I wrote last week that I’m start to “brain dump” my ideas, either as a page, or a design document. One such idea was to automate the data I need to collect for publishing monthly project status reports.
Here’s what I wrote about it:
Monthly Analytics Report Generator is a project I’m planning to work on soon. It should simplify the generation of status reports such as my March 2025 Projects Update post. In the mean time, this is the design document I’m working on with ChatGPT.
And what do you know, I had some free time on my hands (and I wanted to implement this before having to collect the data manually at the end of April). The implementation took around 3 hours, but it wasn’t as smooth sailing as I hoped for. I encountered a few blockers:
- I stopped paying Ahref, so their API to retrieve the websites DR is not available to me
- Google Search Console doesn’t export the Indexed Pages stat in their API.
On the other hand, It was simple enough to implement something to get most of the job done. I also automated the calculation of the change from the previous period. And no less important, ensured I can just copy past the data into WordPress and have it well formatted.
I currently collect the following statistics:
- Google Analytics: Page Views
- Google Analytics: User Engagement Events
- Google Search Console: Total Impressions (will probably add Clicks at some point too)
I’ll add Ahref DR and Indexed Page manually for now, until I’m too tired to do it, and find a way to automate that as well.
Here’s the sample output:
You can take a look at my ugly code here: https://github.com/saguiitay/monthly-analytics-report
Do you ahve any recommendations? Any stats that I should collect and publish?