NEXT Google Analytics User Guide This document describes the capabilities of NEXT Analytics v5.1 to retrieve data from Google Analytics directly into your spreadsheet file. Table of Contents Adding a Google Analytics Query... 2 Default Google Analytics Account/Profile... 2 NEXT Google Analytics Query Menus... 4 Accounts/Profiles... 5 Fields Dimensions and Metrics... 6 Dates Rolling Period, Sub-Period, Custom... 7 By Rolling Period... 8 By Each Sub-Period... 9 By Custom Dates... 11 Filter Only Download What You Want... 11 Segment... 12 Sort Download The Top 10... 14 GA Options Permitting Sampled Data... 15
Adding a Google Analytics Query Within NEXT, from the Add Query tab, select the Google Analytics button to begin. You will be asked to name the query; this name will be used in the worksheets created for the query actions and data. NEXT allows you to have multiple queries in a workbook, so these names will be used to identify and edit individual queries later. Default Google Analytics Account/Profile When you make your first Google Analytics query with NEXT, it will immediately ask for you to sign in to the Google email that you use for accessing Google Analytics. After you allow access, you will be promoted to select a default Google Analytics account/profile. These defaults are used when working with a generic example, such as those supplied by NEXT.
NEXT Google Analytics Query Menus In NEXT v5.1, all of the Google Analytics query options are available from tabs below the Google Analytics button. As you make selections, you can try out the query by clicking the Refresh Data! menu item.
Accounts/Profiles Multiple Google email IDs On the Accounts/Profiles tab, you can select a Google ID the email address you sign in with. If you want to use multiple email addresses, you can manage the selections using the Add and Delete buttons. Dynamic list of accounts and profiles When you select the Google ID, a list of GA Accounts will appear, and for each GA Account, a list of GA Profiles. Google Analytics queries always use GA Profiles, so pick the profile you want for the query. Changing the default profile Note that you can change the default profile by clicking the Make Default button.
More than one profile in a report (optional) As a powerful extension over typical GA reporting, you can have more than one profile on your report. Just select a profile and click the Add Profile button; you will see a list being built. When you later refresh your query, NEXT will generate columns in your results with the profile names and profile ID numbers. This lets you easily compare different profiles to each other. Fields Dimensions and Metrics NEXT allows you to select up to ten dimensions and seven metrics at once while building a query -- the maximum allowed by the Google Analytics API. NEXT groups the dimensions for convenience. Select a category, and the detail items will appear. Click on items and they are moved into the respective list box on the right. Items in the list box can be re-arranged or removed by dragging them back.
Google doesn t allow all possible combinations. For that reason, if you see a field that s crossed out and gray, it s because the rules don t support the combination. Sometimes a combination doesn t work that we didn t know about, and in these cases, you ll get an error from the query, most likely Error 400 Bad Request. Dates Rolling Period, Sub-Period, Custom While building a Google Analytics query, you are able to specify the date range that the query results will be returned. N.b. this is not the place to actually choose what shows on the report that task is done on the Fields tab and there is a Date dimension for that purpose. This tab, instead, filters the data so that only dates in the range you specify are returned by Google. The Date tab is a great place for NEXT to automate what you have to do with other analytics tools and Google s web interface. Your choices are divided into three categories: Rolling Period, Sub Period, and Custom.
By Rolling Period The rolling period tab allows you to design GA queries that do not need to be adjusted on each new reporting period. Simply specify the type of data you want and what kind of period. The key ones to understand are these: Past will be a time period starting from yesterday, working backwards in time. LastCalendar will look for a whole period of the unit you selected (e.g. the last whole month). This is convenient if are building a report for the previous calendar period. ToDate is gives you the sum of the values up to and including yesterday for the unit you selected (e.g. month to date). For example, you could select Past 1 Months to get the most recent month of data, ending yesterday. Previous period Selecting Previous period time shifts your query back by one whole period. If you have said Past 1 Month, it actually changes the query to one month earlier than that. Year ago period Notice that there s also a checkbox for Same Period Year Ago. This will provide a date range one year prior to the selections, and is useful to compare year-over-year change. Previous and current periods If you also put a check on Both periods:... then it will get both the selected period, as well as the one previous to that, on the same report. It will create a new data column identifying the selected and previous periods. For example, the following choices ( Previous and Both checked) (as below):
Will give you: Which can easily be pivoted to show: So, in conclusion, the combination of those two checkboxes can be quite useful when producing a report which must change automatically each time period and yet still provide comparative numbers for current period and the prior period. By Each Sub-Period This simple dialog hides a tremendous amount of power being added to the GA API. By choosing this option, it will fetch the data day-by-day and automatically join the individual days together. This is extremely effective in reducing the incidence of data sampling when the Google Analytics server decides that your data set is too large to return accurate numbers.
If you use it in conjunction with one of the dimension members on the Fields tab, you can get more accurate rollups of the values in the period you request. For example, you can ask for a month of data. NEXT will go fetch the days for that month and sum them. If you hadn t used the NEXT feature, Google would likely have returned sampled data. This kind of usage pattern won t work if you are using a calculated metric it has to be a metric that can be summed, at least in the current release of NEXT and GA. The dialog has several options: 1. Start from the most recent whole period looks backwards for the last complete period of the type that you chose. If you chose Month, for example, it would look for the last complete month and then work backwards from there. 2. Alternatively, you can request that it works backward from today with Start from the current day. It also allows you to specify what the first day in the period is. If your unit is week, then that s telling NEXT that you want your week to start on day 1, which is Monday in the view of Google Analytics. If you choose Month or Year as your unit, that s tell NEXT that you want it to start on the 1 st day of the month or year.
By Custom Dates The final choice is rigid and inflexible, but easy to understand. This is for those times when you want to query on a specific interval of time. This is probably not a query you are going to refresh in the future. You can pick any date range although note that Google Analytics does not accept future dates. If you need your report to automatically adjust over time, you probably should consider using Rolling Period date option and use the LastCalendar or ToDate choices. That will fetch a period-to-date up to the current date, which is probably what you were looking for. Filter Only Download What You Want Google Analytics allows you to send a filter command prior to it fetching the data from its servers. NEXT software lets you create filters on the fly. This has the benefit of making them portable you design one, and you can re-use it on more than one workbook. Using a GA Filter reduces the amount of data that Google has to send to your computer, so they re always a good idea. Also, because they re done on the fly, the incidence of data sampling is reduced. People often use filtering to remove certain URLs from their analysis. For example, you can ask for the software to bypass anything that contains a certain snippet of text. In the following example, the any Page Path that contains the text /help will be included from the query result set.
You can have more than one filter in effect. If you do, you can indicate if they should all be applied ( AND ) or any of them should be applied ( OR). The more advanced user can use something called Regex, or Regular Expressions, to test whether a row should be included or not. Segment There are two kinds of advanced segments. The first kind are predetermined by Google or pre-defined by you in your Google Analytics web account. These are listed on the Server Segments tab in a dropdown.
These segments can be quite useful. NEXT software lets you choose more than one Segment to include in a report. This lets you compare the results from multiple segments at once. In the following example, the results for six different segments will be returned on the same report.
The other kind of segment is a Dynamic Segment. In many ways, this operates very similar to NEXT Filter tab, but it has a very different result. All rows returned from a Filter will match the filter criteria, but Segments will include entire visit sessions that match the criteria. Both are calculated on the fly, but the Filter is more efficient because it performs a quick filter after the query is done, whereas a Dynamic Advanced Segment must re-process the data to see which visits should be included in the results. You can only have one dynamic segment in effect in a report. Sort Download The Top 10 Sort lets you tell Google which dimensions and metrics you d like to see the data sorted by before it s sent back to you. In conjunction with Maximum Rows, you can use it to eliminate some data that s not interesting to you. For example, the top 10 web pages by pageviews, or top 100 sources by number of visits.
GA Options Permitting Sampled Data Some advanced options can affect how you work with Google Analytics data. This tab lets you change the default settings. Note that NEXT will not include sampled data in your report unless you specifically allow it.