About ten months ago, Google launched add-ons for Docs and Sheets, enabling users to get more functionality out of the products. Similar to how web browser extensions make browsers like Chrome more powerful, add-ons do the same for Google Docs and Sheets.
At launch, there were add-ons for things like printing address labels and name tags, creating a bibliography without leaving Docs, sending customized emails, getting approvals, etc. Now, Google has announced the launch of a Google Analytics add-on, which enables users to more easily get Analytics data into Google sheets for reporting purposes.
“It’s common for Google Analytics users to use spreadsheets to analyze their Google Analytics data or combine it with another data source,” Google’s Philip Walton says. “But exporting your data from Google Analytics to Google Sheets is a manual process, and it can be tedious if you run reports frequently or manage multiple accounts. With the release of Add-ons for Google Sheets, getting your Google Analytics data into Google Sheets has never been easier!”
If this applies to you, you’ll probably want to watch the following six-minute video on the subject to get yourself acquainted with the add-on.
You might also want to watch this longer one about building a dashboard with the add-on:
The add-on enables you to do things like: query and report data from multiple views, compute and display custom calculations, create visualizations and embed them on your site, schedule reports to run and update automatically, and control who can see your data and visualizations with the existing privacy features in Sheets.
To install the add-on, create a new spreadsheet (or open an existing one), then go to Add-ons from the menu bar. You’ll find the Google Analytics add-on in the gallery. Click the “+” to add it, and accept the dialogue that pops up. When it’s installed, a Google Analytics sub-menu will appear in the add-ons menu.
Once you’ve installed the add-on, you can create a report manually or with the report creation tool, which is in the new menu. The tool adds a sidebar to the right side of the screen that lets you look at Analytics account info, and choose dimensions and metrics to query. Then you can create the report and the info will appear in a sheet named “Report Configuration”. Any report you create after that will add a column to the right of the previous report.
“If you look at the values the report creation tool enters into the report configuration sheet, you’ll notice that many of the cells are left blank,” Google says in its documentation. “This is intentional. The tool is meant to help get you started and provide you with the information you might not know off the top of your head. The rest of the fields will need to be entered by you.”
You can also run reports from the new menu. It will run every report with a name by default, but you can exclude reports if you like. You can schedule them to run automatically by selecting the “Schedule Reports” option from the menu.
In addition to the new Google Analytics add-on, Google suggests checking out the Supermetrics and Analytics Canvas add-ons for more advanced business and data-integrated solutions. Both integrate with Google Analytics as well as other services like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Office, etc.
Image via Google
