google analytics api - Advice on integration with web app - google-analytics

This is more a question of if this is the right way to achieve the desired solution.
We are building an eCommerce store like Shopify. We want to display report/data to our users for their stores.
Using GA can we do this. We was thinking of using one account. Adding the tracking api. Posting the store sales using the eCommerce plugin.
Then pulling the data back into our control panel, show graphs etc.
Is this a workable solution.
What would the issues be.
Best way to segment for each store so that we don't have data bleed (we may have thousands of stores - coincidentally they would have a domain like mystore.yourstore.com)
Any advice or better ways of us doing this without re-inventing the wheel.
Thanks

You can segment data with a custom Google Analytics variable or by setting the subdomain, e.g.:
pageTracker._setDomainName("subdomain.yoursite.com");
I think your approach is viable, but the notable challenge is that you have build out custom code to pull all of the data from Google Analytics into your application. I don't know of many off the shelf products that would offer this type of segmentation for analytics without requiring you to manage and create users for every subdomain/store.
The only thing I can think of is building out automated reports in Google Analytics (or similarly in Omniture) and have them sent to your store owners. But unfortunately those would be static reports such as PDFs.

Related

merging profile views in google analytics

I have a website where users commonly go to x/y/z/userprofile=123456 and so my analytics data is being polluted with a lot of different profile views. I want to merge them all into one 'viewed profile' bit of data.
Does anyone have any idea exactly what I should be putting into filters to get the information I want?
I am completely new to GA so I am really unsure where to start

Google Analytics - Custom Alerts for Real-Time data

I'm looking to create a custom alert to notify me whenever X number of people are on the site at once. This data is already available using the Real-Time reports page. However, this does not seem possible via the Intelligence Events section. From there, I'm only able to create custom alerts based off Day, Week, or Month data. Has anybody found another area of Google Analytics that would make this type of report possible?
Google Analytics have just launched a Beta of their Real Time API which might let you do this: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/google-launches-real-time-api-for-analytics-in-invite-only-beta/
You can use the real-time API for that. It's been possible for quite a few years now. You can find all the documentation for that right here. It's typical OAuth + JSON API.
You can also use a paid service. I built one, Metrics Watch. It really depends of your goal and how critical this is to your business/job. If it's critical, I would highly encourage you to look for a paid service, no matter which one.
Hope that helps!

Google Analytics: Report delayed conversion?

We have a site that tracks conversions through Google Analytics for redirects to an affiliate. However, not all redirected visitors convert to a sale after they leave our site. Our affiliate reports back to us weekly on who converted (and we can identify an individual user session from that report). Is there a way to get that conversion data back into Analytics? We've got a great coding team, but I just need to point them in the right direction.
Good question Jeff. If you don't mind the accuracy of the timing being off, your team could certainly just step through your site and intentionally trip the conversions.
Other than that, you may look into using a custom solution to bulk import that data using this type of API: Google Analytics for Mobile Websites
This Google Analytic server-side solution supports PERL, ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP. If you're looking for a repeatable process for batch importing GA data, this maybe a viable solution for you.
Hope this gets you going in the right direction.
I would not recommend manually 'tripping' the conversions.
There is no easy way to get the data back into Analytics. And it would depend on your reporting requirements (time lines, etc)
One way to approach this is to set a custom variable that is scoped to a visitor that would identify the visitor in an anonymous way (not personally identifiable manner, beware the privacy policy).
http://cutroni.com/blog/2011/05/05/merging-google-analytics-with-your-data-warehouse/
So when a visitor comes to the site, a custom variable would get set. This variable acts as a key to associate behavior on the site and the affiliates. Once you receive the data about which visitors converted from your affiliates associated to the non-personally-identifiable ID, you can use this to have code fire some conversion events once it recognizes on a separate visit that a visitor with certain custom variables set using the _getVisitorCustomVar()
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApiBasicConfiguration.html

Can Google Analytics do a user's who looked at x also looked at y?

Just wondering if this this possible? I realise you could never use it to display recommendations on a page but it would be useful from an analytics point of view to see for example what other products user's who've looked at product x have also looked at.
You can use Advanced Segmentation to do this.
Advanced Segments slice Google Analytics data on the basis of sessions. Sessions are a collection of pageviews that correspond to the popular notion of a visit.
If you create an Advanced Segment for users who visited /product/x/, it will return data from all the sessions in which that page was viewed. (Similarly, you could create a segment for /product/x AND /product/y. From there, you could filter it to only include your product pages, and exclude the original products themselves.) As a result, this session-based querying is perfect for your use case.
So, yes, you could use Google Analytics API data to inform a simple recommendations engine. The only caveat I'd give is that the Google Analytics API is a little slow, so you'd want to cache the data locally in your app, rather than querying it directly on every pageload.

Best way to generate an automated report in Google Analytics for a specific collection of URLs

Currently using Google Analytics as a supplement to our paid tracking software, but neither of them are giving us exactly what we need.
I have a list of about 60 or so urls (out of about 1500) on the site that I wish to setup a monthly report for that can be emailed to multiple recipients. I can't seem to figure out how to create a report showing just the hits on these 60 urls, I can apply advanced filters on the content page but those disappear after a while and sometimes error out when adding too many URL's.
Is there a method I'm missing in Google Analytics to achieve this goal or am I better running an SSIS package to pull the URL's from the API and formatting a document that way?
Yeah, advanced filters are not really designed for this kind of thing.
Here are some things which may work for you:
Try setting up a new GA Profile with an Include filter to filter only the URLs that you want to report on. You can use a regular expression to identify the 60 URLs. Then these will be the only URLs tracked in that particular profile.
Try setting up an Advanced Segment to select the Pages using a very long "OR" filter.
You could set up a new GA account and log the URLs into that account with additional tracking code. This is not really recommended as the 2 accounts will share tracking cookies.
Use Excellent Analytics to pull down data into Excel for the URLs in question using the GA Export API.

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