Analytics Edge has everything you need to export your Google Analytics/Universal Analytics data to Excel, Google Sheets or CSV files. This article shows how you can do it using the new Analytics Edge Desktop App, but a similar process can be followed with the Excel Add-in.
To get started, download and install the Desktop App. Have a quick look at the orientation document as well before you begin. Create a new Excel file or Google Sheets file and open it. For Google Sheets, you will need to add (+) an account first.
With the A1 cell selected and Quick Query mode enabled, open the GA Reports wizard.
You will be presented with a selection of Kick-Start Reports you can use to pre-select common field combinations. Use one of these to quickly get started, like the Country report in this example.
Next, add (+) or select your Google Analytics account and GA property that you want to report on.
In the Fields section, add the dimension ‘Month of Year’ and drag it to the top of the list. The query is easy to edit, so you can come back and change things later if you want, but for now just follow along.
By default the Kick-Start Reports are sorted by sessions descending, but we wouldn’t want that in this case so select the Sorting Rule and delete (X) it. The API default sort is by the order of the fields in the query, which is fine (month, continent, country, etc).
Next comes the date range. Since we are using a Month if Year dimension, let’s pick 60 months, which is a good range.
To avoid heavy sampling in long-term queries, Analytics Edge has an option to minimize sampling. Enabling this option causes the query to be split by the date field used in the query – in this case, including Month of Year will result in monthly queries (60), and the results are transparently merged for you.
CAUTION: if you get tempted to use a Date dimension and very long date ranges, you could run into API quota limits, which reset daily. I recommend weekly or monthly resolution.
Click OK and wait for it! Analytics Edge will pull down your data and prepare it to write to the worksheet. At this point, another popup wizard will appear – Quick Functions. Since this is just an export of data, skip to the bottom and you can see the Write options to write to the worksheet where you placed the query or export it to a text file (CSV).
Click OK to complete the write operation.
Now that you’ve seen how easy it is, you can edit that query (Edit > Edit Query) or add another worksheet and start another query using different dimensions and metrics.
The Kick-Start Reports provide a good starting point to get most of your data out of Universal Analytics — just add a Month or Week dimension and remember the option to ‘Minimize sampling’.
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