Google Analytics (GA) is the de facto solution for analyzing web site traffic and trends. Millions of users around the globe rely on GA for determining not only what web site content is resonating with visitors, but also how visitors came to arrive at the web site, each visitor’s geographical location, their operating system and browser, and much more. Yet logging into GA daily can be a tedious task. Although you can configure GA to send formatted reports via email on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis, sometimes you’re just interested in quickly gaining a bird’s eye view of key statistics.
Thankfully, last year Google made the Google Analytics Data Export API available for public use. Although still in beta,
it already provides a powerful yet simple way to access your GA data and
format it in a manner most convenient for your consumption, whether that’s by
integrating it into a corporate dashboard, monitoring trends using a desktop
application, or creating a simple mobile interface. In his PHPBuilder article, Jason Gilmore shows you how to begin taking advantage of this API to create a handy interface
for web consumption.
