Attention Developers: Google Analytics API Launched | Hacker News Reader

Attention Developers: Google Analytics API Launched

analytics.blogspot.com

107 pointstimf29 comments

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.

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

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!

Use clicky, http://getclicky.com

I've run A/B experiments via them.

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)

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.

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.

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.

It depends on the market. What gets frequently overlooked when comparing Omniture SiteCatalyst to GA is the services and the reseller / SI market. There is a lot more support / consulting available for high-end SiteCatalyst installations and the cost of the license fee has very little to do with the overall cost of managing the campaign.

Why only Omniture ? Bunch of others like TeaLeaf,Coradiant...

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).

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.

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.

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

Google App Engine, you mean?

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.

Well, that's true for all modern web analytics packages, no? Crunching Apache logs with AWStats is way more bogus given the ridiculous number of rogue bots on the web these days.

Based on my (very simplistic) tests, very few users of my business-oriented site block ads or javascript, but I'm sute it depends on the site. Most of my users are stuck on IE, after all.

I guess I feel this pain more than most, since a lot of my sites are aimed at web developers.

Well get back at them and use a bunch of non-degradable JS. Kidding... Sort of :)

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Nope

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

For what it's worth, I find the Clicky iPhone-tweaked page to be a pretty good way for us to get stats on our current usage.

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.

Also Touchlytics:

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

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