This is the kind of thing that I hesitate to admit getting excited in fear of forever being branded as nerdy beyond salvation but in this case I had to risk it. The Google analytics blog has a great post about several free new Excel plugins that have come out that use the Google analytics APIs to allow you to generate your analytics reports right in Excel. This is an interestting use of the API and a great time-saver for those of use to generating analytics reports and then crunching through them on our own in Excel.

Paul Knegten posted a simple little cost-per-acquisition (CPA) calculator that got picked up by ClickZ and is now here on their site. If you would like to have the illusion of knowing how much a sale, sign-up, or conversion cost relative to the online advertising that “drove” it, use this tool. I’ve used this stat many times and I find it helpful but it also poses pitfalls because it only takes into account the most proximate message that a visitor received before conversion and fails to account for any of the other factors that could have made that conversion possible.

A recent Nielsen Company study has confirmed that the percentage of Twitter users 25 and younger is significanty lower than the percentage of the same group on the web as a whole. This indicates that Twitter’s recent growth is fueled completely by adult users which runs counter to most people’s intuitive sense that young people are mavens with all things social media.