In this month’s installment of my Excel dashboard series, I’m going to show you a trick that will give you the ability to control an entire dashboard with one menu — in this example, a radio button menu. For my example, I’ve put “months” in the menu at the top of the dashboard, but you […]
I’m starting a series on dashboards because I think creating sexy dashboards is a critical skill every marketer needs to know. It’s going to be a long series — but by the time we’re finished, you’ll be able to create dashboards that excel in both form and function. (Editor’s note: This popular series continues on […]
One question I get asked a lot is this: what Excel skills are most important for marketers to learn? I have whittled that interminable list down to five skills that I believe are absolutely essential for marketers to know, presented below in order of importance. Table Formatting I believe that table formatting is the baseline […]
One of the steps in my last post on finding 404 pages worth saving involved determining if any of your404 pages received traffic in the past year. This can be accomplished by pulling a landing page report and using VLOOKUPs in Excel to see any of your broken pages used to receive traffic. However, Google […]
A critical part of doing a site or link audit is checking to see how many 404 (page not found) pages there are in a site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an audit that lists the total number of 404 pages and advises developers to find appropriate pages to redirect these […]
While cruising through the standard reports in Google Analytics (GA), you may have noticed that you can only get URIs (the part of the URL that follows the domain, AKA hostname). You can’t get the full URLs. That can be pretty unhelpful. So, I’m going to show you some tricks to pull full URLs into […]
There comes a time in a marketer’s life when making pretty charts with a predefined dataset just doesn’t cut it. And finding the sum and average of a column of data just doesn’t satisfy you anymore. Eventually — and it’s really inevitable — you will actually have to dive deep into the data and cull […]
One thing I’ve never understood about Excel is why it doesn’t support regular expressions (which the cool kids call regex). Regex allows you to do advanced sorting and filtering. The SeoTools plugin for Excel supports regex, but it — like most cool resources for Excel — is PC-swim only. For those of us red-headed stepchildren Mac […]
I’m spoiled now. I rarely go into the Google Analytics (GA) interface anymore. You know why? There are cool Excel plugins that will pull your data right into Excel. Of course, most of them are PC-swim only. Sorry, Mac users. I’m going to be testing out the only one I know of for Mac, but […]
Have you ever done a search to find out how to do something in Excel, just to find the search results littered with macro options? I used to avoid those results like the plague because I found macros (at least those beyond what I could create with the Macros Recorder) really intimidating. And I’m writing […]
Having covered all the basics of how to make tabular data tell a story using custom cell formatting and conditional formatting for both static tables and pivot tables, we’re now going to jump into the really fun stuff: charting data out in Excel. I’m not going to cover the basics of creating charts in this […]
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a fan of tabular data (data in tables). If you want your data to be persuasive, it needs to be visual. However, when you’re dealing with large data sets that’s not always feasible. For example, when I’m dealing with data from webmaster tools or Screaming Frog, there’s just […]
In my post on table formatting, I demonstrated how to transform your static data into a simple yet sexy database in a matter of seconds. If you don’t know how to use table formatting, go read that post and then come back. Otherwise, your data will look like one of those housewives who goes to […]
Big data is all the rage right now. If you search Google News for the term, there are 53,500 thousand results. And that’s just the news. Most of us in Internet marketing aren’t truly working with big data, in the truest sense of the word. However, when we’re investigating things like the competitive landscape for […]
If there’s one task most marketers share — whether their focus is SEO, paid search, or social media — it’s collecting and interpreting data. Being able to slice and dice the data to find actionable insights is key to effective analysis. Yet, one of the biggest mistakes marketers make is trying to wrangle static data […]