I trying to find a better solution than google analytics to create dashboards for visually representing custom data.
My use case is that I need something to track and record custom data that is not passed in through custom web events into google analytics.
I was able to find a hacky solution to the problem initially by running a periodic function over my data on firebase and sending it as custom events to google-analytics. (I mention the approach in this answer. The linked blog post gives further details.)
The problem that I faced was that it wasn't always reliable as although the function did run successfully every day, the data was not shown in the google analytics dashboard.
The data I to visualize is gathered as further insights by writing basic code on existing data
I am aware that it is possible to integrate google analytics for various use cases like even the smallest button click, but I am trying to either send custom events( raised outside of the application by running cron jobs or scheduled functions ) through some API call or maybe directly save and update the data in some other place where there is direct access to visualization
Does anyone know a better solution?
The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol allows developers to make HTTP requests to send raw user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers, so you can use it to send your data generate outside your application:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1
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In My android application I am trying to achieve a page Where I want to show Some Graphs for Stats of App to Users Like Active Users , Avg Time Spent by all users who use the app, Global map indicating Users from which Country with Intensity or more
To what I know Firebase Analytics Provides such details but I think its only for Admin , That is only the people that have access to the project can view it
Is there a possibility of Bringing those Analytics Graphs , Data , Stats into the App to and Show the User ? I am trying to achieve this in Kotlin for a Android App.
Any Indicator or Clear Resource to read abt Would also be helpful With slight info on the part I am trying to Achieve.
Thanks in Advance
I believe you could achieve this by using the Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol API. The Measurement Protocol API allows developers to make HTTP requests to send events directly to Google Analytics servers. This allows you to measure how users interact with your business from any HTTP-enabled environment. Notably, this makes it easy to measure interactions that happen server-to-server.
You can use the Measurement Protocol on the following:
Tie online to offline behavior.
Measure interactions both client-side and server-side.
Send events that happen outside standard user-interaction (e.g. offline conversions).
You can go to this documentation for more information.
I need to test some things with a Google Analytics View, but the default demo account that Google offers does not allow user to use the Analytics Reporting API :
You cannot use the demo account with the Analytics Reporting API. Attempts to do so result in a permissions error: (403) insufficientPermissions.
Source
I just need to replicate a view with different data already.
Thanks for helping.
You cannot replicate views with data. A view will always start empty.
However you can simply register a Google Analytics account and send lots of bogus data (either by setting up a web page with tracking code and call it repeatedly, or set a cron job to fire call via the measurement protocol) (this will happen in realtime, so you need to wait a few days before you have enough useable data. There is not way to bulk-create hits for a longer timeframe).
If you just want to test the API it probably matter that much what data you use, so a mock account should work just fine.
I'm trying to add recommender systems to an existing website. In particular, I'd like to implement item-item collaborative filtering, to figure out what pages users tend to visit in the same session--much like Amazon's "People who viewed this item also viewed...."
At a minimum, collaborative filtering requires data on each individual viewing session, so that the algorithm can determine which pages get viewed together, rather than just tallying up how many times each page gets viewed in the aggregate.
If I were creating a new website, I could pretty easily add code to collect this data. However, this is an existing website, and has been set up to use Google Universal Analytics.
I have two questions:
Can I get Universal Analytics Data through an API? I need to be able to analyze the data using my own algorithms, not just look at it in a dashboard. I know about the Core Reporting API--but the Core Reporting API doesn't seem to include any extra Universal Analytics variables. I know about the API for sending Universal Analytics data, but that's not what I'm trying to do here.
Assuming I can query an API or otherwise export the Universal Analytics data, will I be able to distinguish individual sessions? The idea here is not to ask questions about individual users (let alone associate their data with some other data), but simply to figure out which pages were viewed in the same sessions.
Thanks for your help.
You can use the Google Analytics Core Reporting API many combinations of the available Dimensions and Metrics. You should check out the Common Queries page to get a sense of how precise you can get in terms of how people might use your application.
Also the Hello Analytics APIs Quickstart guide is a good place to start if you haven't developed an application with Google APIs.
I'm assigned to create a WordPress plugin that displays recent visits graph under each post in WordPress. I'm struggling with the authentication of the data and general structure of plugin. My first question would be whats the most efficient way to authenticate with Google API for this kind of task?
I was looking into the AuthSub but i cant understand the concept of next parameter in the query. It should be the landing page after authorization, but how can i make it work dynamically with all the different posts?
In OAuth i'm getting a bit lost in terminology.
Second question is how often should the Google API be queried for the results. I mean is it rational to make smaller request every time visitor opens a page or maybe its rater optimal to download the data for the pages once and keep it in local xml and refresh it on some intervals?
As an idea of the plugin overall structure i was thinking of making a php file which would generate the graph out of the GA feed and would do it so when called from post hook via ajax. This would be controlled by passing parameters of the post to that php file.
Would that structure make sense or there is an easier way to preform the task?
I would really appreciate if someone pointed me in right direction especially in authentication problem.
The most important thing to do first is to lay out your design. You don;t want the user of your site to authenticate on the GA API. Because he doesn't have access to your data. So you'll have to login with your own credentials on the backend. And just cache the metrics you want to display on the screen. So, from the user perspective, there's no way to tell if you're using Google Analytics or any other web analytics product.
Since you're working with Wordpress and you'll need to do the data pull on the backend you probably want to do that using PHP.
You should take a look at this PHP library.
http://code.google.com/p/gapi-google-analytics-php-interface/
Even though it's not google officially supported it's pretty good and you won't have to worry about the process of authentication.
It doesn't make sense to query GA every time the user visits your site. Besides impacting the load heavily the GA API has some latency and GA is not a real time tool. The data freshness on your GA data depends on how much data you get. If you are a small blog it can take 2-4 hours to process the data. If you're a big blog it can take up to 48h. So for that reason I'd query the API every 4 hours or so and just cache the data for all your pages. When you render the page it's just a matter of getting it from the cache/db.
To plot that data there are plenty of options around there. I'd suggest you to start with Google Chart Tools.
What is the best option to track user wise analytics? I am looking for google analytics along with per-user reports.
some questions:
1) was using custom variables to track the userId and was able to see the report in Visitors -> 'Custom Variable', any way to see the same on the content report. There is an option for 'user defined variables' but that is not populated.
2) is there a sandbox for google analytics. searched for it but it seems like the only option is to serve the file from the local machine (to check the tracking gif) and to create a separate tracker so as to not pollute the production data with testing. The lack of sandbox seems kind of a PITA. can check the content report immediately but custom variables takes a longer time to get updated.
3) are http://piwik.org/piwik.org or http://mnutt.github.com/hummingbird/hummingbird any good?
4) what is the best way to track per-user interaction on the site, can suggest a better alternative to google analytics. Realtime is not a requirement. Wanted a hosted service as i do not want to host a server and also do not want to go into the trouble of parsing the logs - but can do it if it is easy.