Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it has some limitations, particularly with very large data. Thankfully, Google has provided an excellent API to allow access to your data- and with tools like Analytics Canvas companies are pushing what they can do with their Google Analytics data to the limit.

1. Analytics
Canvas
Using the Google Analytics API
to enhance Analytics
Case studies and methods

2. James Standen
15 years of Data warehousing and
Business Intelligence
Founder of nModal Solutions Inc.

3. Analytics Canvas
Released Feb 2011
Google's Featured
Application
April 2011-Aug 2011
Selected by Google to
present at Analytics Partner
Summit September 2011
A powerful visual tool that makes using
the Google Analytics API point and click.

4. In this Webinar:
What we love about
Google Analytics.
What we “not so
much love” about
Google Analytics.

How the Google API and
Analytics Canvas can help
with the challenges.

5. What do
we about

6. It’s FREE! What’s not to love about that?

7. It’s fast. You can create a new account, install
the code and be tracking in minutes.

8. It’s got lots of features. More all the time in
fact. This fall has been a big step change, and
there are certainly lots of things to like.

9. Challenges

10. Nobody loves sampling. Google samples when more than
500,000 sessions are involved or more than 1M unique
dimension combinations.
While its understandable why Google sometimes has to
sample, everybody wants to have accurate, “cross-checkable”
data. I haven’t found anyone yet that likes the yellow rectangle
of inaccuracy.

11. Sampling
Particularly impacts segmented data.
Very often the value of analysis is to
find the 10% that has hidden
insight, the smaller the data set the less
accurate the sampled results.

12. $ CND
$ US
$ SDG $ AUD
£
€ ¥
For companies that do ecommerce in
multiple currencies, Google Analytics
also has some serious limitations in
regards to reporting.

13. Google Analytics does store a currency
with each profile- but not all currencies
are available, and it has no effect on the
data, nor does it do currency
conversion.

14. Sampling
Global ecommerce reporting

15. In general, cross profile reporting is a
challenge. Sometimes duplicate code is
installed- but it all has to be
maintained, adds more profiles, and
doesn’t cover historical data.

16. Sampling
Global ecommerce reporting
Cross profile reporting

17. While GA works well for a small number
of analysts that can access entire
profiles- if you have large numbers of
users and want to control what they
see, it has limited capabilities.

18. Sampling
Global ecommerce reporting
Cross profile reporting
Fine grained user access
control

19. One solution:
• Much, much more data
• Much higher sampling limits
• Larger export capability
• Better user access control
• And much more.
$150,000

20. Another Solution:
The Google Analytics APIs

21. Why
+

22. Analytics Canvas provides a visual, easy to use user
interface that lets you take advantage of the API
without having to learn how to program it.
And when the API changes, you don’t have to
rewrite everything- just upgrade to the latest
version to be able to take advantage of new
features, but still use all your existing queries

23. Control sampling
Lets look into more detail at how we can use the
API to control sampling.

24. When does sampling
start?
Not pre-queried and:
500,000 sessions
or
1M dimension value
combinations

25. Analytics canvas lets you define a query that
breaks the API requests up into small date
ranges, and therefore avoids sampling by
never asking for too much data. Then it
combines the data sets together, giving you
your exact answer- Automatically.

27. Cloud based data warehouse example
1) Load all historical data, partitioning to
ensure no sampling
2) Incrementally load a sliding X day
window of data every night
automatically

28. Case Studies
Plus , a Franchise reporting website
delivering Ad words to 50+
franchisees in an end to end
solution.

29. Global ecommerce
reporting
Fairmont has many hotels, each one with its own
Profile in GA, and does ecommerce in 10
Currencies. It used to mean lots of work in
Spreadsheets to get reporting.
Q1 USD Q2 Euro
Q2 USD
Asia Q3 USD
Q3 USD

30. Global ecommerce
reporting
With Analytics Canvas, a single canvas does all
the conversion, they can run the report every
day if they like, and get a single currency view.
$US,$CND,$A
UD,
$SDG,€, ¥ ,£

31. Global ecommerce
reporting

32. Global ecommerce
reporting

33. Automated Multi
profile data
management
SQL Server
Multiple queries per profile
as required by Business Intelligence
model.

34. Now GSK’s Google Analytics data
can be integrated into their Business
Intelligence system, and combined
with data from their enterprise
systems.

35. Fine grained user access control
and reporting
Client: US wide franchise
based retailer.
• 400+ Stores
• 50+ Franchisees

36. Ad words managed by Franchisor
Regional
Regional Ad words Landing Pages
Campaigns

37. By building a custom
website and
dashboards, nModal
provided an end to end
cloud based solution.
Now all of the franchisees can access
the data they need, and ONLY the
data they need in a set of
dashboards with drill down and
export capabilities.

38. Google Analytics API solutions from
Do-it-yourself to turn key.
Full service end to end
Analytics Canvas
solutions on-premise or
Desktop tool
in the cloud.

39. Questions?
info@analyticscanvas.com
james@nmodal.com