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.
Related
I need to extract Google Analytics data through it's API. However I do not want to generate any account and key manually (the reason is I do not want to let this technical this to be performed by any non-techie person) and want to dump that data for analysis purpose.
In order to use any of Googles APIs they need to know who you are. You as a developer are identified by the project you create on Google Developer console. Once the project is created you can create a number of different types of credentials including Service account credentials and Oauth2 Credentials.
Answer: No there is no way to programmaticlly create service account credentials. Nor is it possible to use the a Google api without first creating a project on Google developer console.
Note: Google Cloud Resource Manager does exist but is very limited in what it allows you to do.
If someone else is going to be running your application to access their Google analytics Data you should idealy be using Oauth2 in your application and not a service account.
Service accounts are designed as way for the developer to grant others access to data owned by the developer in question. They are not really intended for novice users to be creating their own projects on google developer console and generating credentials.
You are basically asking if you can obtain the credentials necessary to query the API via the API. This does not work.
I am also not sure how this would help you. Before you can do any API operations to a Google Analytics account you need to have an authorized user (e.g. a service account) added to your view or property. If you are in a situation where you can add a user programmatically to an account you might as well just read the data you need.
I want to show google analytics dashboard to my users. It is not possible to give access of "google analytics dashboard" to all users. So I want to integrate it on my own website. Will it be possible to integrate google analytics dashboard on a particular website?
This question gets asked quite a bit. It is important to understand the security model for the API. All Google APIs use OAuth2.0 to authenticate the user. This is designed to make it easy to use the API to access the Users's data on behalf of the user. In contrast you will need to do work to show Your data to your users.
With that said, an example of what you are looking for is the Server side Auth example provided by the Analytics API team.
The simplest answer is to query the API on the server side, with a service account and serve that data as you serve any other data to your users. Read the scenarios in detail, and pick one that best suits your end goals. Understand how the API views the following entities.
A User uses an application.
A Developer develops Application.
An Application has a project id and its associated credentials.
A user authorizes an application to access their data via the API.
You are breaking this paradigm because you are the user and developer from the API's perspective. You want to share your data with people who are not authorized to view it, so you will need to use a service account to access that data and share it directly with your users.
Also remember to add the service account to Analytics View you wish it to access.
Check out EmbeddedAnalytics if you prefer not to get bogged down learning oAuth2, the CoreReporting API, and lastly a charting tool. We simplify the process. All you do is create your chart and embed a snippet of code in your site where you want the chart/dashboard to show.
How can i use gapi.analytics.auth.authorize without button..
I need it for customers, to track visits on their subdomain, and I have my analytics code on page, so they can't use button to authorize, need without it, automatically.
Any example?
Your question isn't very clear it is hard to understand what you mean by Button.
I think you mean that you would like to select data from YOUR Google Analytics account and display it on YOUR website.
To do this you will need to use a service account as apposed to Oauth2 (Oauth2 would popup with a new window requesting access). When you create the service account in the Google developer console take the service account email address. Give it access at the ACCOUNT level in the Google analytics admin section. It must be the account level this will then give the service account access to read your Google analytics data.
Quota: I am not sure what you are extending to do here but remember you can only make 10000 requests per day against your Google Analytics profile. After that you are cut off there is no way to extend this number. So I advice you to save the data in the database someplace you shouldn't request the same data more then once.
Example:
I suggest that you look for an example in what ever programing language you are intending to use. Again your question doesn't state anything about what language you will be using. Hello analytics API might be a good place to start but it depends upon the language the PHP one is way out of date I wouldn't bother with it. Also you cant use a service account with JavaScript so that one is out to.
Update figured out button
Embded api I think I have finally figured out what you mean by button. gapi.analytics.auth.authorize is used in the Google analytics embedded api. Which is JavaScript which it is not possible to use with a Service account. So the final answer to your question is
Answer: You cant remove the button from the Google Analytics Embded api the only way to login with JavaScript is to use Oauth2.
Advice: switch to PHP and use a service account to request data yourself. Or give each of your customers access to your Google analytics so they can login themselves.
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.
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.