Introduction

Google Analytics and AdWords are essential marketing and sales tools. They can be integrated with the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel with the Google Data API. Data Big Bang’s Nicolas Papagna has developed an Excel add-on which can be downloaded here. This plugin enables Excel users to quickly retrieve Google Analytics data using the available Google Analytics metrics, and dimensions, and may also be sorted by the user’s criteria. One of the advantages of our solution is that Excel accesses the Google Analytics API directly instead of accessing it thru Data Big Bang server. Other solutions need access to your information which this exposes your private data to third parties.

Installation and Usage

Download GoogleAnalyticsToExcel.AddInSetup_1.0.20.0.exe. Install it. Run Microsoft Excel. Configure your Google credentials by clicking on “Settings” under the “Google Analytics to Excel Addin” ribbon tab. Customize your query and retrieve your Google Analytics data by clicking “Query Google Analytics” button.

Development Notes

Data Big Bang’s research team has also developed an OData web service that can be consumed using applications such as PowerPivot, Tableau and LINQPad. This web service doesn’t require any add-ons. However, since unfortunately neither PowerPivot nor Tableau offer query builders to interact with OData providers, users must know how to craft the OData URL query themselves. The most interesting part of this project was developing a Google Data Protocol to Open Data Protocol .NET class that offers an IQueryable interface to convert LINQ queries to GData. LINQ queries add a lot of expressive power beyond GData.

See Also