Lars kindly asked me if I could use the WASP Market Research feature to analyze a sample of 400 Swedish websites. WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a specialized Firefox extension aimed at web analytics professionals who want to do quality assurance and understand how their web analytics solution is implemented. The Market Research feature lets you scan several sites to uncover web analytics market share information.

Here’s the insight we uncovered:

• 71% of websites analyzed (282) are using a web analytics solution. This is similar to results found in other markets.
• 19% (77) websites uses more than one web analytics solution. When two or more tools are used, most of the time it’s Google Analytics.
• The most popular web analytics solution is Google Analytics (131 sites, 32.75% of all sites, or 46% of sites using at least one WA solution)
• If we include GA and Urchin: 77% of sites using a WA solution (218). This is similar to other analysis where Google dominates with about 80% market share of the web analytics space.
• Other leading web analytics solutions are: Nielsen (62), Omniture (39), WebTrends (17) and then a number of local and smaller players. (Note: Some people consider Nielsen to be more of an audience analysis tool than a true web analytics platform. In most cases were Nielsen was found, Google Analytics was also present).

While GA dominates, Gartner analyst Bill Gassman recently published an excellent paper covering the pros and cons of this solution as an enterprise-level web analytics platform. Among the difficulties mentioned, data collection & integration are lacking, and reporting, while sufficient for most, lacks advanced capabilities. Terms of service and privacy are also raising some concerns for enterprises. But the free solution is also a good choice when web analytics requirements aren’t too high. The availability of a strong user community (over 1M sites uses GA) and local consultants are helping and GA has quickly become a de facto choice for anyone doing lots of AdWords campaigns.

What also stems from this analysis, when mapped on the Web Analytics Maturity Model, is the relatively low web analytics maturity of the Sweden market. More advanced analytics such as voice of customer, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing and offline data integration remains an exception. As is the case in other markets, qualified & experienced resources are scarce and localized training & education are even more difficult to find.

The Web Analytics Maturity Model can be used to asses the current state of your web analytics practice, your strong and weak points based on six critical success factors, and identify the gap with the sophistication level you would like to achieve. Rather than trowing the towel because web analytics is too hard, organizations needs to set realistic objectives and gradually work to improve their web analytics. This topic will be presented at the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver, Canada, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington and Infopresse in Montréal, Canada in the fall. Discussions are underway to present this topic at other conferences, including Europe.

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Stéphane Hamel helps businesses understand the value of online optimization. He has over twenty years of experience, and has been on both sides of the fence, including client and agency. Stéphane is an online tutor for the Award of Achievement in Web Analytics and Introduction to Business Analysis classes at the University of British Columbia. He is on the board of directors and treasurer of the Web Analytics Association. Read more about Stéphane.

Have you heard about the free, open source, Microsoft Excel plug-in for Google Analytics? It was released in June, and so far the project has generated 10,000 visits from 8,000 unique browsers, 2,000 downloads, 1,300 inlinks from blogs and websites, and countless tweets.

Excellent Analytics is an Excel add-on that allows you to define data queries and embed them into Microsoft Excel. Simply go to the Excellent Analytics menu in Excel and use the wizard interface to add a report query to your spreadsheet. It can be used to correlate variables and track them over time. You can also add external data to Google Analytics reports to get a more complete view of how your business is performing.

No longer do you have to use Omniture SiteCatalyst, HBX, or WebTrends to get a web analytics Excel client. Forget about awkward exports from the GA interface. No more exporting! Import and refresh your data from within Microsoft Excel instead! Then you can easily sort, manipulate, and distribute your data to anyone using Excel.

Excellent Analytics is 100% free to download and use. If you’re a programmer and passionate about analytics, you can even sign up to help improve the plug-in since it’s open source.

If you’ve already used Excellent Analytics, make sure you have the latest version. An important update has been released since the plug-in was first introduced.

Requirements to use the plug-in:

• Microsoft Excel 2007
• Windows XP or Vista

Using Excellent Analytics is easy. Just download Excellent Analytics.rar, extract the contents using a program such as 7-Zip, and run Setup.exe. Follow the on-screen instructions.

If you’re running an old version of Excellent Analytics and would like to upgrade, you need to remove the old installation and make a clean install.

Once installation has completed, you should be able to find the Excellent Analytics menu in Excel.

The first thing you need to do is to click “Account.”

The credentials (the e-mail address and password you use when you log in to Google Analytics) that you enter will be sent to only Google so that your Google Analytics data can be accessed. Your credentials are not stored or shared in another way.

Once you have successfully logged in, click “New Query.” This will open the Excellent Analytics window where you will be able to select the Google Analytics data you wish to pull into Excel.

The first thing you need to do is to select which dimensions to include.

If you tick a box, you’ll select everything included in that level. For instance, if you tick the “Content” box, “exit page path,” “landing page path,” “page path,” and “page title” will all be selected. If you wish to select only one of them, you need to expand that level and tick only the box in front of the dimension you wish to add.

Selecting metrics works the same way as selecting dimensions. Tick an entire level, or simply tick the metrics of your choice.

An example showing the available campaign metrics. No metrics have been chosen yet in this example.

To find out which combinations of dimensions and metrics are valid, check the official list.

The final step to consider before running your query is whether you want to filter which data should be included.

OK, this example is a bit silly, but if you are familiar with the way filters usually work in other programs, I know you’ll get the point.

If you have selected the date range you’re interested in, you’re now ready to push the “Execute” button, and watch the magic happen.

If you’d like to run your query again using a different date range, simply mark the top row of the table generated by the query (in this case it’s row 1), and click “Update Query.” Please note that a spreadsheet may contain multiple queries and that you need to mark the heading of that particular table. It contains the name of the selected Google Analytics profile and the selected date range.

That’s it. Pretty cool, huh?

Well, now we need your help. Excellent Analytics is open source, meaning its continuous development depends on all of us.

There are three ways in which you can contribute:

#1. Become a developer.

#2. Submit your Excel dashboards based on Excellent Analytics (send a link to where we can download them from, or contact us and we’ll let you know of alternative methods for submission)

#3. Submit your suggestions of functionality that could be added or changes you’d like to see made

Excellent Analytics is a project initiated by Mark Red. Anyone is, however, welcome to join. It doesn’t matter if you are independent or part of a different agency.

Download the free Google Analytics plug-in for Microsoft Excel 2007 for Windows XP/Vista