This week I had the challenge of extracting a years worth of history for a few URLs in a rather large website. We have been running Google Analytics a for the past year, so we should have the data. The question is how to get it.

What I chose to do is to follow the tip in this article and download the edge-most 5000 URLs (by my chosen parameter). This gave me roughly 12 .xlsx files. Then in each file I needed to extract only the 50 URLs which were pertinent to this particular investigation. That was a bit more tedious and done manually (with sort and filter of course).

Now I have the challenge of presenting the data in a way that it is easily comparable. Yet the data is for 50 unique URLs with multiple bits of data for each URL. I am thinking a bar graph will help but then that means 50 bar graphs.

This particular challenge is also complicated by the fact that there the scope of the investigation really crosses a server migration in which the old server is still getting hits, and part of the content was turned off on the new server. How do I show that in a graph?