Many of our clients use Excel to manage their ad campaigns, visualize marketing performance, and perform complex data analysis. Most analysts use the Google Analytics Export feature to manually export their report data to CSV files. Then they import the CSV file into Excel. No longer! Now, with the Google Analytics API you can bypass this manual step and export Google Analytics data directly from within Excel! Once you've set it up, there's no need to visit the Analytics reports to view data in Excel.

Thanks to a variety of developers, here are four solutions that can transform you from a reporting monkey to an analysis ninja (as Avinash would say).

• VBA Macros - The simplest solution of them all. Mikael Thuneberg's page explains how to make API requests directly from Excel using VBA Scripts and includes a pre-built Excel worksheet to get you started.
  
  
• The Tatvic Excel Plugin - Another easy-to-use plugin for Windows users that supports both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007. To get started you download the plugin then register to use the tool. Its simple UI helps you build complex queries and get data from Analytics right into your Excel worksheet.
  
  
  Tatvic's Plugin Query Builder
  
  
• Excellent Analytics - Is an open-source initiative by Mark Red and Dropit. This Excel 2007 plugin works on Vista/XP and comes with a query builder to help you create Google Analytics queries and pull data right into Excel. Webanalytics.info put together a great step by step tutorial to get started using this plugin.
  
  
  Excellent Analytic's Query Builder Interface
  
  
• ShufflePoint - Works somewhat differently than the solutions above. ShufflePoint has developed a query language that works with the Google Analytics API to achieve common tasks, such as defining the last 30 days as a date range. One then uses this language to construct an Analytics Data Export API query either by navigating to a URL within Excel, or by using their web-based query builder, then importing this data into Excel. This process allows the ShufflePoint solution to work across most versions of Excel, as well as Powerpoint, and iGoogle gadgets.
  
  
  Shufflepoint's Web Based Query Builder
  

We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team