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.
Related
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
we have events listing website and events from different organizers are grouped (by URL), like -
www.site.com/organizer/event1
www.site.com/organizer/event2
www.site.com/organizer/event3
etc. How to give an organizer an access only to his/her part of the site's Google Analytics?
Easy way -
An organizer registers in Google Analytics
An organizer creates a counter in Google Analytics
An organizer sets this counter in his/her profile on our website.
We add this counter to our Google Analytics code on www.site.com/organizer/* pages
He/she clicks on some link in the profile and sees the GA stat only for own events.
The way I want it:
He/she clicks on some link in the profile and sees the GA stat only for own events.
Is this possible with some API to separate statistics for www.site.com/organizer/* and share a private link to it with organizer?
After reading your comments in another answer (which is basically just a copy of the comment I left on your question). I have changed my recommendation left in comment, think you should use the Google Analytics API for this.
Since you want to give others access to your own data I suggest you use a service account. You will need to do this in a server sided programing language, say PHP or C#.
Every night run a job that will extract the data you want though the Core reporting API. Store it in the database then create a page that will then display only the data you want to the different people. You will only need to run your job once per day as the data for previous days will never change. Wait at least 24 hours to get the data as data hasn't completed processing for 24 hours.
I am not sure what language plan on using but these tutorials should get you started: Google Service Account with PHP or Google Analytics API Authentication with C#
I would create different profile views with filters to include only the subset of data for the subpages.
This way, you can add a specific user access rights to that specific profile only, so they can only view that profile when they log in.
Create an include only filter which filters on Request URI: /organizer/event1, /organizer/event2, /organizer/event3 etc.
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.
There are multiple profiles on my website and each user is managing his/her profile himself. I am trying to find the most efficient way to present analytics of each profile to its owner. Here are 3 ways I found:
Record each and every hit made on a profile page against that profile. This is not just count of hits, this requires to record IP, country, referrer, search terms etc. against each hit. This would require me to manage a huge database as there would be a lot of hits on each page. And a lots of processing on this database. Even if I have to de this, what database is recommended for such use?
Use Google Analytics on each page. But I am not sure that Google Analytics provide an API to fetch Analytics for individual pages.
Use some open source solution like piwik. Again I'm not sure if they provide per page analytics or not.
Please suggest the pros and cons of using each approach.
Update: More explanation - Think of it like a facebook page where each user can see hits on his page. What solution you'd suggest?
For Piwik, you can create a site id for each user, because you are allowed unlimited site ids with Piwik. You can can use a tracker with that user siteid, so when your member logs in, they get data only on their pages. You might also want to look at using custom variables and use the Piwik API to filter data.
Check here for info on multi-tracker: http://piwik.org/docs/javascript-tracking/#toc-multiple-piwik-trackers
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.