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Live blogging Google I/O: Google Analytics APIs: End to end

May 20, 2010 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

Nick Mihailovski

First time GA has done anything at Google I/O.

Four components
* Processing
* Management
* Data collection
* Data exporting

Core processing

Dimensions: Strings (80 dimensions)
Metrics: Numeric values (95 metrics)

1. Logs (collection)
2. Goals, filters, profile settings (management)
3. Data structure (processing)
4. Functions (processing)
5. Tables (processing)
6. Query engine (export)

Core visitor interaction model

Visitor/session/hit levels

1×1 tracking pixel with a number of parameters appended. Three of these parameters relate to visitor, session, hits.

Their back end parses their logs and sorts and stores based on parameters.

ga:visits

int visits(Session session, int index) {
}
[Too quick to get these code snippets]

Developer platform

Data types (several)
Protocol (_utm.gif)
Client libraries:
* JavaScript (ga.js)
* Android SDK
* iPhone SDK
* Mobile websites
** PHP/JSP/ASP/Perl
* ActionScript 3
** Flash/Flex/Air
* Silverlight

Account Management

Data types:
* Accounts
* Web properties
* Profiles
* Goals
* Advanced segments

Protocol:
* Google data

Data export API

Protocol: Google Data
Client libraries:
* Java
* JavaScript
* Python
* .Net (C#)
* Ruby
* Perl
* PHP

Use the Data feed query explorer (in Google Labs)

Example integration

Using visitor behavior to optimize user experience: ranking a number

Start with a list of unordered links. Can use GA to track the number of times people click on these links.

Demo is powered by MAMP; hopefully the code will be made available. (Definitely need this code)
Two parts to the demo:
1. How to send data explicitly to GA
2. How to retrieve data from GA

Part one was implemented with PHP and JS
Part two is a scheduled .Java application

Recently introduced asynchronous tracking (to avoid blocking the browser).

Working on a better developer ecosystem:

http://google.com/analytics/apps

Working on a better turn-around time than 24-hours.

Working on complete data export, but difficult because they store it as a cube. The current export API is actually more of a query API.

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