Google Analytics API available for your site

Few days ago Google has announced availability of its Analytics API for your own web sites.
This is great news for web administrators and anyone wanting to find out more about the details of web traffic on your web site.

With Google Analytics, you can gather, view, and analyze data about your website traffic. By embedding our basic JavaScript snippet into your pages, you see which content gets the most visits, average page views and time on site for visits, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, and more. You can also use the simple administrative interface to set up goals and filters to control what data goes into your reports based on your business needs. The best part: this sophisticated, full-featured web analytics package is free.

Additional benefit of Analytics API is ability to use Data Export API and then integrate it with your own data.
Indication of power of Analytics API is in fact that FeedBurner has stopped providing the same service in favour of Google Analytics.
With Analytics API one can view various reports detailing visitors (unique visitors, total visits, Pageviews, time on site, bounce rate…) traffic sources separated by direct traffic, referring sites, search engines etc. Not to mention that one can compare two metrics for a parameter or compare to a web site.


If you don’t like the default dashboard or reports you can check out and download have a look at Polaris for Google Analytics.
It provides new view of the dashboard but it is built using Analytics API.


Polaris comes as free version for one web site profile or only $15/year for multiple profiles. It is very low demand on system configuration. Old Pentium III with 512MB should be just fine… as long you have Adobe Air 1.5 installed.
This is definitely easier way to track web site traffic than to collect the log files, import into database and generate reports on your own.