This is an older, technical article that shows how to manually configure a specific NEXT Analytics report. Things are a LOT easier with the latest release of NEXT; see the new article on this topic: Multiple Websites, Multiple Segments, One Google Analytics Report
A number of people need to keep track of multiple web properties – their blog, support site, maybe a social media presence and their main web site. They may even have a series of related websites that they want to track independently. This week’s free Excel dashboard shows just how easily Next Analytics lets you refresh and display multiple metrics from multiple web sites all on one worksheet.
Next Analytics workbooks can be completely driven by script commands, with multiple queries performed in sequence. In most of our dashboards and reports, these queries are pulling various metrics from a single Google Analytics profile, allowing us to show different performance analytics of the site on a single report. Since the query command includes variables for the account, password and profile ID, successive queries can use different credentials to query profiles that aren’t available to a single account. In the MultiSite Scorecard, we repeat the same query and analysis for 6 different website profiles. This makes it a great example to ‘take apart’.
The script is laid out with a simple repetition pattern – each web site is processed in sequence, starting with the query, a bit of analysis, and finishing up by writing the results to a ‘data’ worksheet. If you compare the groupings of commands and look at the differences, you’ll see how little it takes to query multiple websites for a single report.
To start, the profile ID and website name are copied from a data-entry row into a query command and a labelling command, respectively. The query and subsequent import commands write to, and read from, the same file. The results of the analytics are labelled with a unique Page Caption, and that page is saved in the “MultiSite_data” worksheet at a specific location.
This last command, uiSaveInWorksheet includes the ability to overwrite (clears the entire worksheet) or not (“nooverwrite”), so the first instance of the command clears the sheet and the rest simply append to it. You will also notice that the target location numbers are changing with the first result set writing to row 1, column 1, and the second result set writing to row 11, column 1. Since there are only 8 rows in each result set, this allows all the results to be saved to a common worksheet, with following sets written to rows 21, 31, 41 and 51 in a similar fashion.
The scorecard, like all our free dashboards, uses simple cell references to this common data page for the charts and metric display. It is all straightforward Excel presentation and formatting.
Although this example uses a common GA account and password, it is done through simple cell references to the data entry block at the top of the sheet; it would be a simple matter to modify the uiGetGoogleAnalyticsData commands to use different values as needed.
Now you can see how easy it is to query multiple Google Analytics profiles and generate a single report with their results. It should also be obvious that each query could be different, so you could be summarizing hot articles in the blog, downloads from the main site, and new questions on the support site. With version 3, you’ll soon be able to include Twitter, Facebook and other queries along with your website metrics.