new default value for future queries, even in a different workbook.



Change the Date Range NEXT-ANALYTICS software will automatically adjust the ranges of time in your query. On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. NEXT Analytics Addin -> Google Analytics -> Change Date Range…

This is the“Choose the Date Range” dialog box.



Past calculates from yesterday backwards Last Calendar searches for the most recent full calendar period and then works backwards from there. Period To Date calculates to the start of the period and counts forward to include days up to and including yesterday. This is similar to expressions like “month to date”, “week to date” and “year to date”. NEXT-ANALYTICS can automatically also fetch the previous periods that match.

“Previous Period” will automatically fetch a matching previous period. This varies depending on the date unit you chose. For example, if you choose “month” it will fetch the previous month.

You can alternately choose “Same period year ago.”

“Put both periods in the report” will add a new column titled “Period” to your data, and you will be able to plot using this column.

If your web site experiences data sampling by Google Analytics, then check Avoid Data Sampling. If you have a specific range of dates, one that doesn’t automatically adjust, then choose Custom Date Range.

If you examine the worksheet that ends with the name _actions, you will see your choices. You can edit these directly, as well as copy/paste it into other workbooks which have an _actions worksheet.



Choose Metrics and Dimensions (Fields) On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. NEXT Analytics Addin -> Google Analytics -> Fields …

Click the drop down arrow (red arrow)



The dimensions and metrics for that category are shown in the list below. DOUBLE CLICK an item to add it. To remove an item, double click in the smaller list. Repeat until you have the dimensions and metrics that interest you. Google Analytics lets you build custom reports using combinations of dimensions and metrics.

You can combine up to seven dimensions and ten metrics together.

Many combinations are supported, but not all.

You are allowed to mix dimensions and metrics from different categories, except that not all combinations are supported by Google. When in doubt, try it. If it comes back with an error 403, it's not supported.

See the following URL for a complete list of dimensions and metrics: http://www.nextanalytics.com/google-analytics-metadata/

http://www.nextanalytics.com/google-analytics-metadata/



Save Query Data In a Worksheet If you are merging multiple queries into one workbook, you should carefully manage where the data gets placed. To keep things simple, we recommend that each query write to its own worksheet, but this is not mandatory if you don’t mind being very careful in the values you supply in the following parameters to your script.

Change the Target Worksheet You can change where the data is written to. The software will automatically create that worksheet if it doesn’t already exist. In the following example, it’s written to Sheet1. You can change this to any valid worksheet name simply by editing the text in the cell. prompt,add,[DATA_SHEET_NAME],Sheet1

Change the Top Left The next two script commands tell NEXT-ANALYTICS the row and column to use for the top left corner of the data. You can change it to any valid number for Excel rows and columns.

prompt,add,[TOP_ROW],1

prompt,add,[TOP_LEFT],1

Change the Bottom Right The next two script commands indicate the bottom row, and the right most column to write to. If you put -1, it means you don’t know how many rows or columns will be returned. With a -1, it will write as much as needed. If you want to fix it in size, put the row number and column of the bottom right. The software won’t overwrite outside this boundary.

prompt,add,[BOTTOM_ROW],-1

prompt,add,[BOTTOM_RIGHT],-1

Overwrite of Cells In Target Worksheet If you examine the SaveInWorksheet2 command itself, you’ll notice the word overwrite. If you change this to no-overwrite, the softare won’t erase the data in the target worksheet.

How To Edit a Previously Built Query



Locate the worksheet who’s name ends in “_actions”. There can be many of them, and they might be hidden.

1. Select the cells with the script commands in them. Then click “edit/copy”.

2. Create and switch to an empty workbook

3. Paste the script into any worksheet

4. Rename that worksheet to “_actions”.

5. Open any dialog box

a. Choose the Web View b. Choose the Segment c. Choose a Date Range d. Choose Metrics and Dimensions (Fields) e. See Your Data

After you have finalized your changes, edit/copy the changed script back to the original place in the original workbook. You can selectively move lines of text, you don’t need to transfer the whole script. After that, refresh the data in the original workbook. You can inspect any charts to see that they are showing all of the new data. You can identify where the data is located by referring to the information in Save Query Data In a Worksheet. We do not recommend that you try to adapt the dashboards from the NEXT-ANALYTICS Free Samples. They were hand-built and often use complex structures that are outside the scope of the simple editing technique we are teaching in this document.

How to Create a Custom “dynamic” Segment Google provides an assortment of useful segments. But many people, specially power users who are using an Excel Addin for their Google Analytics, wish to create custom segments for unique business solutions. Most people use the Google Analytics web browser user interface to build their segments. The problem with this approach is that the segment becomes attached to the user’s Google Login. When they deploy the workbook to another Google user, the segment isn’t available to that new user, and they encounter a security error.



NEXT-ANALYTICS has a way for you to dynamically create a segment each time you refresh a report. The command to create it is stored with the query, and this makes it portable to any Google Login, Web account, or View. On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. NEXT Analytics Addin -> Google Analytics -> Create a Segment…

The following dialog box is shown. As examples, we’ve added a dimension query and a metric query.



Dimension fields are tested using text operators. Regex expressions are available and the test is match or not-match. Metric queries are tested using numeric operators.



When you save your dynamic segment, the following script would be generated:

Since the command to create the segment is embedded in the script, it is now portable to any Google Login, Web Property or View. Please note that the comparison operators are URL encoded and there’s either a comma or a semi-colon between multiple entries, depending if you chose AND or OR. We recommend that you build these with the UI and copy/paste your modifications. You can also take advantage of the fact that the scripting language is in plain text, so you can copy/paste it from this workbook into other workbooks. The result is that your segment or filter definition becomes extremely portable and re-usable.



How to Create a Google Filter You can also dynamically create Google Filters. The benefit of using Filters over Segments is dependant on what Google implements. At the time of writing, segments are known to affect the entire data set, before your query is excecuted. In contrast, Filters are applied after the query has been executed, against the values in the result data set. Depending on your solution, you may want to use one or the other. For more detail, look for up-to-date articles at google.com.

Filters employ an almost identical user interface as the Create Segment dialog box.



How to Build a Report that shows Multiple Web Views On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. The following popup menu will appear. Look for NEXT Analytics Addin then Edit Google Analytics choose Multiple Views…

You will see a dialog box that shows all the Web Accounts that are available to your Google Login. When you click on one of them, its Profile Views will show underneath. You can double-click on a view to add it to your report.

You can add as many profiles as you want. After selecting all of the desired Google Analytics Profile Views, click the Save button. If you haven’t already, refresh the data, and you will see individual profile Names and IDs in the worksheet. A profile is another name for View.



You can see the following “code” on your actions worksheet. Notice the part in yellow, that has the View Ids, also known as Profile Ids.

To get a good looking chart with the Excel Chart Wizard, you should remove column B, named Profile ID, scroll down until you can see the line which says “ImportDataFiles”. You will need insert a row at Row 13, following this ImportDataFiles command.

Copy / Paste the following line of text into the blank line:

RemoveColumns,,”Profile ID”

The next time you click Refresh Data, that Profile ID column won’t be in the worksheet.



How (and why) to Add a Time Dimension You can use the Time Dimension when you seeking a chart or pivot table that shows values for each unit of time over a long time range.

To get the dates along the chart axis, you choose a dimension from the Time dimension. In the foregoing example, the field “Date” was chosen. You have other choices:

Name Description API Name Date The date of the session formatted as YYYYMMDD. ga:date Day Index

Index for each day in the specified date range. Index for the first day (i.e., start-date) in the date range is 0, 1 for the second day, and so on.

ga:nthDay

Day of the month

The day of the month. A two-digit number from 01 to 31.

ga:day

Day of Week Name

The name of the day of the week (in English). ga:dayOfWeekName

Day of Week

The day of the week. A one-digit number from 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday).

ga:dayOfWeek

Hour Index

Index for each hour in the specified date range. Index for the first hour of first day (i.e., start-date) in the date range is 0, 1 for the next hour, and so on.

ga:nthHour

Hour of Day

Combined values of ga:date and ga:hour. ga:dateHour

Hour A two-digit hour of the day ranging from 00-23 in the timezone configured for the account. This value is also corrected for daylight savings time, adhering to all local rules for daylight savings time. If your timezone follows daylight savings time, there will be an apparent bump in the number of sessions during the change-over hour (e.g. between 1:00 and 2:00) for the day per year when that hour repeats.

ga:hour



A corresponding hour with zero sessions will occur at the opposite changeover. (Google Analytics does not track user time more precisely than hours.)

ISO Week of ISO Year

Combined values of ga:isoYear and ga:isoWeek. ga:isoYearIsoWeek

ISO Week of the Year

The ISO week number, where each week starts with a Monday. Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date. ga:isoWeek should only be used with ga:isoYear since ga:year represents gregorian calendar.

ga:isoWeek

ISO Year

The ISO year of the session. Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date. ga:isoYear should only be used with ga:isoWeek since ga:week represents gregorian calendar.

ga:isoYear

Minute Index

Index for each minute in the specified date range. Index for the first minute of first day (i.e., start-date) in the date range is 0, 1 for the next minute, and so on.

ga:nthMinute

Minute Returns the minute in the hour. The possible values are between 00 and 59.

ga:minute

Month Index

Index for each month in the specified date range. Index for the first month in the date range is 0, 1 for the second month, and so on. The index corresponds to month entries.

ga:nthMonth

Month of the year

The month of the session. A two digit integer from 01 to 12.

ga:month

Month of Year

Combined values of ga:year and ga:month. ga:yearMonth

Week Index

Index for each week in the specified date range. Index for the first week in the date range is 0, 1 for the second week, and so on. The index corresponds to week entries.

ga:nthWeek

Week of the Year

The week of the session. A two-digit number from 01 to 53. Each week starts on Sunday.

ga:week

Week of Year

Combined values of ga:year and ga:week. ga:yearWeek

Year The year of the session. A four-digit year from 2005 to the current year.

ga:year



On a Mac, press the Control key and Click a worksheet cell. On Windows, right-click a cell. The following popup menu will appear. Navigate to NEXT Analytics Addin and choose Fields….

Click on the drop down list until you can select Time. In the list below, double-click on the row that says Date. This will get you a daily report. If you wanted months, you’d click one of the Month dimensions,



This instructs Google Analytics to send you day by day data. Click the Save/Exit or the Data Refresh then Save/Exit. If you examine the _actions worksheet, you’ll see that ga:date was added.

If you haven’t already, refresh the data, and you will see individual days in the worksheet.

You will notice that the Date column has numbers in it! This is because Excel parsed them as Excel dates. When Excel gets the dates from Google Analytics, it converts them into numbers. As the Excel user, you need to request that Excel format them as dates, as per the image below. Click the date column, then click the Number format to Date.



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Google Analytics in Excel · Get Started by Authorizing Data Access 2 Preparing For Your First Query 4 Establishing Your First View and Segment 5 Run The Query and Get Fresh Data