Google have now rolled out Email Scheduling and PDF exporting in Google Analytics allowing you to schedule a regular report from Analytics to be emailed to people or to export a snapshot of data for someone in a PDF.
Both of these two new functions are in BETA format but were two of the thing Google was waiting for as the last steps to going live with the new version of Analytics as the only version.
Over the course of the last few days more and more users of Analytics have seen the ability to email and export appear and it now looks like this is across the board.
Email reporting is very useful and can be set up on both specific report pages or on custom reports or dashboards within your Analytics account.
These report can be set to be emailed as a once off, or regularly (daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly). When setting the reports up to be weekly or monthly you can choose the specific date of the report such as on the 3rd of each month or weekly on a Tuesday, but not the time of email coming through, as they tend to be sent at the end of the working day – so you’ll receive them in the morning the next day.
These reports are particularly useful if you have someone either in your team or externally who needs to see a specific set of data in your analytics, such as the conversions from a specific short term campaign, then these reports can be emailed to them on a regularly basis and you can even choose for how long they receive the report.
You Email can also be sent in a number of formats, so you can send someone who wants to crunch numbers a CSV file and someone who just wants to look at a snapshot of success a PDF.
Note that the body area is mandatory and has to be completed, so if you are sending a quick pull of data you still need to put something in the email body!
If you are setting up a report don’t forget to change the name of the report as otherwise it will be something like the name of the page in Analytics such as ” Google Analytics: Visitors Overview” which isn’t as useful as something like “Our Site Latest Traffic Figures”.
You can also set these reports to show a more specific snapshot of data such as the organic keywords filtered to show just your company strapline to show how this is driving traffic to your site.
As I mentioned in my blog about getting to know the new version of Analytics, the time will come when the old version is retired and with this latest update this becomes more of a reality, so get used the new version as soon as you can.