For anyone that has used Google Analytics for any length of time (particularly those that are driven by reports), the question has come up, “The tool is great, but let’s use the API to…”

Well, there wasn’t an API….until this week.

Google announced this week that an API is being released that will allow read-only access to ALL data found in your analytics accounts. The possibilities are endless with this release, but the opportunities in reporting and business intelligence become immediately interesting.

Imagine if you have a business running multiple websites for various purposes feeding to your single bottom line. Would you like to see how profits can be directly influenced by varying traffic patterns across these multiple channels? Would that help you in creating an overall strategy for how you structure all of your SEO, PPC and various other internet marketing efforts? Of course it would!

Relatively simple requests like these were a nightmare before Google’s API was released – typically sending the marketing or IT department scrambling for log files and munging data in spreadsheets, only to surface with days old data that was merely a snapshot from the past. Now, some minor time with a developer can open doors to infinite possibilities of custom data reports.

Of course, this is just a single example of how this API could be of assistance. Honestly, I cannot wait to see what our data visualization team will do with this knowledge!

Read more about the announcement at:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/04/api-for-google-analytics.html

Or the details of the API can be found at:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataDeveloperGuide.html

There is no doubt that we will be delving deeper into this topic as the API evolves and our understanding of its capabilities grows – our curiosity and our clients’ needs will demand it!