In this post we’ll see how to add the Google Analytics Add-on to Google Spreadsheets and take advantage of all cool things you can do with GA API, no coding skills required.

First, we’ll add the Google Analytics Add-on to Google Spreadsheets. Just login to Google Drive and click Create – Spreadsheet.

In your empty spreadsheet select Add-ons – Get Add-ons:

A pop up will open with the available add-ons, just use the search field in the top right corner to look for google analytics and select one called Google Analytics by clicking the + Free button on the right:

The add-on will ask you for permissions, just scroll down and click on Accept:

That’s all! Now you can build your first report with the GA API. Go to Add-ons – Google Analytics – Create new report

The tool will help you with the initial setup of your report – you can enter a Name for the report, select the account, property and view you’ll be pulling data from, and choose metrics and dimensions.

Here’s how a test report configuration looks like:

By default the tool will select the last 7 days, you can also specify specific start and end dates by removing the value next to Last N Days and enter the dates you want following the YYYY-MM-DD pattern. In this example I want to see the number of sessions for 3 dimensions simultaneously: source / medium, landing page and date. You can also sort, add filters and segments, define max results, etc.

Let’s run our report and see what data we’ll get. Just click on Add-ons – Google Analytics – Run Reports:

Google Spreadsheets will think a bit and return a success message when ready:

And the results (by default sorted by the first column):

Of course there’s a lot more to say for this handy tool which I’ll do in future posts.
Here are some really useful links that you should bookmark as you’ll use them a lot for reference:

1. Dimensions and Metrics Reference

2. Configuration parameter reference

3. More details how to build your filters and segments, and sometimes even the Segments Dev guide

Next time we’ll see how to get more insights of our conversion visits and different paths. Stay tuned!

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

Margarita Evtimova

Margarita Evtimova is a Google Analytics fan, who also loves SEO, conversion optimization, online marketing and social media. You can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.