An easier way to get Google Analytics email reports

How to set up weekly email reports from your GA account with traffic & conversion summary, predictions and insights

TL;DR: Here’s the link for an app that does it for you.

I spend a lot of my time working with Google Analytics. I measure visitors of an e-commerce website that sells prints, a community blog, a Kickstarter page for when my campaign was live and multiple web properties owned by the start up I co-founded. It’s a real hassle to try and keep up with all that data, let alone making sense of it.

I thought that my problem was unique to serial webmasters, however it turns out that making sense of Google Analytics can be a challenge, even for a casual blogger. Seeing the default graph of visitors over time doesn’t provide as much value as one might think. Real-time reporting surely is exciting, but not very insightful. A proper way to get an answer to “What should I do with my website next?” question can only be found by digging through numerous GA views, often importing the data into a spreadsheet and processing it further. Only then you may have some answers.

Email reporting — spending less time digging through data.

A friend once brought up email reporting as a possible solution. He owns a medium-sized blog where he posts reviews of vintage camera lenses and street photography advice. It turns out that Google Analytics provides email reports that could potentially cut down on the time spent digging through data on the daily basis.

Perhaps I could do better if I concentrate on building content, code and design for my websites and let the data get to me, instead of seeking it out? At least that’s what I hoped the email reporting would do: give me the numbers every week or so. I’ve never found the constant stream of traffic reports that useful anyways.

The dream: simple, usable email reporting.

Google Analytics’ proprietary email reporting: not very simple, not very valuable.

Everything sounded fantastic at the start. Google is an all-powerful tech giant that can whip out amazing software. I’ve got a decade’s worth of programming experience & industry know-how. This is just an email report — should be super-easy! Right?

No. First of all, Google has been revamping its Analytics software for the past few years practically non-stop. Hence finding good instructions with correct screenshots on the web is a challenge. After some digging it became evident that I’d have to create a custom dashboard that can then be sent as a PDF attachment to my email at a frequency of my choosing. Making such dashboard is a lot of work, and if it isn’t properly designed to cater to my application, I’ll be getting misleading reports, every time. Which isn’t good.

I have to say that PDF reports look great with the graphics and all, although I’d have to wait for them to download and open in a very mobile un-friendly way: zoom, scroll, zoom, scroll…

Long story short, GA email reporting can be an incredibly powerful feature, but to set it up correctly you’d have to do a data requirements inventory on your web property and get it right. Which isn’t simple.

An easier, better way to get Google Analytics email reports.