Analytics Tool Review: Shufflepoint

As serious users of Google Analytics, we’re always looking for easy, great-looking ways to share the data gleaned therein with our clients. Since we provide various clients with daily, weekly and monthly reports, there is usually a whole lot of time spent copying and pasting data - and too little spent analyzing and understanding that data.  There is of course AnalyticsView, but it's not customizable enough for our tastes.  We always felt that good old HBX ReportBuilder (which apparently Omniture/Adobe is allowing to die on the vine with HBX in general) was the absolute best web analytics tool around for two reasons:

1. You could build highly customizable reports that contain exactly and only what your customer wants to see
2. You could automate the delivery of those reports via email.  No cutting and pasting.  No downloading, attaching and emailing.  

HBX ReportBuilder just worked!  In our quest to get back to that place, we decided to try ShufflePoint and see if it was an easier means to the same end.

First, what is ShufflePoint? It’s a service that connects Google Analytics directly to Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint (via the GA API), allowing users to easily pull data from Google Analytics into Excel to create custom reports. (ShufflePoint also allows you to associate GA data with Google Gadgets to assemble a web dashboard, but that’s for another post!) So, does it really work? And does it help save time?

In a word: absolutely. With the click of a single refresh button in Excel, entire multi-tab reports reflect the most recent data for our clients, and the time we once spent assembling the data can now be spent diving further into what the data means. For each property (site/client/customer), we create a series of templates to dictate the look of the report, and then drag in Metrics, Dimensions and Profiles from Google Analytics. And that was that – automated, detailed reports for our clients.  No more 20-30 hours per month cutting and pasting.

Is ShufflePoint for everyone? We think so. If you’re using Google Analytics on a regular basis to report your site's performance, you can find the package that works for you: $29-199 per month. In addition, ShufflePoint offers a free seven-day trial period and is a month-to-month service, so you can easily cancel your account at any time. Chris at ShufflePoint provides terrific customer service and is readily available to answer questions and solve problems. If you’re looking for a new reporting solution, and have maybe fallen down building a data warehouse, join the world of APIs and check out Shufflepoint.

Coming soon! - Shufflepoint has just integrated with KeywordEnvy.com for rankings tracking.  Put your rankings reports, and your Google Analytics reports right next to each other in the same report....automated.  Also soon to come is data directly from Google Adwords (not through GA) via their recently updated API.