4 Steps to Automate Google Analytics Reports With Google Sheets Add-On
Want to export specific data points from Google Analytics to Excel?
Need to setup scheduled Analytics reports?
How about running reports for multiple websites all at the same time?
If you don’t have access to fancy Business Intelligence dashboards or the resources to work with the Google Analytics API, keep reading…
With Google Sheets you can get the Google Analytics Add-on and setup and run your own customized reports pulling almost any data point you need. Once you have setup your report, you can then schedule it and start automating your Analytics reports.
The following is a step-by-step guide to configure the Google Analytics Add-on with Google Spreadsheets.
Step 1 – Get the Analytics Add-on
Go to your Google Spreadsheet and click on “Add-ons” on the navigation at the top. Search for Google Analytics and install it.
Step 2 – Create New Report
Click on “Add-ons” > “Google Analytics” > “Create new report” and then allow the request for permission it will ask for. Once you accept, you will see a new right-side panel appear where you can 1) Name Your Report 2) Select Account Information and 3) Choose Metrics and Dimensions.
For creating a monthly report, you can add metrics and dimensions depending on what you want to measure. Some basic examples would be as follows:
Metrics – what you want to measure
– ga:sessions
– ga:goal1Completions (for specific goal conversions)
– ga:itemRevenue (for tracking ecommerce revenues)
Dimensions – how to segment the data, usually time and traffic source or medium
– ga:year
– ga:month
– ga:medium
Once you hit “Create report”, you should see something like this:
For the time dimension, you can look back by a number of days (“Last N days”) or use a specific data range with the “Start Date” and “End Date” if you want to look at a month.
Step 3 – Run Report
Once you have your report configured, you simply need to go to “Add-ons” > “Google Analytics” > “Run report”. This will generate a new sheet populated with your raw data (below) organized neatly by your dimensions and metrics. Now, you can easily be export this data to Excel and manipulate with pivot tables.
Step 4 – Schedule Report
Now that you have your report configuration defined, you can schedule the report to run automatically (“Add-ons” > “Google Analytics” > “Schedule Reports”) on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
