It's nearing the end of the semester and I was finishing up some of my projects. One project was from my Web Analytics class. Dr. Liddle gave us quite a bit of freedom in choosing a project suitable for the class. I decided to talk to the independent study and figure out a project that could benefit them.
Turns out, BYU Independent Study uses Google Analytics. While it is set up rather nice, they don't have anyone hired to help them interpret the data they have. Because of that, they don't know who to market to, how to increase traffic, or what trends are occuring. With this information, I decided to think of a project that I could do to help them interpret all the data they currently have.
After a few days of planning, I finally thought of something they could use. I decided to create a spreadsheet that would take the CSV formatted data from Google and compare weekly data with the overall average of the data. For example, if the metric they want to view is of Unique Visitors they can see a weekly basis of how many unique visitors they are indeed getting for each week.
Once I had this idea, the coding frenzy began. I spent about a good three days of coding and testing until I finally got it to work. Since the data from Google can be a CSV file I decided to use Excel and VBA to create a spreadsheet that would automatically upload the data to the sheet. I used conditional formatting to display the weekly trends. In the end, I had a pretty good program. The only other interesting thing was this program could potentially be used for other sites other than BYU Independent Study. One improvement that I could implement (if I had more time) would be to autogenerate graphs. For now, I am proud of the project I have made and I think it will be very useful to them.
http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/courses/index.cfm
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