Pivot Tables in Google Analytics

If I ask: how many times have you use Pivot tables, probably you will answer hundreds of times in Excel, but if I ask: have you use pivot tables in Google Analytics? maybe your answer will be, I didn't know GA has pivot tables!. For almost a year this feature has been present in the GA reports, but not many people know it despite of its great benefits. As you know the default view for the reports in GA is table, where you can see the information organized by columns and rows by 1 or 2 dimensions but you can't group them unless you use advanced segments.

However, an easier way to use a multi - dimensional view and compare results in a same table is using the pivot table feature. Using this feature you can rearrange significant information without exporting the data and importing it to an external spreadsheet. More important, you can do this on the fly because you are interacting with updated information directly in the application. Now, you can find this feature in many reports at the 5th column of the list of Views.

Although the pivot table is available in most of the reports, I have taken the time to check for you each section. Below there is the list of the reports where you can use the pivot table view.

Section	Sub - Section	Report
Visitor	Main Level	News Vs Returning
		Languages
		Custom Variables
	Browser Capabilities	Browser
		Operating System
		Browser and OS
		Screen Color
		Screen Resolution
		Flash Version
		Java Support
	Network Properties	Service Providers
		Hostnames
		Connection Speeds
	Mobile	Mobile Devices
		Mobile Carriers
Traffic Sources	Main Level	Direct Traffic
		Referring Sites
		Search Engines
		All Traffics
	AdWords	AdWords Campaigns
		TV Campaigns
		Keywords
		Campaigns
		Ad Versions
Content	Main Level	Top Content
		Content by Title
		Top Landing Pages
		Top Exit Pages
	Event Traffic	Categories
		Labels
		Actions
		Trending
Ecommerce	Product Performance	Product Overview
		Product SKUs
		Categories
	Main Level	Transactions

Let's look at some ideas where you can use this report. Imagine you want to see the visitor trend by type (news vs returning) grouped by Browser, and to compare the performance of each one of them, maybe number of visits vs pages/visits or bounce rate, so you can go to the news vs returning report and choose the view 'Pivot Table'. Then you will have the option to select the dimension to pivot by, in this case we select Browser, and as metrics visits and bounce rate.

However, you want to see the same information but showing in the same screen the top 10 browser. What you can do then is to go to the Browser report and pivot by Visitor type this time.

I've found very useful the pivot feature when comparing keywords, adgroups and/or campaign performance. For instance, if you go to the report Keywords and click in the view pivot you could pivot by Visitor type as we did in the last example.

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