Supermetrics – Easy access to much data!

One nice and very handy tool for extracting data from various sources is an add-on to Google Sheets called Supermetrics. Using it you can access several different data sources, e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Google AdWords, Twitter Ads, Instagram and many more. Once installed (and that’s super easy) it opens up as a side bar to your Sheet, like this:

Then it’s more or less clicking the right options from the dropdown menus and you have a nice and handy report. Here’s some tips for using Google Analytics with Supermetrics:

1) Make sure that the account you are logged in to Google Sheets (and thus Supermetrics) also has access to the data you want to access.

2) Remember to have you the cell A1 selected before opening Supermetrics or your data will appear in some random corner of your spredsheet.

3) Pay attention when selecting the dates. If you plan to make a report that is auto-refreshing you need to choose the dates using the predefined intervals like today, yesterday, last week, last month, year to date etc. If you chose a custom interval, let’s say January 1st to Janyary 7th, the report will always show the result for these dates even though you ask it to refresh weekly.

4) Split by… rows and/or columns. This is the main benefit compared to querying Google Analytics directly. Here you can specify several dimensions for your data, in GA you only get two.

5) You don’t have to define any segments or filters. If you do, make sure that the account you’re logged in as also has access to these in Google Analytics (and that they are available for the view you are querying).

6) Under options make sure to tick both Add note to query results showing whether Google has used sampling and Try to avoid Google’s data sampling. You’ll see that many times Supermetrics is capable of supplying you with unsampled data where Google itself would give you sampled data.

Here’s a simple example, querying one of our sites for 2017 sessions, splitting the data by operating system and system version:

Nothing spectacular, but very easy to use, easy to share. Absolutely one of my favourite tools!