The long sought after Google Analytics Data Export API beta has finally been made available to the public. The API will allow developers to access the read-only data from Google Analytics in their own applications.

Any data that’s available through the standard Analytics web interface is available through the API. The Analytics API is a Google Data API. This is the same API protocol used for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster Tools.  If you’ve used any of these APIs, the Google Analytics Data Export API will look very familiar to you.

Client libraries for the JavaScript and Java programming languages have been provided. Support for more programming languages is in the works. For any programming language you want to use you can make requests directly to the API over HTTP and access the data in XML.

To get started, you firstly need to get the documentation from Google Code. Here you’ll find example code, a developer guide, FAQ, and the complete API reference.

You can then sign up for the Google Analytics API Notify email group so you get the key announcements on feature updates, code changes and other service related news that relate to the API.

It will be interesting to see some of the inventive ways developers present the data from Analytics.

Anyone who manages their own website knows how important it is to track the traffic coming to their site. There are several solutions out there, Google Analytics being the most well known. I wanted to see what other alternatives were out there.

After a bit of searching, I came across Piwik, an Open Source alternative to Google Analytics. After reading through the Piwik website, I thought I would give it a try.

Installation is very simple. Just upload the files to your webspace, and then access the installation URL. The Piwik installation will firstly perform a system check to make sure your system meets the minimum requirements. Next comes the Database access details. Once the Database is setup, your are then asked to enter the Super User details. Finally you are required to add a website URL to track.

For the tracking to work, you need to add Javascript to each page you want tracked. Tracking covers the standard things like vistors, unique visits, Bounce Rate, Browsers, location and so on. The one feature I really like is that all sections of Piwik are actually plugins. You can easily customise the information you see in Piwik by enabling/disabling the plugins. Expanded functionality in the future will be added via new plugins.

Piwik Dashboard

As this project is Open Source, it’s open to anyone who wishes to contribute. There are already several translations of the project. As Piwik is still in beta (currently at v0.2.33 as of writing this article), there is still a few months of development before v1.0 is reached. However, even at this early stage, I’m finding Piwik to be feature rich and quite stable. Some of the features the developers have planned to implement are:

• multi sites dashboard
• new modular Javascript API
• PDF reports

Piwik looks to be a promising alternative to Google Analytics. The developers have delivered a robust platform that will allow Piwik to grow with user contributions over coming months. Definitely worth taking a look at.

For more information: piwik.org