I am trying to create a view count feature for a webpage. To do this, I created a new property and generated a tracking id from Google Analytics.
Is there a way I can use the page vists data from there and display it on the same page that I am tracking?
You can, but since GA APIs are authenticated, you will need to handle that authentication one way or another.
You have basically 3 options:
User doing OAuth: by default you would need to implement the OAuth flow like the Query Explorer is doing, which is obviously not adequate if the counter is meant to be public, as visitors won't have the appropriate GA permissions to get data from that property
Pre generated access token: you can generate the access token manually, and use that token to make the requests:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/embed/v1/component-reference#auth-options
serverAuth.access_token Type: string
If you already have a valid access token, you can pass it to the
authorize method directly and the user will not be prompted to
authorize. For details on how to retrieve an access token, see the
OAuth 2.0 documentation.
Middleware: you can use a tool to pull data from the GA API and then query data from that tool. For instance you can:
Use the GA add-on to pull your data to a Google Sheet
Import that data into another Google Sheet with IMPORTRANGE
Publish the Google Sheet from 2 so it's publicly readable via API (for instance as CSV). You will be provided with a URL that looks like https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/{some-uid}/pub?gid=0&single=true&output=csv
Fetch data from that URL from the website (eg with jQuery)
Note: you probably don't have to do step 2 if you're careful, and can publish as CSV your sheet from steo 1 directly: since it's a CSV export, people cannot get to the original spreadsheet so no security risk. But just to be on the safe side (eg you could publish the whole spreadsheet by mistake), I would do step 2.
As for which middleware you want to use, there's probably an infinite number of options :)
Related
We have the following scenario:
Website A has GTAG installed and tracks every page visit, sending a internalUserId along in the dataLayer (when the user is logged).
Website B is a CRM where we list all users, and it uses the same database as Website A.
In the CRM we need to see what pages each of our users have visited.
Proposed solution:
Ideal solution: call Analytics API passing internalUserId and returning a list of pages the user visited.
Alternative 1: make Website A call an internal API that registers a visit, along with any other metadata. Unfortunately the dev team behind Website A wants to avoid this approach as it will send yet another request on every page, thus slowing the page down.
So the suggestion was to leverage analytics to gather this information.
Alternative 2: somehow instruct Tag manager to call an external API every time a visit occurs, and send along any meta data. I don't actually know if Tag manager offers this service or not.
The alternative 1 & 2 will mean that we will store the visit stats, while the ideal solution will use Analytics stats.
So the question is:
Does Analytics API offer the ability to query for a specific user identified by a custom property, internalUserId, that we set using dataLayer, and return that user's stats (visits) ?
Thank you very much
I don't believe you can query Google Analytics API using your internalUserId unless you set it as the user ID in GA, which may lead to limitations. You'd be better off merging the data by collecting the _ga cookie along with you internalUserID values. Look up all user activity by _ga and then merge to your CRM data with internalUserID.
I don't believe alternative 2 is possible.
Alternative 1 would require you store the data yourself and a client side call, but you'd avoid ongoing GA API usage. The calls from client side could be minimal. Use a Cloudflare worker to fetch and process only the data you need, that could be an interesting solution.
I would like to enable (some) of my users to view my website's analytics data.
Our website has a bunch of groups where users can add content. I would like to enable certain users (group admins), to view usage statistics for that specific group. Ofcourse the data should only be accessable to those users with the VIEW_ANALYTICS right, not to any others.
Is there any way to do this in Google Analytics, or is there some other platform I could use to easily achieve this goal (we use AWS for our hosting)?
Regards,
klmdb
The Google Embed API allows you to display analytics data in your own pages. Pages that are only accessible to the members of your VIEW_ANALYTICS group.
You can create a service account and give it the appropriate access in the analytics user management for the property.
You also authorize the service account to use the embed API in the developers API console. (I don't have enough points to include more than two links in an answer.) In the API console you can generate a private key (p12 or json format) which you then use on your server to authenticate the request for analytics data.
You don't say which technologies you are using, but they show Java and Python examples of how to set up the authentication by the Service Account. I've also seen some node.js and php libraries.
This way you don't have to manage who has access through the google anayltics admin system, you just need to control who has access to your "dashboard" page.
I have done this all with client-side javascript and it works. Of course the client-side nature means that anybody who knows how to use browser debug tools can get our private-key, but in our particular case I'm not worried about it. On the other had it seem like you need to keep some security around this so I wouldn't recommend the client-side solution.
I'm developing an application where each 'business' has its own page (or rather many pages):
For example example.com/business/abc/
So, for the logged in business owners in the system I would like to give a feature 'View page analytics'. It would display how many visits (and maybe a couple of other things) that particular page has had.
Is there a way of doing this using the Google Analytics API with my constraints:
I don't want customers to provide their own UA code
I don't want them to require to have GA account
Customers don't need to have Google email account
I don't want to build the entire frontend and backend myself. I would rather use something existing
I've been researching this topic for hours trying to come up with a solution and can't figure out anything.
Here is what I tried and what problems happened to me:
http://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/demos/embed-api/
This is basically exactly what I want for my customers to be displayed on my site (like in the examples), except that Embed Api tries to authorize users to their own (owned) google analytics. I want it instead to use my own Google Analytics data (or rather part of it)
The way I thought about limiting data access would be for every one of my customers to create a View in GA, Add filter to that View so only customer pages are listed there, assign User to the view, and use the Embed Api to display data from that View only. There are a couple of problems with that:
To assign User to View we need email address. And this must be either google account email, or account from a project created with Google Developers Console (application).
In other words I can't create (in any way that I know) an account that would be a shield account for my customers to a subset of my GA data that they would be interested in. It must be either a real user or a real application email address.
So what I tried to do is... I created an app in Google Developers Console, Created new OAuth Service Account. Using Ruby code (that in production app would be running on backend) I obtained OAuth token. I added this email of my OAuth service account as a User to the View
I wanted this server side generated oauth token to be used by Embed Api. That would achieve the effect that I generate the token for on my backend and user can use it without having GA user in my GA property. So I changed according to documentation the basic Embed Api example to use
gapi.analytics.auth.authorize({
container: 'auth',
clientid: 'xxx.apps.googleusercontent.com',
serverAuth: {
access_token: 'Server side generated token'
}
});
instead of
gapi.analytics.auth.authorize({
container: 'auth',
clientid: 'xxx.apps.googleusercontent.com',
});
The effects are not quite what I expected. The example doesn't show anymore (I can't see my data) but I can see in Netowrking section in Chrome that it is actually receiving real data from GA. But for unknown reason, nothing is appearing.
What I try to avoid is building a solution in which I need to build server side code that is querying GA for data, providing it to the frontend and then JS is responsible for displaying it. I would rather use Embed API but it seems not to be well suited for the use case where I don't want users to play with their UA data but rather with my own UA data limited to some scope. I would like to have at least the frontend or backend part of the solution solved. The solution doesn't need to be even Google Analytics based. Anything else that would let me achieve the use case easily and let the business owners see the effects of their marketing (traffic, sales) would be interesting as well.
Related:
Using google analytics API to show subset of data for customers of web application
Google analytics customer data?
Google Analytics API: filter by URI?
https://embeddedanalytics.com seems like something that could be useful, but their page and graphs look like from a few years ago. I would like something more pretty.
https://oocharts.com seems to be interesting because of what their docs.oocharts.com says about queries. But they don't charge anything for their product so I am skeptical of their business model and whether it is a good long-term solution. update: dead link
I don't have enough karma to post links ;)
TLDR: Displaying subset of my GA data to my customers without forcing them to become GA users and adding them to my GA account.
Any help appreciated!
Without seeing your code it's hard to know where the problem is, but using the serverAuth option definitely works. And when using the serverAuth option, you don't need to specify a client ID or container, all you need to enter is the following:
gapi.analytics.auth.authorize({
serverAuth: {
access_token: 'Server side generated token'
}
});
Here's an example that will work if you enter in a valid access token and the idsfor a view to which you have access:
http://jsbin.com/vukezoheyeco/3/edit
Note: when doing auth like this, it happens sync. This can be a gotcha if you're used to an async auth flow (like normal) and you add an event handler listening for the "success" event after calling .authorize because then your handler will never run.
I think you need the Google Analytics Super Proxy
You download the github package and upload to your own App Engine project, do some minimal configuration and then you have an interface where you can setup Google Analytics API calls which require no user login.
It provides end user URLs that you can use to construct data tables in your front end, it also provides data-table format so it slots right into Google Charts.
So for example, you have a user that needs access to visits, revenue for site section /sectionA/
You set up the GA super proxy to serve them a URL that only includes data for that section - you can try out queries here in the GA query explorer. In this case, metrics=ga:visits,ga:productRevenue and filter~=ga:page=/sectionA/
This produces an end URL with JSON data, that refreshes daily/hourly - your choice. You import this URL into your app.
The end user then logs in to your app, and sees the chart data generated from the end URL for their login. They don't need to know about GA super proxy, they just see the end resulting chart.
You could get more sophisticated by providing dropdowns to select which data chart they see, which changes the GA super proxy URL that is requested.
How to generate Google Analytics tracking code programmatic-ally?
I am new to Google Analytics API, can someone please help
It is NOT possible to create new Google Analytics accounts or profiles programmatically using the existing APIs.
There are two APIs available, the Data Export API and the Management API. However, they are bot read-only.
With the Google Analytics Data Export API, you can develop client applications to request data from an existing Analytics profile for an authorized user, and refine the results of the request using query parameters. Currently, the Data Export API supports read-only access to your Google Analytics data.
Currently, the Management API supports read-only access to five components of the Google Analytics Management system: Account data,Profile data, Web property data, Goal data, Advanced segments
Seems like it's finally possible in 2021 with alpha api.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/admin/v1/rest/v1alpha/properties/create#authorization-scopes
It's not currently possible to create Google Analytics accounts automatically at the moment but generating the tracking code is possible.
The only real variation between the tracking code generated each time you create a profile for a new domain is the web property ID. This is in the format UA-XXXXXXX-X. Each X is a number - the first 7 numbers are the account number and the number after the last dash relates to each web property set up for the account.
You can use the accounts feed of the API to get a list of accounts and their profiles. If an account only has one profile then it's possible to use the web property ID of it to automatically generate the tracking code. However, if there's multiple web properties then you would need a way to decide which one to use (present the user with a selection list etc).
I would like to have a div on my companies website that is filled with links to our most-visited pages dynamically by querying our google analytics account. From everything I've been looking at in the DataExport API though, it seems like the user viewing the site has to authenticate. Am I missing something?
This is correct: google analytics only supplies exported data to an authenticated user (you wouldn't want it otherwise after all, with your competitors peeking at your data, right?-).
You can run the application querying analytics separately, with all required authentication, and have that application supply such data selectively to "your company's website" with whatever level of validation you think is warranted (to avoid snooping competitors) -- if the exact subset of data that you supply (just most-visited pages, for example) is not sensitive according to your judgment, you may in fact get away without the "validation" part!-).
You could add a server side script that grabs your analytics data using the api and write some javascript that inserts it into the div.
There are a number of different client libraries for google analytics you could use.