You don’t need to be Houdini to escape the limitations of your Analytics Service.
You just need NEXT Analytics Free or PRO Excel Addin.
Although this works equally well for PIWIK , consider this example using Google Analytics.
NEXT Analytics can create a cohort much more powerful than Google Analytics, even using Google Analytics’ own data.
To demonstrate, let’s start with a trivial query: Country by Date with the metric of Users. As a cohort, we’d like to see the date on the column axis, similar to a pivot table or crosstab.
If you examine the workbook, you will see a worksheet with script on it. Notice that it has a filename embedded in it.
Let’s open that file to ensure the column orders are just as we expect them to be:
You’ll see that Country is column zero, Date is column one, and the metric User is Column two. FYI, the column numbers start at zero, not one.
Now, look carefully at the script.
You’ll see row 20 has a zero. That’s referring to the first column in the file. Row 21 has a 1, that’s referring to the second column in the file. Row 22 has a 2, and that’s referring to the third column in the file. In row 19, you’ll see that it has suggested a name of Country, which can be changed if you want.
When the command on row 24 executes, it creates a cohort of those two dimensions and one metric, as shown below.
If you are comfortable editing script, you can substitute any of the hundreds of Google Analytics Dimensions in row 7, and you can change the metric in row 8.
This is far superior to what Google Analytics offers you, and this blog article has only touched on the power of NEXT Analytics cohorts.
This technique works equally well for other data sources.
NEXT Analytics offers free software that downloads data, in addition to a wide variety of other data:
- Google Analytics,
- PIWIK data,
And it also does social, as well as database queries and file imports…
- Facebook,
- Instagram,
- Twitter,
- YouTube,
- SQL databases (local and cloud),
- Import Data Files