Analytics Canvas V1.3 Released- New faster Google Analytics API, Excel dashboards

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas V1.3.0

Analytics Canvas is a powerful platform for extracting data from Google Analytics using the API, as well as other data sources, and creating visual data analysis that can be run automatically.

  • Pull data from hundreds of Google analytics accounts at once
  • Combine, segment, filter and transform data both from GA and other sources like databases and files
  • Avoid sampling for high traffic web sites- no more fast access mode in many cases

Analytics Canvas is available as a free trial.

Read on for more details about whats new in V1.3

Google Analytics Core Reporting API 3.0

One of the most important improvements is of course the move to Googles Latest API, which is much faster, and ensures Analytics Canvas users have access to all the new features Google is releasing.

Enhanced Excel export for dashboards

We’ve also enhanced AC’s ability to insert data sets into Excel, making it possible to create template based dashboards that let you save time by automating your excel reporting. With this new functionality, you can see where the data is coming from and going in your Excel workbooks- and you can build templates that you can reuse again and again.

Click on the screen shots to get a full size view.

First, as always in Analytics Canvas, data transforms are defined step by step with visual blocks on the canvas. In this case, we create three sets- segmented keywords for organic search month by month, a total for the year broken down by segment, and then after filtering on only Mobile visits, we break the visits down by Mobile operating system.

You can see how we build each query by stringing together blocks- the end of each block stream is the excel export that inserts the data into the specific point in the Excel template that we want.

When we insert the data into the template, we can see exactly where it is going (in green) and where the other data sets from this canvas are being inserted (in yellow).

And finally, we can build the template to have the charts we want- and this excel workbook is generated at a click of a button every time we want to update. And of course if you want to Automate, there are both on-premise and in the cloud options available. Learn more.

Powerful new data manipulation capabilities

One of the things we love is how our users keep coming up with cool new things they want to do with data- we’re pleased to add a number of new functions into this version that make it even easier to get your Google Analytics data (and any data, for that matter) into line, and ready for insight.

Just a few of the new features:

  • Improved automation of query partitioning to avoid the dreaded “Fast access mode”- in many cases can eliminate sampling, and let you export your raw Google analytics data even for millions of unique visitors a month.
  • Expanded query design interface including new metrics, meta data, metric and dimension search and more
  • Text parsing functions that let you easily decode complex strings- very useful in jamming lots of information into event labels or custom variables when you are tagging.
  • Enhanced transposing and pivoting
  • Enhanced date conversion capabilities

Upgrading to V1.3

If you are an existing Analytics Canvas user, as always all your canvases will upgrade to the new version. You will need to authorize all your user accounts again, since the change in the API version also changes the authorization method. We strongly encourage everyone to upgrade, and enjoy the new features as well as the speed of the new API.

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool Tagged With:

We’re hiring- Digital Marketing Intern

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’re excited to announce that we’re looking for an intern for the summer to help us spread the word about Analytics Canvas, as well as help us manage the growing amount of way cool data crunching we’re doing for our clients.

If you (or someone you know) is looking for a chance to get some real world experience in a fun, startup environment, working in downtown Toronto then definitely check this out.

‘Cause if you are into Analytics, and digital marketing in general, then this is a chance to see both sides of the business- our products are used by companies and agencies for their digital marketing needs, and we need to market those very same products themselves, using, of course, digital marketing methods.

The ideal person is a Google Analytics and data fanatic, swims the social media oceans like a fish, and loves working hard, but having fun.

For more details, check the detailed description- and email us at jobs@nmodal.com


Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool

Google Analytics fast access mode and accuracy

March 5, 2012 By 2 Comments

Mark Twain popularised the expression “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics”. It is a phrase that I think reminds us that when working with numbers, we have to be careful with the analysis we do.

Statistical sampling is a very valid way to come up with accurate, useful measurement from very large sets of data. The trick is, the sample has to be large enough, and random enough to be valid.

With Google’s recent announcement that it is reducing the default level at which fast access mode- (sampling) starts from 500,000 to 250,000 visits, it is even more important to understand what sampling can do to the accuracy of your data.

The bottom line about sampling is- are you getting enough samples to have the results be accurate?

Obviously, if your sample is 100% of the underlying set, then your results are 100% accurate.

Because Google sets an absolute limit on the number of sessions included in a query, the more visitors you have in the time frame of the query above this limit, the less accurate your results.

The challenge is that the key thing that often triggers sampling is the use of advanced segments- and advanced segments are exactly the tool you use when you are trying to look at a small subset of very interesting visits in a much larger set of visits. So right when sampling is the most damaging, it’s more likely to kick in.

An example of when sampling can cause serious inaccuracy in Google Analytics is when looking at very detailed information like page views or keywords over large numbers of visits. For example, if you are looking at a web site that gets a 2.5 million visitors a month, and look at specific pages and keywords over a period of a year, then depending on how you have the sampling set, you will be looking at a very small number of the overall visits. At the maximum of 500,000 visits, your sample is still less than 2% of the visits- so looking at details like specific keywords or pages just isn’t possible, as important as it might be for your analysis.

One solution to make sure you have all the data is to move to Google Analytics Premium. While the $150,000 a year price tag makes this a solution aimed at enterprises with larger budgets, Google has a powerful solution, and companies are signing up because they have the traffic (and revenue) that make the price affordable. Premium lets you download unsampled data from your custom reports, and has higher limits for other data aspects as well.

But if you can’t afford that price tag, you are probably looking for alternatives to Google Analytics Premium, or for that matter the other equally expensive paid solutions.

In this case, the free version of Google Analytics does offer a solution- the Google Analytics Core reporting API.

It is possible to control sampling through the API- by spreading your queries out over time, and storing the exact results, then aggregating back up. The Analytics Canvas tool and platform was designed to do exactly this, and is able to load millions of rows of data representing hundreds of millions of unique visitors using the Core reporting API.

In the example above, you would do a query for each day in the year, and store the results about pages and keywords in a database. As a result, because daily visits are always less than 500,000 no sampling occurs and you have the exact data.

Once you have loaded your data from Google analytics into the database, the 250,000 or 500,000 visit limits no longer apply, and sampling no longer has to be taken into account when designing queries giving you the flexibility to do the analysis you need.

To discuss with us further how we can help you manage sampling without going all the way to Google Analytics Premium, contact us. We can get you full access to your data, and often avoid sampling completely, even if you have millions of visitors to your site each month. We can provide a completely hosted, software as a service solution that stores your data securely and quickly, and gives you the reporting you need.

contact us

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool, Google Analytics Premium Tagged With: ,

Analytics Canvas V1.3 Beta released- Using Google Analytics API V3.0

December 8, 2011 By 3 Comments

Extraction time reduced by up to 50%

nModal Solutions is pleased to announce the release of the public Beta of V1.3 of Analytics Canvas, which takes full advantage of the new Google Analytics Core Reporting API announced today. We’d like to thank Google for having granted us early access to the API, as it is our goal to always deliver the latest capabilities in our products, as quickly as possible.

If you are already an Analytics Canvas customer, or already have a trial key, you can download the Beta for V1.3 here. If you are new to Analytics Canvas, sign up for a free trial, and you’ll be up and running in no time. Check out these comparisons of previous vs new:

How much faster? WAAAAAY faster!

The new version of the API is seriously faster- one reason is that now it uses JSON to deliver the data, which is much more efficient than the previous XML format. We’ve seen it take less than half the time for queries with the new version.

Also new: Detect sampling

Nobody really likes sampled data. While Analytics Canvas can be used to avoid sampling by partitioning the requests to Google, it is helpful to know if queries are resulting in sampling or not. In V1.3, there is a new tab in the query definition area, that lets you do just that:

Exciting things will happen in 2012

The world of Web analytics moves fast, and certainly 2011 has seen a lot of important changes in the web interface and capabilities of Google Analytics. The creation of Google Analytics Premium for enterprise customers with big data needs has also changed the market, and with the new API capabilities things are just getting better.

2012 is going to be an exciting year for Analytics Canvas- stay tuned, Google Analytics data use will never be the same.

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool, Google Analytics API Tagged With: ,

How to avoid Google Analytics fast access mode

December 2, 2011 By 1 Comment

We all love Google Analytics- it is a wonderful tool, great features, great price, but if you have a high traffic website, it won’t always give you all your data.

So how do you avoid fast access mode? How can you eliminate sampling?

You need break your request to Google into smaller chunks, so each request is less than the amount of data that triggers sampling.

Use Analytics Canvas

The Analytics Canvas desktop tool lets you do this quickly and easily, by simply specifying how many date ranges you want to break your query into, and then automatically combines all the results into the final answer with all the data.

It then lets you save that data to a file (as an spreadsheet for example), or if you like, writes it into a database.

Analytics canvas is available for 30 days as a free trial.

Analytics Canvas tutorial

Here is how to do it in the tool. For more detailed tutorials and videos go here.

First, define the dimensions and metrics you want:

Then, select the “time period” tab, and select “Set specific time period”, then all you have to do is select the date range, and how many partitions you want.

The result will be the exact data set for the full date range as long as you have enough partitions to avoid ever including more than 500,000 visits in a single partition. In addition, the smallest partition is 1 day, so if you have more than a half a million visitors a day this will make the sampling more accurate, but won’t avoid it completely. At a half a million visitors a day, you might consider Google Analytics Premium- although it costs around $150k a year, its got big data capabilities, and the upcoming Analytics Canvas enterprise will let you take advantage of all that data to the fullest.

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool, Google Analytics API Tagged With: , ,

How to get more than 10 metrics from the Google Analytics API

November 13, 2011 By 4 Comments

While the best queries might not have lots of data, but have the RIGHT data, sometimes you do have a reporting need that means you want to get a lot of different metrics from Google Analytics all at once. Because Goal completions are tracked as metrics, this is often the case- if you are tracking 10 goals, for example, you want to get a data set that has both the standard metrics, as well as all ten Goal metrics.

Of course the Google Analytics API is limited to 7 dimensions and 10 metrics, that doesn’t change. But using Analytics Canvas to access the API makes it simple to connect multiple queries together, and get the final result you need.

The key is to have two (or more) queries that contain exactly the same dimensions, but different metrics, then join them together, using the dimensions as the join key.

In Analytics Canvas this is done easily using the JOIN block:

The two queries are easily made- create the first one, then cut and paste, and edit just the metrics. Then after you connect the two queries to the two inputs of the JOIN block, just select all the dimensions as joined columns. To confirm that you are getting what you expected, the number of rows in each query should be the same, as well as the resulting number of rows from the Join.

You now have a complete snapshot of traffic, by source and medium, per day, with fourteen key metrics.

Give it a try with your own Google analytics data- Analytics Canvas is available for 30 days as a full function free trial.

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool Tagged With: , ,

Google Analytics Premium- Showing the value of data

September 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The interwebs are a-buzz today with the announcement by Google that there is now a Premium, paid version of their web analytics product.

Google Analytics premium offers a number of key advantages. The service guarantees in the form of SLAs, the more formalised arrangements with certified partners for support, attribution analytics, but perhaps most importantly, more data and less sampling.

Google Analytics, for a very long time, as been a remarkably powerful tool, particularly for its price. Free. Of course, any company who uses Google Analytics seriously knows it’s not really free. True they are not paying for the tool itself, but with a number of internal and external resources working hard to keep it all functioning, and to get the data to the people that need it when they need it the cost is significant.

But when Google announced the new premium offering, what is interesting is that the key differentiation is data volume. Certainly, some in large enterprises will be comforted by the new SLAs, or the support agreements with partners or Google, but in the end, the big difference is in the data. In general, I note a trend- everything in the premium is way bigger (ten times or more) than the free version.

More data. Exact data with less sampling.

In any market, prices are important, and give a clear signal on regarding the value of things. Google, in offering this new premium service, focused on data, and priced at $150k a year, has clearly sent a signal about the value of data. It’s not free, because the big data is important.

Data is valuable. Hats off to Google for always knowing this. Google premium is an exciting evolution in the analytics industry. Many large companies currently use both the free version of Google Analytics and some other paid tool. My prediction is that in many cases, even at $150k a year for Google Analytics Premium, the other paid tool is going to start to look expensive, and in a lot of cases, companies will make a switch.

Filed Under: Google Analytics API, Google Analytics Data, Google Analytics Premium Tagged With:

Analytics Canvas presented at the Google Analytics Partners Summit

September 22, 2011 By 1 Comment

Last week, Google held its annual Google Analytics Partners Summit at the computer history museum in Mountain View California.

This year, Google invited ten of its most accomplished third party application developers to present their solutions to the Partners and demonstrate their applications.

Analytics Canvas was proud to have been selected to attend, and we had a great time speaking with the partners, and members of the Google team. This event really underlined the depth and breadth of Googles commitment to Google Analytics, and how effective their partner program has been in creating a network of experts to support the tool. The event attracted around 500 Google Analytics experts from all over the world, from about 200 certified Google Analytics Partners.

It was a fantastic venue as well, and it was just way too fun to be presenting around the corner from a cray super computer, and a full scale model of Babbages difference engine, just to name a few of the items in the computer history museum’s collection.

As Google continues to evolve Google Analytics, Analytics Canvas will be releasing new solutions and services to maintain our place as one of the lead developers and service providers for the API. Thanks to our friends at Google for the recognition, and the chance to present to the Partners, and we look forward to the exciting times ahead!

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool

Is it your traffic changing- or how Google Analytics Tracks it?

August 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

Google Analytics is a fantastic web analytics tool- and it is improving constantly. One result of improvements and evolution, however, is that how data is collected and stored changes, and can change your metrics.

Usually these step changes are subtle- in certain cases, depending on your traffic and situation they could be earth shifting. While these changes can sometimes be frustrating, there is no simple solution- and they are often the price to be paid for continuous improvement, and best accuracy.

The next time you see a step change in your data, it doesn’t hurt to consider the possibility that your traffic hasn’t changed, but the way that Google Analytics is reporting it has.

Here are some recent examples:

History is the old definition, the future is the new

Example: Session definition

Before Aug 11 2011

A session ended when :

  • More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
  • At the end of a day.
  • When a visitor closes their browser.

After Aug 11 2011

A session ends when:

  • More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
  • At the end of a day.
  • When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

What it means to you and your analysis

You are going to see more visits in cases when visitors leave and return to your site in a short period of time. Because there are more visits this is going to affect many metrics- bounce, pageviews per visit etc. etc.

The session change and it’s impact is explained in great detail by Avinish Kaushik in a long, but very descriptive video well worth worth watching.

Example: Image search

Before July 22 2011

Image search from images.google.com is referal traffic with a referal path of “imgres”.

After July 22 2011

Image search is included in search traffic. (Which makes sense).

What it means to you and your analysis

If you have significant search from images.google.com, and if that traffic is different than your existing search traffic, all your metrics could have a step change for the search category.

These changes were covered here by searchenginewatch.com

Changing categories within a dimension

Example: Changes to how city is recorded

Before Feb 24 2011

All traffic within a certain rectangle was defined as “London” in Google analytics.

After Feb 24 2011

A number of smaller, more detailed areas within the original rectangle were given their own city name.

What it means to you and your analysis

You’d suddenly get much fewer visits to London. SEOOptimise.com noticed this and did a good blog post on it.

Discontinuing metrics, including removal of history.

Example: Connection Speed

Before Feb 24 2011

Connection speed was recorded for each visit.

After Feb 24 2011

Connection speed is being eliminated- new functionality around page load time has been added, requiring additional code, but providing much better, meaningful information.

What it means to you and your Analysis

After the depreciation date, no data is collected (the interface puts all visits under “unknown”). This metric does not exist in the new GA interface, and will return an error if an attempt to query it in the API is made even for historical periods. If you need this data for any reason, you need to export it out of the old GA web interface now, or it will be soon unavailable.

Conclusion? Be aware of step changes.

The bottom line is that in many cases the changes are all for the better, and while historical analysis is important, we know that the future is the key, and looking too much in the rearview mirror isn’t good analysis- the benefit of better and more accurate metrics are worth the temporary challenges in comparing recent historical data.

If you do need to compare apples to apples for annual or quarterly reporting for example, then you can use the Google Analytics API to pull the more detailed data out, and adjust for any troublesome changes based on the the date of the change.

And in terms of eliminated data, you need to be aware of the upcoming changes, and if needed pull the data out of Google Analytics while it is still available, and store it in your own database.

While obviously we’re biased, we think Analytics Canvas is the best tool to do this kind of work- it connects easily and quickly to the Google Analytics API, and lets you do the analysis you need, as well as export the data directly in to databases and files as needed.

So next time you see a sudden step change, maybe something has changed in the real world, and you are seeing visitor behaviour… or maybe the definition of what you are analyzing has changed.

For notifications from Google for the Google Analytics API, this group has been setup:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-analytics-api-notify?pli=1

And of course another source of information is the Google Analytics blog.

Filed Under: Analytics, Google Analytics API, Google Analytics Data Tagged With: , ,

Analytics Canvas V1.2 released

August 8, 2011 By 1 Comment


We are pleased to announce that V1.2 of Analytics Canvas is now available, both in the free trial, and for upgrade to our subscribers.

This release of Analytics Canvas both keeps the application up to date with Google Analytics API changes, and adds some interesting new functionality. It makes it even easier to pull data from multiple Google Analytics Accounts and profiles, analyze, cleanse and transform it and pump that data into databases and files.

New Functions, and a new Pivot block

This version brings some new functions, particularly in the area of URL and text parsing.

It also adds a powerful new block, the Pivot block, that lets you exchange row values for new columns.

For example, if you query Google Analytics for visits by country and date, you get this:

After using the pivot block, you can turn the country into new columns, and get the total number of visits for each date shown this way:

Very useful for getting ready for different types of graphs. If you add other dimensions, you can then build multi-series bar, area or line charts with Country on the X-axis.

Google Analytics API updates

We work hard to keep Analytics Canvas on top of all the latest developments from Google, here are some of the recent changes:

  • New page load time metrics added: ga:pageLoadTime , ga:avgPageLoadTime , ga:pageLoadSample
  • Depreciated metrics and dimensions removed: ga:connectionSpeed, Confidence interval

To keep everyone informed, the Google Analytics API team posts updates regarding the API at this Google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-analytics-api-notify

We look forward to everyones feedback on the new version, and have even more enhancements in the works. We’re excited by enthusiasm of our customers and users, and amazed by the powerful and innovative analysis they are doing with Analytics Canvas.

To give Analytics Canvas a try, signup now for the free trial. Discover what you can do when you have full access to your Google Analytics data.

Filed Under: Analytics Canvas Tool, Google Analytics API
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