Analytics Talk

New GA Feature: Emailed Reports

May 8, 2007 by Justin Cutroni

One of the most common feature requests we used to hear from Google Analytics users was the need for automated report delivery. Well the wait is over! You can now configure Google Analytics to email you a report daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

Setting up an emailed report is very easy. If you’d like to share a report with a colleague just click the Email button at the top of the report. You’ll instantly get a form where you can enter an email address, a subject and a description. You can also choose the format for the data (PDF, XML, tab separated file or comma separated file).

Want to schedule the report for automated delivery? Click the ‘Schedule’ tab. You can have the report delivered daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

If you check the ‘Include date comparison’ check box the report will include a comparison of the data based on the scheduled delivery. This means that a report delivered daily will show trending of data from yesterday to today. Reports delivered weekly will show trending from last week to this week.

Another cool feature in Emailed Reports is the ability to add an additional report to a scheduled email. This is done using the ‘Add to Existing’ tab.

In the above example Google Analytics would email me my New vs Returning, Top Landing Pages and Content by Title report every morning. I don’t know if there is a limit to the number of reports GA will send out. But I can’t image that anyone would need more than 2 or 3.

The new GA also has a nice interface where you can review all of your scheduled emails. Just click the email link in the left hand navigation and you’ll see a list of all your scheduled emails. You can edit and delete then right from the list.

Remember, Google Analytics contains important data about your business. Be careful who you send reports to and which reports you send them.

Now, if you’re really creative, you may be able to use the automated email delivery as as API into Google Analytics. In my past life as a programmer I wrote a number of script that would read emails from an inbox, parse the data and enter it into a database. Theoretically you could do the same with GA’s email feature. Just have an comma separated file sent to a generic email address daily. Then write a cron job that will parse the inbox, format the data and store it in a database. I haven’t done this, but it’s not impossible.

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