An Excellent Google Analytics Companion: Shufflepoint

Delaware based Shufflepoint has taken the most user friendly web analytics application in the world today and managed to make it even more useful. Their ability to move data easily between Google Analytics and Excel makes GA an even more viable option for businesses of all types.

What does Shufflepoint do?

In a nutshell Shufflepoint connects Google Analytics indirectly to Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint, arguably two of the most widely used analyst tools in the world today. While somewhat time-consuming to use the first time with a little practice Shufflepoint has the ability to dramatically reduce the amount of time analysts and GA-focused consultants spend gathering data (you know, so you can spend more time actually analyzing the stuff!)

As you can see in the following screenshot, Shufflepoint allows you to drag Metrics, Dimensions, and Profiles into a series of “targets” that govern how the report will look. If you’ve used Yahoo Web Analytics to create custom reports this interface will feel extremely familiar to you.

How does Shufflepoint work?

Shufflepoint simply makes excellent use of GA’s free APIs, essentially serving as a bridge between GA and Excel (or Powerpoint) to allow you to build moderately complex custom reports. Leveraging both a drag-and-drop interface and a query language that is in many ways similar to SQL (see image below), Shufflepoint makes Google Analytics native export functionality more or less obsolete. More importantly, while the team at Google has done a pretty good job with the new “custom reports” interface in GA, Shufflepoint extends GA’s custom reporting paradigm to the logical conclusion: relatively easy to generate documents that can be shared the same way more or less all other data is shared in a business environment (Excel!)

Why is Shufflepoint different?

Shufflepoint differs from the only other automate-into-Excel solution that I am aware of (Excellent Analytics, http://www.excellentanalytics.com/) in a few ways:

Shufflepoint is not free, although the $29 to $199 monthly pricing is not particularly expensive;
Shufflepoint does work for those of us using non-PC machines because it is browser-based SAAS at the core, not a true Excel plug-in;
Despite being a service, Shufflepoint is available as an installed instance, although a consulting arrangement with the company is required for this.

Additionally, Shufflepoint extends Google Analytics in interesting ways, including the ability to create queries with multiple profiles at the same time, good support for creating Google Gadgets which essentially allows anyone to create totally customized views of GA-collected data in iGoogle, and support for augmenting and moving GA-collected data in a variety of unique ways (for example, into Google Earth!)

Who will benefit from Shufflepoint?

Two main groups will benefit from spending a little money with Shufflepoint every month: any Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) and any analyst who has standardized on Google Analytics and has ongoing report distribution needs. The benefit to the former is pretty obvious — if you can spend the time to build slick-looking dashboards and then couple them with Shufflepoint to quickly import different client’s data then the quality of your ongoing deliverables should go up along with your margins! The benefit to analysts is similar — the value of a standardized report template for distribution throughout the organization is not one that anyone should overlook — and if Shufflepoint can reduce a day’s worth of generating reports to less than an hour … well you can either spend your newly freed time reading some awesome free books on web analytics, contributing to the web analytics community, or, you know, doing analysis.

What you need to know about Shufflepoint?

I really like what these guys are doing, and not just because their very existence makes me look good having predicted their existence back in October, 2008 when Google first dropped the APIs on us. The emergence of “value-added” applications in Google’s analytics ecosystem, especially coming from companies who aren’t afraid to charge money on top of an otherwise free service because they are delivering incremental value, bodes well for the future. In my consulting practice more and more very large companies seem to be considering moving away from incumbent paid solutions designed for widespread use and adoption in favor of the ease-of-use and simplicity they associate with Google Analytics. While this may be a case of the “grass being greener”, certainly the existence of Shufflepoint as a replacement for Omniture ReportBuilder and Webtrends REST make the consideration process more realistic (if not any more likely.)

Things we like about Shufflepoint:

The fact that the app is platform agnostic.
The fact that the app is really pretty easy to learn and use.
The pricing is very easy to digest, even if you’re a cheap bastard like me

Things we’d like to see from Shufflepoint:

Automation, automation, automation, automation … did I mention automation?
Some type of Excel integration that would make launching the SAAS app even more straightforward.
An expansion of their SQL-esque functionality, perhaps as integration into Microsoft Access

Learn more about Shufflepoint at their web site at http://www.shufflepoint.com.

Posted by Eric on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 | 5 responses | Add a Comment | Share, Save or Email

Richard Warzecha

Eric, great review of Shufflepoint. I’m not an extensive user of it, but spent some “quality time” researching its use for a client last summer. I agree it’s a great tool, and I’m somewhat surprised there hasn’t been more innovation in this area (commercially leveraging the GA API).

I realize your review probably wasn’t meant to be a full detailed analysis of Shufflepoint, but it would be good to have an overview of features at some point for the larger audience. For instance, one of the downsides of Shufflepoint is that it doesn’t handle absolutely every metric that’s available via GA. Granted there’s probably more than most people may need, but depending on your current reports you may not be able to completely duplicate them using a Shufflepoint feed.

Having said that, I do strongly suggest serious GA users to check out this tool (and no, I do not have any connection to Shufflepoint). I think there is still a free month trial for it. The ability to instantly (OK, it actually takes a few clicks, but no more than a couple of minutes) an entire spreadsheet is quite impressive.

Brandon Didsbury

I have been using Shufflepoint for a few months now and I am extremely pleased with the functionality of the tool. We do Google Analytics monthly reporting for clients of all sizes. Having the ability to refresh the data instead of the grueling task of copy/paste, gives me more time to actually tell the data’s story and to deeply analyze it. The ability to filter exactly what I need either through a simple filter or by using RegEx is a great added value. The capabilities for the tool are ever growing. Great post Eric.

Eric

Richard and Brandon: Great to hear from both of you and I’m not surprised to hear you like the product. I too am surprised that we don’t see more companies leveraging the GA API like this but I suspect we’re still just looking at the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks!

Mark

I have to strongly disagree with your comment that it’s easy to learn and use.

Maybe if you’re a rocket scientist, yes, but I suspect many people will find it unfathomable and, together with the time involved to try and learn it, unfortunately unusable.

On the plus side they are very responsive to any queries or difficulties you might be having.

Tim

Yes I’d agree with Mark in terms of responsiveness. There’s a guy called Chris who works for them who is very responsive and also when bugs/suggestions are reported I get the impression that they are integrated in the development. Also get a feeling that it is getting continual development spent on it(a bit like GoPlan’s development team), so if you feel there is something it can’t do then tell them (nicely) and I’m sure they’ll do something about it.

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