What do the Google Analytics related API's buy me that the Google Analytics UI cannot achieve? - api

Long time ago, I took and passed the Google Analytics IQ certification test. At the time, I don't believe there were such things as Core Reporting API, Management API, and Metadata API (and probably some other Google Analytics related API's that I don't know about). Now that I am going through the Google Analytics IQ certification training course again (provided by Google, presented by Justin Curtoni?? I believe that's his name), I found that they now have Core Reporting API, Management API, and Metadata API.
I am a computer programmer by trade; so, I have no problem with programming using these API's. However, what I don't understand is, what do these API's buy me that the Google Analytics UI cannot offer? There is no reason to write a program that utilizes these API's simply because I can do it. To me, the existing Google Analytics UI has a lot of tools, reports, and other features that quite extensive. I am hoping that some of you can help me see something that I am probably missing.

The APIs are primarily for programmatic access. For example, if you need to create 1000 accounts all with the same property/view structure and then maybe add a few view filters to each of those accounts, you'll probably want to use the Management API. Doing that by hand would be a nightmare.
The same thing is true for the reporting API. Maybe you want to set up task that runs every monday morning and reports on the previous weeks data. And maybe you want to display that data on an internal dashboard for your company using some fancy charting library. You'd have to use the API to get the data.

Dashboards (executive summaries; managers often want nice visualizations instead of boring drill-downs)
Custom reports for user groups that do not have a Google Account or are not supposed to have access to full reports (e.g. Affiliates)
advanced filtering and aggregation (GA report cannot do everything)
You can combine analytics data with external data (e.g. you are not allowed to store personally identifiable information within GA; but you might store a custom key that allows you to link analytics data to customer data from you CRM or fulfillment system)
Machine-to-machine communication; I once did tracking for an airline that needed trend data on what people where searching for and what they where actually booking; that data was used to allocate/withdraw resources from busy/lame flights, and part of this was done by hooking up GA to their backend system

Take a look at the GA Partner Page. I would say the primary reason is to "liberate" GA Data from outside of GA itself. As Eike mentions, you can create dashboards and combine this data with other sources for a complete "View" of your online presence.

HI I guess there is no definite answer. Here are some things you can do with the APIs:
Automating AdWords CRO based on keyword ad and campaign performance.
Scoring leads based on Analytics data (Engagement with different items) and external data from a CRM.
Collecting unsampled data using multiple daily queries
Filtering using several dimension.
Tracking conversions for periods longer than supported by AdWords.
Looking at a funnel via segments
Analyzing funnels with non-linear structures
Create more robust alerts
Export data to BigQuery and analyse it together with data from other systems.
Create Machine learning apps for behavioural customizing your site.
Create a dashboard with data from multiple views
Use product recommendation to implements "better together" in an online store.
Automate creation of accounts and properties + their integration in a Hosting provider's console.
Cheers!!

Related

Is there an API or other data source for FlightRadar24 aircraft flight path?

I would like to know if there is an API that gives freely the flight paths of all aircraft currently flying or that had flight some days ago over the world. It could be in any projection and any format. I imagine that it would be most likely a table with each row being an aircraft/flight and the correspondent geopath in one column.
Thanks.
I was looking around for the same topic.
The terms and conditions for getting data from Flightradar24 are shown there
https://www.flightradar24.com/terms-and-conditions
... they talk only about getting data after a business contract on the kind of data (e.g. flights with a specific filtering) and on the format (JSON, CSV, ?). With the contract one may download the data, maybe via an API.
My conclusion: Flightradar24 does not share its full set of data, only a limited set with payment.
Searching for "Flightradar24 API" you will find some sites offering Flightradar24 data via their own API primarily requiring payment, a few for free at a very low level.
You will also find some software projects for accessing and processing data from the Flightradar24 sites with a focus on Python. But these software packages build on tracking the access of the Flightradar24 site from a mobile app or the desktop browser. Result: a few accesses of an endpoint may work then comes the stop sign: Flightradar requires an authenticated access.

How to move data from Adjust, Funnel and facebook Ads to google big query?

Can someone provide me the steps to push data from Funnel,Adjust and Facebook Ads to google big query ??
We are not interested in third party softwares like stitch.
Thanks
Welcome to StackOverflow!
Assuming you mean Funnel.io here? If so, isn't this what Funnel already does for you? If you are looking to migrate away from that product and do this yourself, you'r going to need to find importers for each of the data sources which Funnel connects too individually. It may be, actually, that you just want to stick with Funnel to make life easier?
BigQuery offers several connectors to external data sources via their Data Transfer Service, while Facebook Ads is not one of the official connectors, Google recently opened up the platform to third-party connections via the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, which does contain a connector for Facebook Ads.
However, this means you are once again using a third party connection, so may not be what you are looking for.
If you don't want to use third party connections, and there isn't a Google built solution, then your remaining option is to build your own data importer, usually via the data sources API.

How to build Google Analytics 'collect' like api using Google Cloud services

I'm trying to build a data collection web endpoint.The Use case is similar to Google Analytics collect API. I want to add this endpoint(GET method) to all pages on the website and on-page load collect page info through this API.
Actually I'm thinking of doing this by using Google Cloud services like Endpoints, BQ(for storing the data).. I don't want to host it in any dedicated servers. Otherwise, I will be end up doing a lot for managing/monitoring the service.
Please suggest me how do I achieve this with Google Cloud Service? OR direct me to right direction if my idea is wrong
I suggest focussing on deciding where you want to code to run. There are several GCP options that don't require dedicated servers:
Google App Engine
Cloud Functions/Firebase Functions
Cloud Run (new!)
Look here to see which support Cloud Endpoints.
All of these products can support running code that takes the data from the request and sends it to the BigQuery API.
There are various ways of achieving what you want. David's answer is absolutely valid, but I would like to introduce Stackdriver Custom Metrics to the discussion.
Custom metrics are similar to regular Stackdriver Monitoring metrics, but you create your own time series (Stackdriver lingo described here) to keep track of whatever you want and clients can sent in their data through an API.
You could achieve the same thing with a compute solution (Google Cloud Functions for example) and a database (Google BigTable for example) and writing your own logic.. but Custom Metrics is an already built solution that includes dashboards and alerting policies while being a more managed solution.

Web app idea directions

I have an idea for a web app project, however, due to not having any programming knowledge, I'm first asking here for directions. Essentially, I wonder if the idea is realistic and what the most effective way could be for me to tackle it.
I want to combine several open-data sources, some in the form of API's (e.g. Google maps), others in the form of statistics in Excel sheets. Like a Mashup of different sources? The idea is to use the data to perform some data crunching and in effect provide some insights from this data in an aggregated way. I have previously played around with dashboards during an internship and I am attracted by the idea to maybe produce a Single page application for my idea with some visualisation. Any thoughts on this?
I have looked at the following services online, but I have no idea if they can help me produce a web app which aggregates different data sources and that allows for nice presentation:
Zoho Creator,
QlikSense,
Sproutcore,
Caspio
Any thoughts on this are highly appreciated!
Best regards
If you’re not a developer and would like to get started immediately, then you could get started by signing up with Zoho Creator. Its intuitive yet easy to use builder lets you setup web app in minutes.
Regarding your query for aggregation from different data sources, Zoho Creator provides REST API that allows you to access external data sources to interface with your web applications.
Zoho Creator allows you to setup the perfect web-app on a secure cloud with admin level access to handle the necessary permissions and manage data.
You can customize the Reports in your Zoho Creator application using Report Settings to suit your needs. Web-App can be created by converting a CSV/Excel into a full-featured Web DB / app in seconds.
You can check out our help videos or register for our upcoming webinar to know more about Zoho Creator.
Happy Building!!
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho Creator

Google Adwords Keyword Tool API to automatically extract data onto a website

Im looking to use Google Adwords Keyword tool data on a website. Ive been looking around in the API and I cant find much to match what I need. I noticed a lot of keyword research tool websites use google as their main source for their information. How would I go about doing this and extracting the data and have it run on a website automatically so it wouldnt need to be updated manually each month?
you can use the Traffic Estimator service in the AdWords API:
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/reference/v201409/TrafficEstimatorService
Be warned that this is notoriously inaccurate (which is odd given that you would think Google had its own data to call upon!)
I use the TargetingIdea service in the AdWords API to generate lists of keywords to use for building AdWords campaigns. (https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/reference/v201409/TargetingIdeaService.TargetingIdea)
First off you need an API key - they're not that easy to get and your app needs to offer a whole lot of features to meet the required minimum functionality - take a look here https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/requirements
Once you've jumped over that hurdle you get the data from Google by sending a request to the service. That request includes some targeting criteria like location and language and also a "seed" keyword. You can also specify if you want closely related results or broadly related results.
For example if you sold tractors you'd put 'tractors' in as a seed keyword and then the API would return either closely related terms like 'tractors for sale', 'used tractor spares' etc or more broadly related terms like 'agricultural machinery'.