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How To Convert Google Analytics’ Funky Month of Year Format In Excel

convert Google Analytics date formats in Excel

UPDATE: Since I’ve had a couple questions about how to display the date as just the month and year, I created a Google Sheet demonstrating several fixes. You can view it here.

Whoever engineered the Date format for Google Analytics’ latest version has probably never actually tried to chart it out inExcel . Today’s date would show up as 20121118. And, of course, since that’s not a valid date format, Excel interprets it as text.

Formula To Use

To convert this to a date format Excel recognizes I wrote a function that uses the DATE, LEFT, MID, and RIGHT functions. You can see how it looks here:

converting Google Analytics date format in Excel
Click for larger image.

 

Or you can copy and paste this and replace H7 with the cell address that contains the first date in your column:

=DATE(LEFT(H7,4),MID(H7,5,2),RIGHT(H7,2))

Breaking It Down

Date: The DATE function follows this format: DATE(year,month,day).
Year: This says, “Go into H7 and grab the four left-most characters.”
Month: This says, “Go into H7 and grab the middle two characters. Oh, and it starts at the fifth character. No need to thank me. Just trying to be helpful.”
Day: This says, “Go into H7 and grab the two right-most characters.”

To copy the formula down the column just double-click on the bottom-right corner of the cell containing the formula (in my case K7) or grab the fill handle (same bottom-right corner) and drag it down the column.

Wait Just A Second … Where’s The Year?

Very observant! Yes, there’s no year in any of the dates in Column K. You can decide exactly how you want your dates to show in cell formatting options. Learn more in this post on custom date formatting in Excel.

Google Analytics Has A Date Dimension???

Yep. To use access it, you need to use a custom report or the GA API. It’s not built in to the standard reports. You can see where to find it when building a custom report in this screenshot:

date dimension in Google Analytics
Click for larger image.

Learn More

You can learn more about data formatting in my Annielytics Dashboard Course, a video course that will teach you how to put your data in stilettos and work the pole. 🙂

Photo by Matthew Kenwrick.

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If you would like to learn more about Excel, check out my Excel dashboard course. 24 instructional videos, totaling 6+ hours of instruction for $95.

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Comments

  4. I found this article when trying to do the opposite.

    For those trying to convert regular dates into GA’s format for importing Cost Data manually, this is the formula to transform a regular date into the right format for uploads:

    =TEXT(A2,”yyyymmdd”)

    A2 is the actual date

    Reply

  6. Hi Annie,
    great article and (unfortunately) still valid today.

    Here’s my challenge:
    I cannot use the Date dimensions because of the API limitations.
    In my case Month of Year returns 201501 (yyyymm) – I don’t have and don’t need to have the day.
    Is there a formula I can use so I end up with 01/2015 ?

    Thanks!

    Reply

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