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.
Related
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 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 working on the architecture for a project that includes a Android and iOS apps and a web interface with a subset of the mobile apps functionalities. The project is basically a e-commerce solution. In all three interfaces I'm using Google Analytics to track some information. However I'm having an internal discussion about the extent of the information I should send to GA. What should I store in GA and what should I store in my own server?
Let me give you some examples.
Session tracking is clearly something that belong to GA.
ProductDetailViews. Sounds like something that should go into GA, specially considering the enhanced e-commerce module.
Shared item. When a user shares some content over a social network, should I store that information on GA or in my own server? I'm inclined to GA but it becomes more ambiguos.
Do you see my point? Can someone share a general rule or recommendation on what should be saved in GA and what should be saved on the projects own server?
Thanks
For those examples I would generally send all the hits to Google Analytics. Here are a few reasons:
Preventing data silos. You want all of your data in one place and Google provides you with a database reachable via the API where you can keep all your data organised in one place. This is important when you are considering measuring performance, as you want to avoid duplication of conversions or traffic hits
Useage of Google Analytics advanced segments. With all your data in GA, you will be able to create advanced segments for analysis. But the real power is if you are using AdWords or retargeting, as you can send those Advanced Segments to AdWords, and target those users around the web with your custom data
Single point of reference for users All analytics are inaccurate, but you want to make sure they are inaccurate to the same degree. Using GA keeps all your data on the same playing field
Usability and Freedom of information Its easier to serve up your data to users within the GA interface as people are more likely to know how to navigate that than your database. You can also use the GA API to pull out any data you need to push into other visualisation tools.
User session merging With your data and userID tracking in GA, you may be able to track users as they arrive via mobile to desktop and back again, over multiple sessions.
What you need to avoid putting in to Google Analytics is personal info such as names, email address etc. There are against the TOS. But you can capture a unique userID, and match that outside of the tool later.
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.
Is there a tool to capture actual user experience on a my website. I would like to capture things like customerid, which button they clicked, information in their cookie, query string etc. etc. etc. Is there a tool that I can plug into my website that would provide this information for a web page and dump into nice columns in sql server table? I would like to be able to …
go through the logs.
Pick a particular log entry
Zoom into that log entry and look into more detailed information like querystring, cookie data etc.
Be able to capture all the information on what user was doing on that page when the exception happened.
Is it possible? Is there a tool out there for this?
Thanks.
This article describes using Google In-Page Analytics to generate heat maps for where users click on your web pages but this is aggregated rather than for specific users. In addition to the normal hits GA records for a page you can also add custom hits based on client-side interactions using a technique similar to tracking outbound links. We used this with the GA Funnel to track progress through a sign-up form.
Having ELMAH installed is unbelievably useful for a wide range of reasons and will be well worth configuring if you haven't already.
I found WebLog Expert to be very handy for analysing the IIS logs at an aggregate level.
I'm not aware of any one product that does all three elements and none specifically well at the per user level.