Excel and Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web-based website tracking tool that will collect data about your website and its users for a wide variety of events, such as website traffic, referring sources, conversions, and much more. Excel, on the other hand, is a spreadsheet-based program that lets you take data from any given source – including Google Analytics – to quantify and understand your results. When you use Excel and Google Analytics in conjunction with one another, you can really begin to reap the full benefits of living in a data-driven world.

First of all, you need to get your Google Analytics data into Excel – preferably in an automatic and easy way. The good news is there are many API products on the market to help you do just that. Free tools such as Analytics Edge allow you to pull in your Google Analytics data into Excel automatically, to anywhere you want in your spreadsheet. This program has no limits on how many queries you can include, and it’s constantly updated in real time. Analytics Edge and the many others out there like it save you time and reduce the risk for mistakes when moving the data manually.

Once your Google Analytics data is in your Excel spreadsheet, you can use standard Excel features and available add-ins to really dive into your data, understand your results, and begin to tailor your marketing to support your goals. By using Excel and Google Analytics data together, you can run a variety of reports, create tables and histograms, and more to give you a clear picture of where your website is and where you want to go. Uses of Excel for your Google Analytics include:

• Simple Calculations – You can utilize this add-in to run reports such as mean, median, and mode to make generalizations about your data. There are many various simple calculations you can program Excel to make, based on your needs.
• Histograms – Simply put, a histogram is a diagram that shows data ranges for a variety of factors. You can use the histogram feature in Excel to rank data points based on where they fall in the range. For example, if you want to categorize where your website gets referrals from, you can categorize and visually represent your results with a histogram.
• Charts, Tables, and Graphs – Data is best understood when it is visually represented. You can use your Data Analysis add-in to create a wide variety of reports that will show you and others on your team your results in a visual and easy-to-understand way.
• Trending & Forecasting – There are also a variety of ways you can use your Data Analysis tool to assess your past data to make assumptions about future results. For instance, if your website traffic grows by a certain percentage every month, Excel can help you predict what your traffic will be like a year from now. You can also use this program to help you forecast sales and other metrics based on past data and trending predictions.

And more! Google Analytics collects and stores an amazing amount of information about your website and its users, and when used with Microsoft Excel to mine your data, the options are nearly endless. When Microsoft Excel and Google Analytics are used together, there is almost nothing you can’t learn about your customers and their behavior.

Ready to learn more about just how much you can do in our world of big data – including how to combine the power of Excel and Google Analytics? The Google Analytics and Excel classes, as well as the Digital Marketing Certificate, offered at Digital Workshop Center, are all designed to give you the understanding of these programs you need to leverage the data you can collect from your website.

Click here to learn more about these courses and how they can transform your marketing efforts by giving you the data you need to make smart decisions about your website and digital marketing campaigns. Contact us with any questions or to register!