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Archive for the ‘analytics’ category

Whitelabel Analytics using Google Analytics

July 19th, 2010

Whitelabel products can be seen anytime you walk into a grocery store.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia

They’re becoming even more popular in online business models:

Tracking

Most whitelabels operate by either providing a back-end API, or in having a DNS CNAME entry pointing to the host. In the case, for when you’re powering a whitelabel through a CNAME entry, usually the partner wants to have a way to track their stats. An easy way for them to do this is to include their Google Analytics code and then have them setup a Custom Segment to isolate the traffic to the whitelabel site. That setup is easily accomplished through the following instructions:

Creating Custom Reports

If you are only interested in statistics for an exact Web site, following the steps above to drill-down to your site becomes a time consuming process. You can follow the steps below to create a custom report that is already focused on one or more URLs. In Google Analytics, you can create an “advanced segment” to narrow down a report to basically any criteria.

Log into Google Analytics
Click “Advanced Segments” under “My Customizations” on the left menu.
Click “Create New Custom Segment” on the top right of the screen.
In the “type to filter” search box on the left menu type in “hostname” as one word.
Drag the green hostname box over to the center column and on top of the dotted box labeled “dimension or metric”.
Change the condition to “contains” in the drop down box.
In the value box, type in your full URL of your web site minus any slashes, http://, www or anything else. Example: autoparts.yourdomain.com
Down at the bottom of the form you need to give your new segment a name, for example call it “Entomology site traffic”.
Click the button “create segment” to the right of the name box.

You have now created a new segment, which will be available at any point in the future from only your account. This segment can be applied to your reports by following the instructions below.

Viewing Custom Reports (Segments)

Log into Google Analytics
From any report or the Dashboard click down arrow in the drop down window next to “advanced segments” on the top right of the screen.
By default “All Visits” will be checked, which is the default segment that shows all traffic and all sites. Under “Custom Segments” you will see the segments you created.
If you wish to only view your segment, check it in the “Custom Segments” box and un-check “All Visits”. If you leave “All Visits” checked, it will overlay the reports to allow comparisons.
Once you have selected your segment and unchecked “All Visits” you can click “Apply” below the “Custom Segments” menu.

You are now viewing all of the reports that are narrowed to to only this specific segment or Web site. You can verify the segment is selected by looking above the graph on any report and it should say the name of the segment you created.

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Posted in analytics, Tips and Tricks

Ruby Script to Extract Google Analytics Keywords, Landing Page, Medium Entrances to CSV/TSV format

April 19th, 2010

I’ve had versions of this script hacked together before. In fact, if you search for “Google Analytics Data Extractor” the #1 result is a google groups posting I made in a former life for a C# program I developed: http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help-misc/browse_thread/thread/d2ad6ddf3d73e511

There’s now a couple of ruby gems out there for handling the Google Analytics API

One of them I’ve been doing some light-contributing to, including the pagination support (automatically grab all results in 10,000 result chunks)

I pushed a couple of changes up today at: http://github.com/er1c/gattica that hopefully will get merged into the main trunk soon (http://github.com/activenetwork/gattica)

One of the more useful uses of the library is to extract your Organic Search Results Keywords from Google Analytics. We’re using this at Frugal Mechanic to see how people search for Auto Parts.

require 'rubygems'
require 'gattica'
require 'fastercsv'

ga_profile = "" #Enter your Profile Here
start_date = Date.new(2009, 1, 1)
end_date = Date.new(2009, 12, 31)
file_path = "data" # Directory Needs to exist

puts "Google Username: "
u = gets.chomp
raise "bad username" unless !u.empty?
puts "Google Password: "
system "stty -echo"
pw = gets.chomp
system "stty echo"
raise "bad password" unless !pw.empty?

class ExtractKeywords
  def initialize(email,password)
    @gs = Gattica.new({:email => email, :password => password})
  end

  def get_accounts
    results = []
    @gs.accounts.each{|account|
      profile = {}
      profile[:site_title] = account.title
      profile[:profile_id] = account.profile_id ## this is the id required for requests to the API
      profile[:account_name] = account.account_name
      profile[:account_id] = account.account_id
      profile[:web_property_id] = account.web_property_id
      results << profile     }     return results   end   def connect_profile(profile)     @gs.profile_id = profile[:profile_id]   end   def connect_profile_id(profile_id)     @gs.profile_id = profile_id   end   def get_keywords(start_date = nil, end_date = Date.today)     results = []     csv_data = @gs.get({         :start_date => (start_date || (end_date - 365)).to_s,
        :end_date => end_date.to_s,
        :dimensions => ["medium", "keyword", "landingPagePath"],
        :metrics => "entrances",
        :sort => "-entrances",
        :page => true}).to_csv(:long)

    return FasterCSV.parse(csv_data, :headers => true)
  end

end

gs = ExtractKeywords.new(u, pw)
gs.connect_profile_id(ga_profile)

(start_date .. end_date).each { |date|
  file = "#{file_path}/medium_keyword_landingpage_visits_#{date.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}.csv"
  next if File::exists?( file )

  FasterCSV.open(file, "w") do |csv|
    csv << ["medium", "keyword", "landingPagePath", "entrances"]
    keywords = gs.get_keywords(date, date)
    keywords.each{|row|
      csv << [row["medium"], row["keyword"], row["landingPagePath"], row["entrances"]]
    }

  end
}