Google Analytics API

With the release of an API for Google Analytics http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/08/analytics-data-in-excel-through-our-api.html) we are now starting to see the appearance of tools to make use of the API.  A couple of the tools embed plug-ins into Excel giving the ability to run your GA queries directly from Excel and cutting out the whole .CSV export and import process

A couple of Excel plug-ins are available.  Excellent Analytics http://excellentanalytics.com/ works with Excel 2007 and Tatvic http://gaexcelplugin.tatvic.com/ works with both Excel 2007 and Excel 2003. 

I’ve been playing around with Tatvic’s version in recent days.  Once you have registered, downloaded and installed the plug-in you just have to enable it from the Tools | Add-Ins menu option – it shows up as Gaclient.  The toolbar then shows up as Tatvic Google Analytics Excel Plugin in the View | Toolbars menu. 

As a first step click on Login and enter your Google Analytics username and password to connect to your GA account.

Tatvic Google Analytics Excel Plug-in toolbar

 

Tatvic GA login

Once you are logged in then you can start to pull your data from GA into your spreadsheet.  Click Add a new data block to start the query-building dialogue.  The first screen lets you choose from your GA profiles which website you want to analyse, select the time period for the query and decide whether you want the data selected by dates.

You can select up to three Dimensions and several Metrics. Once you have selected these click Submit, choose where on the spreadsheet you want the data to appear – you just need to choose one cell.

The plugin looks to have great potential and we will be testing it over the next few weeks and months to see how it can help in pulling website analytics data for Performance Indicators and generally informing decisions about website updates and management.

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