Tag: report design

SAS BI: Looking at Google Analytics for Popular Blog Topics

This past week I have been studying the Google Analytics data to determine the best topics to discuss in the upcoming month and to prepare the SAS Glo Fo 2012 conference. Google Analytics allows me to measure which posts get the most hits when posted and continue to be popular or referenced. I’ll unveil my little known, but highly coveted analytics process. How’s that for some hype? Getting the Google Analytics Data In a past article, I discussed how I extracted the data from Google Analytics using Excellent Analytics. The following figure shows my query in the Excellent Analytics tool, the data results, and the results in SAS Enterprise Guide. The data consists of the date, post path and title (with URL), source (how person came to site), and visitor type. It’s probably obvious why I would want the date, post, and source but what is not so obvious is visitor type. Visitor Type allows me analyze what topics bring new visitors to the site as well as the topics that retain visitors. Cleaning Up the Data My original plan was to use MS Excel to complete this analysis since I thought it would be simple. However, I realized that […]

Web Report Studio: Who stole my pie (chart)?

Ok – I”ll just say it.  I hate pie charts.  If there are more than a few categories – then the user has to interpret the ranking order, it slows them down, and they may loose interest in the report that you so lovingly prepared.  Maybe you say – “Tricia, add the numbers! Geez – you’re so dramatic!”  Then I will calmly reply to your dramatic outburst, if I want to have numbers – then why not just provide a data table? Let’s look at some examples so I can use the power of screen captures to sway you to my way of thinking. 30-Second Test Consider the following beautiful pie chart from Web Report Studio – you have 30 seconds to decide the product had the largest sales.  It will take 30 seconds because you have to determine which slice actually is the largest (and there are two competitors) and then correlate the slice color to the product name in the legend.  Go ahead, I’ll wait. Ok – let’s try the method of adding the numbers.  Note that this beauty contest winner is getting cluttered.  To make room for the numbers, the chart is getting smaller.  I could use percentages to make the […]