It seems that forever one of the advantages paid web analytics tools had over Google Analytics was path analysis. Not anymore – for a few months now GA has had something called Visitors Flow and it is pretty cool. This “new” feature allows you to segment on the fly and visually view a chart of the different ways site visitors traverse your website. For me the best part is that the visitor flow feature works retroactively with your data, unlike some setup and configuration which works going forward from the time it was set up. More posts to come about this really nice feature addition – the pressure continues on paid web analytics vendors!

Nice post title, right? Excellent Analytics is something we all strive for, but this time the topic is actually the name of a plugin / add-in for Google Analytics which allows you to pull Google Analytics data directly into an Excel spreadsheet for further processing.

Excellent Analytics is free and open source, and has been around for a couple years now, so there’s no reason not to try it except for the fact that it relies on Windows and the Microsoft .NET framework. Click the link above to get the plugin, view the FAQ and a little gallery of sample results.

On the same topic of pulling GA data into other tools, this blog post explains how PBS has automated some of its web analytics reporting with other paid tools such as DataGrabber ($299 street).