Posts from — May 2009
Free php library for the google analytics API
Here is a list of other services that google supports using this same protocol:
| Application | Service name |
| Calendar Data API | cl |
| Google Base Data API | gbase |
| Blogger Data API | blogger |
| Contacts Data API | cp |
| Documents List Data API | writely |
| Picasa Web Albums Data API | lh2 |
| Google Apps Provisioning API | apps |
| Spreadsheets Data API | wise |
| YouTube Data API | youtube |
| Google analytics | analytics |
Login
Google uses something called the oauth protocol. It’s more secure than basic authentication because it encrypts your datastream. (Twitter currently uses basic authentication for API access, but will also support oath at some point in the future).
From the oath website:
“The Initiative for Open Authentication (OATH) is a collaborative effort of IT industry leaders aimed at providing a reference architecture for universal strong authentication across all users and all devices over all networks. Using open standards, OATH will offer more hardware choices, lower cost of ownership, and allow customers to replace existing disparate and proprietary security systems whose complexity often leads to higher costs.”
I have created a free PHP toolkit for retrieving data from your analytics account.
Example of usage:
require_once 'googleAPI.class.php';
$gapi = new googleAPI('your username','your password',"a profile");
$reportData = $gapi->viewReport("2009-04-01","2009-04-25","ga:pageviews,ga:visits,ga:newVisits","ga:country,ga:city,ga:date,ga:browserVersion");
?>
You just need to include the analytics library and initialize the object with your username, password, and profile (this is the site name(s) that you see when you first login to your analytics account).
Parameters:
| $dateStart: | The start date of the report data |
| $dateEnd: | The end date of the report data |
| $metrics: | metric list (multiple metrics need to be separated by commas) |
| $dimensions: | dimensions list (multiple dimensions need to be separated by commas) |
You can download it here
Return values
The “viewReport” function returns an array with a list of all the dimensions/metrics that you requested.
Also, a full list of dimensions and metrics can be found here
May 1, 2009 9 Comments
