API Python Client Library Updated

Last Updated on Thursday, 17 December 2009 04:19 Written by TheAutomator Thursday, 17 December 2009 04:02

It's easier for developers to program in the languages they know, so we updated the Google Analytics API Python Client library with the just-launched API version 2 features. We also added reference examples for both the Account Feed and Data Feed. Now it's easier than ever to automate your analysis workflow using our API.

Taking The Library For a Spin

With the updated library, we thought it would be a great time to highlight the power of the new features. So we created a sample application to do just that. The application uses the new Python library to retrieve metrics for a series of segments. It then performs some calculations on the data and creates bar charts using the GChartWrapper package, an open source Python wrapper for the Google Charts API. Finally, it uses the Python Imaging Library to add a title and legend, and stitches all the charts together into a single image. We decided to release this application as open source so you can create visualizations with your own data.

Solving Business Problems

Since social media is all the rage, let's use this new application to help Avinash Kaushik, our Analytics Evangelist, measure "engagement" on his popular Occam's Razor blog. We also wanted to determine if the time he spends participating in social media sites is valuable and sends new readers to his blog.

First we created segments to pull all the referrals from Facebook and Twitter. Second, we chose five calculations and corresponding metrics to compare the performance of these two segments. We then compared the segments to each other and, for context, for all the visits to the site as a control.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the results:
Some interesting observations become apparent.

• Far more visits originate from Twitter (3.6x) when compared to Facebook, perhaps not surprising given Avinash's Twitter followers (~16,120)
  
  
• Visitors from Twitter tend to be new visitors, a good thing, but they view fewer pages and spend significantly less time on the blog.
  


• On the other hand Facebook delivers an audience that is loyal. These visitors come back to the site more often and spend a significant time on the blog (compared to Twitter and all other visitors).
  

The bottom line? Even though social networking sites are all the rage, they actually contribute very little to Avinash's blog. If this blog were a company, it would be wise to ensure the time and effort put into driving traffic from social media is proportionate to the actual volume of traffic and goal conversions from those sites.

Hopefully this example shows how powerful our new features can be.

If you're interested in running this report against your own data, the application is free and open sourced. Additionally, we made it really easy to change the metrics, segments, calculations and all the other visual properties to power your own visualizations. Download it here and give it a whirl, we would love to hear your feedback.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team Learn More

New Google Analytics API Features

Last Updated on Monday, 14 December 2009 05:47 Written by TheAutomator Monday, 14 December 2009 05:17

Over the past few months we've received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API, and it included adding access to Google Analytics newest and most powerful features, such as advanced segments, custom variables and more. Today we want to let you know about improvements to the Google Analytics Data Export API, including the following highlights (all the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group):

Support for Advanced Segments

With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond your aggregated data and peer into the nuances of traffic and visitor activity on your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Germany is over 2 minutes.

We've added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:

1. Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
   


2. Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.
   

This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.



Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data

With the recent Google Analytics launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data. Good call! So now, you can access 48 new metrics around goal performance. We've also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, and step names for each profile.

Take a look at this video describing how to work with goal configuration data in the API.



Custom Variables

Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we've added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you've used is now available through the Account Feed.

We've updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group. We can't wait to see the new apps that come from developers using this data. We're hoping that you spend your holiday tinkering with it :-)

Enjoy!


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team Learn More

Depth and Discovery: Powering Visualizations with the Google Analytics API

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 November 2009 11:00 Written by TheAutomator Thursday, 19 November 2009 11:00

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