Do you eat, sleep and breathe web analytics? Do you find yourself constantly checking how many visitors your websites have received today? Is scouring your analytics in search of new wisdom a hobby?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you'll love what Google just announced. If you answered no, there's still probably something of value in it for you too.
What did Google announce? An API for Analytics. And with it, Analytics just got a whole lot more open and a whole lot more powerful.
The API provides read-only access to your Analytics data, giving you the ability to build applications that present Analytics data in new ways and through new interfaces. There's already a mobile app for Android-enabled phones as well as a desktop client.
For Analytics users with development resources, there is almost no limit. With the ability to mash up, mine and integrated Analytics data, businesses and publishers will be able to realize far more from Analytics than was possible pre-API. Already, there are some interesting applications and I'm sure more are on the way. Expect to see integration with popular content management systems, for instance (thank you!).
I use Analytics on my sites and as much as I think it's a great product given the price point, I must say that with this move, Google Analytics just got a whole lot more appealing.
If you're interested in playing around with the API, JavaScript and Java client libraries are available and Google plans to release libraries for other languages. In the meantime, since requests are made over HTTP and responses returned in XML, building with other languages won't be much of an issue.
Photo credit: svensonsan via Flickr.
Reader comments (2)
Internet Advertising Agency at BDR London
1:40PM on 22nd April 2009
I use analystics on all my sites. I totally agree that it is a fantastic tool for the price! I get a strange buzz watching my traffic increase on the graphs. The new API could provide some great applications for internet marketers to take advantage of.
12:58PM on 23rd April 2009
It was a matter of when and not if for the Google Analytics API. GA has grown into such a fantastic product that small and mid-tier companies use it quite comfortably and being in the mid-tier category, the missing icing on the cake has been the ability to export data... this will give GA another massive boost in terms of appeal to a wider reaching audience..
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