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Google Analytics Data Export API with Ruby + Gattica

Written by Chris Le 6 Comments < back to blog home

Download Gattica (with goals and segment support) on GitHub

Getting Google Analytics data export API is amazingly fun!  I originally contributed to the open source Google Analytics library for PHP.  Recently, I’ve been coding in Ruby for it’s speed and agility.

Ruby is amazing!  In 15 lines of code I could get all visits, bounces, for every client, by month.

To date, Ruby only has two Ruby Gems to interface with the Google Analytics API: Garb and Gattica.  Unfortunately, they both seem to be missing some of the deeper areas of the API:

Why Garb’s and Gattica’s code didn’t work for me

• Garb’s filtering is not flexible. Using Garb’s report classes becomes very limiting, very quickly when you’re attempting to do some deep work in the API.  Stevenwilkin added a hack to support dynamic segments.
• Gattica 0.3.3 doesn’t fully support goals or segments.  Too bad!  Gattica is very easy to use but didn’t support what I needed to do.

Solved: Wrote code. Made available to everyone

So, my solution was to add my proverbial brick to Gattica so that it supported goals and segments.  You can download my fork of Gattica on GitHub.

Quick start for developers:

Include it your Rails app by adding one line to your gemfile

gem 'gattica', '>=0.3.3.4',
:git => 'git://github.com/chrisle/gattica.git'

(Make sure to run ‘bundle install’ afterwards.)

Or… download and build it yourself

wget https://github.com/chrisle/gattica/tarball/master
tar -zxvf chrisle-gattica-*
cd chrisle-gattica-*
git build gattica.gemspec
git install gattica

Conntect to Google Analytics

ga = Gattica.new({  :email => 'johndoe@google.com',
                   :password => 'password',
                   :timeout => 500 })

Collect the accounts that the authenticated user has access to and show them on the screen

accounts = ga.accounts
accounts.each do |a|
   puts a.title  # => "www.mywebsite.com"
   puts a.web_property_id  # => "UA-1234567-12"
   puts a.profile_id  # => 55555
end

Specify an account and get visitor and bounce data for this month

ga.profile_id = 55555
results = ga.get({ :start_date => '2011-01-01',
                   :end_date => '2011-02-01',
                   :dimensions => ['month', 'year'],
                   :metrics => ['visits', 'bounces'],
                   :sort => ['year', 'month']})

Find the first profile that has goals

first_profile_with_goals = accounts.detect {
   |a| a.ga_goals.count > 0
}

Collect a list of segments available to the authenticated user and display them

all_segments = ga.segments
all_segments.each {|s| puts "name: " + s.name + ",  id: " + s.id}

Segment by a mobile traffic (Google’s default user segment gaid::-11)

ga.profile_id = 55555
mobile_traffic_segment = "gaid::-11"
results = ga.get({ :start_date => '2011-01-01',
                     :end_date => '2011-02-01',
                     :dimensions => ['month', 'year'],
                     :metrics => ['visits', 'bounces'],
                     :sort => ['year', 'month'],
                     :segment => [mobile_traffic_segment]})

Thanks to code ninja Bob Brodie of Sumo Heavy fame for introducing me to Ruby On Rails.

Posted: 02.22.11