The 8 Alarm Blog

Putting together weekly Web reports for clients can be a cumbersome exercise of importing, exporting, mixing and matching data from analytics solutions like Google Analytics.  The “out-of-the-box” reports never seem to quite combine the precise view that would help marketers monitor and analyze Web traffic.  Plus, it’s difficult for an agency like 8 Alarm Marketing to give clients direct access to data they can review without exposing all the Websites I track via Google Analytics, which only allows access to all Websites I manage, not access by campaign or site.  In a moment of “there’s gotta be a better way,” I Googled “web analytics dashboards” and discovered a souped-up Excel 2007 spreadsheet by Stephane Hamel, a veteran Web analytics professional and member of the Web Analytics Association.

Hamel has released a free Excel Web Analytics Dashboard template that at first glance looks very exciting.  Hamel notes a number of ways to use the spreadsheet that could prove to make life much easier for marketing executives who want to report on Website traffic with more flexibility and precision.  For example:

• Control the information being distributed
• Publish the information in a format people are used to (in either Excel or PDF)
• Avoid granting access to the web analytics tool itself
• Include other sources of data
• Ease “month to month” and “year to year” analysis
• Ease analysis of major segments (such as two countries, two sites, etc.)
• Include the analyst’s comments and evaluation

I’m going to give Hamel’s spreadsheet a spin with high hopes that it may solve a number of the issues of reporting on what is happening on client Websites.