Author: Ben

Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper

Want to build a web scraper in Google Sheets? Turns out, basic web scraping, automatically grabbing data from websites, is possible right in your Google Sheet, without needing to write any code.

You can extract specific information from a website and show it in your Google Sheet using some of Sheets’ special formulas.

For example, recently I needed to find out the authors for a long list of blog posts from a Google Analytics report, to identify the star authors pulling in the page views. It would have been extremely tedious to open each link and manually enter each author’s name. Thankfully, there are some techniques available in Google Sheets to do this for us. Continue reading Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper

10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard

You’re probably familiar with using Google Sheets to organize and analyze your data. But did you know you can build a dynamic Google Sheets dashboard to really understand your data?

With a handful of powerful techniques, you can add some pizzazz and dynamism to the presentation of your data. Here are ten tricks to try next time you’re building a Google Sheets dashboard.

Continue reading 10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard

Building a dynamic dashboard for a 3-day digital flash sale

This time last year I worked with The Write Life during their three-day sale of The Writer’s Bundle, a collection of digital products for writers. I built a dynamic dashboard using Google spreadsheets so the team could visually monitor progress throughout the sale.

This year The Writer’s Bundle 2015 was bigger and better than ever, so I wanted to create an even more useful dashboard for the team. The dashboard was a key tool for the team, to monitor both overall and individual sales channel performance, as well as to be a motivating force by giving everyone a visual sense of progress.

Continue reading Building a dynamic dashboard for a 3-day digital flash sale

Creating a custom Google Analytics report in a Google spreadsheet

Continuing my recent infatuation with dashboards in Google spreadsheets, I’ve been playing around with the Google Analytics Add-on to build a custom web analytics dashboard in a Google spreadsheet.

The idea originated from discussions with my wife about the tedium of preparing month-end website performance reports for her content management clients. This dashboard was a solution to streamline the monthly web reporting and offer insights that might otherwise be missed. Rather than having to visit Google Analytics for each website in turn and click around gathering the necessary data, this pulls it all together in one place.

Continue reading Creating a custom Google Analytics report in a Google spreadsheet

Creating a dynamic dashboard in Google Spreadsheets to track sales for a digital product launch

This article covers how to build a dynamic dashboard in Google Sheets, using formulas and data validation methods so that charts change dynamically based on user input.

Check out my course: Build Dashboards with Google Sheets and Data Studio

This post is based on work I did in 2015 with The Write Life team to develop some behind-the-scenes sales data analysis during their 3-day digital bundle sale. The team wanted a simple way of gauging progress and seeing how the different sales channels fared as the sale took place.

Here’s the final dynamic dashboard:

dynamic dashboard in action
Interactive sales dashboard in a Google spreadsheet
Want your own copy of this dashboard?
Click here to access your copy of this template >>

Continue reading Creating a dynamic dashboard in Google Spreadsheets to track sales for a digital product launch