Export Your Google Analytics Data with New API

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Apr 22, 2009

4 comments

Google Analytics is a very popular website analytics tool. This is partly because it's free, but also because it offers a lot of useful analytics on what's happening with your website. But people have been asking for just a little bit more from Google.

Now they have delivered. Google has made available a Google Analytics API that provides you with read-only access to your analytics data to integrate into your own custom applications and mashups.

How the Analytics API Works

Using the Google Analytics Data Export API you can download your analytics data via API feeds to create your own dashboards, create new applications you can sell or create mashups that integrate your data with other business data. It's really yours to do with what you like.

There are two types of data you can download:

Analytics accounts and website profiles
Analytics report data from a single profile

As the Analytics API is a Google Data API, it uses the same protocols as the Google Calendar, Finance and Webmasters tools. So if you've already dug into those APIs, this one won't be hard to get a handle on.

Google has provided client libraries for Javascript and Java and are working on supporting additional languages. You can still use the API with another language by accessing the API over HTTP — the data is in XML form.

Pick up the documentation on the Google Code site and register for notifications of API changes.

Examples of Services Using the API

This release is the public beta of the Google Analytics API, but it's been tested quite well to date. Here are a couple of examples of applications built using the API:

Google Android App from Analytics Metrics

Polar Analytics - Desktop Analytics

youcalc Mashup - Dashboard Analytics in iGoogle

Want some more examples of the Google Analytics Data API in action? Check out these solutions.

A lot of developers are very happy with the release of this API as you can clearly read from the comments on the Google Analytics blog. What do you plan to do with the API?