It’s safe to say that Google Analytics is by and far one of my favorite analytics tools available for tracking and analyzing visitor data. What used to be a paid version of Urchin, it’s now freely available to anyone who takes the two minutes to sign up and implement on their website. Though many paid analytics solutions exist, few are as robust – and did I mention it was free?
Having said that, and as great of a tool Google Analytics is, it’s not perfect. I spend a good portion of my day reviewing, analyzing, and reverse engineering the traffic data that comes into Google Analytics. Though you can view the data in a thousand different ways, sometimes it’s nice to be able to export the particular page you’re on to an Excel file and manipulate the data for your own use. Google Analytics gives you the ability to export to PDF, XML, CSV, Excel or TSV formats. Very handy.
That’s all fine and dandy, but when you use the Google Analytics export feature, you’re limited to exporting no more than 500 rows of data. For large accounts, you’re certainly going to have more than 500 rows of data!
The solution is to go to the page within Google Analytics that you want to export data from. In this example, I’m at the Traffic Sources > Keywords area within Google Analytics.
Once there, go up to the address bar in your browser and enter “&limit=5000″ (without the quotes) to the end of it and hit “enter” or “go”. After hitting enter, you should still be able to see the “&limit=5000″ at the end of the URL.
The resulting URL should look something like: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/keywords?……………..&limit=5000
You can now export the data to a CSV file with all your rows of data, not just 500. It’s important to note that you have to export to CSV format, not the CSV for Excel.
Let me know how that works for you, or if you have any other Google Analytics tips!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, that’s awesome! Thanks for the tip. Will come in handy for my monthly source reports – I’ve been manually pasting them together with Excel.
Would be nice if Google Analytics would just offer to give you more than 500 in their standard exporting features. I like how it’s formatted in the PDF, much cleaner looking than an excel file, but this works great!
Not to mention that if you feed the beast then the beast seems to like you more.
Looks like they disabled this? I can’t get it to work now.
Hm, I just tried and it seemed to work for me. Still having issues?
Thomas, you are very correct. And you left this comment before I even met you at SMX Advanced in Seattle, is this pure coincidence?!