

 Attention Developers: Google Analytics API Launched - timf
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/attention-developers-google-analytics.html

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greg
Google analytics is installed on something like 40% of all sizable websites.
What somebody should do with the API is link up the traffic flowing between
those sites. Then you could tell how much value one site is delivering to
another. You could create an affiliate network overnight.

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greg
Appears that some people agree with me here. Email me if you ever want to
discuss more.

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FiReaNG3L
What I really want i a read / write API to Adsense, to be able to do some
automatic A/B optimization. Some startups can do it right now, but they
involve scraping which is against Google TOS. Not taking the chance to lose my
Adsense account for that!

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TimothyFitz
Use clicky, <http://getclicky.com>

I've run A/B experiments via them.

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dabbledb
We've been using this - see <http://blog.dabbledb.com/2009/04/introducing-
dshbrd.html> for an initial post about what we've been up to.

(I normally post as avibryant, but had to create this new account to get
around noprocrast. sigh)

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TJensen
This seems like the real beginning of the end for Omniture. I interviewed with
them once and their strategy for defeating Google in analytics was to just
move faster. With Google's developer base, that doesn't seem possible.

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mr_justin
Is Omniture really a direct competitor with Google Analytics? I haven't used
it (Omniture) in a long time, but last time I did we used it extensively for
A-B testing, click tracking and other user-experience type events that I don't
generally use Google Analytics for.

I am fully aware that I'm probably using about 10% of Google Analytics
potential, so maybe they already do all this kind of stuff.

The thing I remember the most about Omniture is this: it was expensive as
hell.

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eli
Yes it is. Precisely because they offer a report builder (for an addt'l fee)
that lets you create custom reports that are simply impossible with Google
Analytics. My employer was paying them a huge amount of money just to be able
to generate reports that collate data from a few dozen different sites.

A GA API changes all that.

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chaosmachine
Unfortunately, Google Analytics is becoming increasingly less accurate as more
and more people begin to use javascript blockers and other privacy tools.

This is especially a problem for sites with a high percentage of Firefox
users, a significant portion of which are using the NoScript extension (it has
almost 50 million downloads).

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wysiwtf
And there are easy ways that Google could track people with javascript turned
off. I always thought they would add this as a 'Pro' feature and charge money
for that option. So you'd have to pay for the complete stats, most personal
sites wouldn't care about non-javascript stats, while most commercial sites
would gladly pay the fee.

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chaosmachine
It's probably in Google's interests to make better tracking available to
everyone. But I think trying to avoid script blocking by using other means is
only going to trigger a filtering arms race.

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tvon
The "other means" is providing a way to submit/process the web server log
files.

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jodrellblank
Google App Engine, you mean?

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tvon
I don't mean Google App Engine, no. I'm not sure where you're getting that
from, unless App Engine lets me upload my Apache logs into my Analytics
account where GA will match up IP addresses to page views and whatnot... ? Not
sure how it could since I'm not using App Engine for anything, even so I've
googled around a bit for 'google app engine analytics' and I'm not finding any
results about doing this for App Engine hosted sites either.

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BobbyH
What I'd really like is an Excel plugin/toolbar that uses this API to let me
create a dashboard for my sites inside an Excel spreadsheet.

Downloading 20 CSVs once a week (and pasting them into my spreadsheet) is
labor-intensive and lame.

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alex_c
Hehe, yesterday I was just messing around with some screen scraping for
Analytics. Talk about good timing :) This should open up some fun projects.

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christofd
The mentioned Desktop Analytics application is a fascinating use of Adobe's
new AIR cross-plattform app: <http://www.desktop-reporting.com/polaris.html>

I can imagine so many uses of integrating monitoring data into apps.

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swaroop
I was more interested in a way to _write_ data into Google Analytics,
something like what MixPanel does ( <http://mixpanel.com> )

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tracy
The samples don't really seem to be working though. Clicking through auto-
inputs an ID, but the next step does not show anything (on the graphs). Does
this work for anyone?

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mrtron
Nope

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nixme
iPhone app anyone? Might even be a nice addition to blog-posting apps to see
stats on views, etc.

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vulpes
There are 2 iphone apps that already tap into google analytics. One is Ego
(<http://ego-app.com>) and another is analtyics app
(<http://analyticsapp.com/>) Both not bad.

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tvon
Also Touchlytics:

<http://www.newstreetsoftware.com/touchlytics/>

