The web is a place where everyone is in your backyard. This can be both a blessing and a curse. How do you know where your website traffic is coming from and how much of it there is? [...] How was traffic led to your website in the first place and why? How long do people stick around and what do they like the most about your site? These are all some of the many questions you can answer with web analytic software, but the real question is why would you want to answer these questions at all and what's the best way to look at the answer?

[...] If we look at a heat map it's easier to spot where the majority of our visitors and traffic are coming from, geographically. It also helps us understand that people visiting a virtual space can, and will, be physically located in different parts of the world.

He includes the steps to recreate a map like the one included in this page showing the current view statistics on his site. He uses a MySQL backend to store the GeoIP data and parses out the Apache "access_log" to get the IPs of the visiting users. He then runs these against the GeoIP data and passes this country data on to Google's visualization for handling. He also recommends using the tools offered by the Google Webmaster Tools to further enhance your introspection into your site's visitors.

It supports: browser Settings Detection, campaign Duration, campaign Fields (custom), cross-domain linking and last but not least Ecommerce tracking.

The configuration lets you set the various keys for your Analytics accounts, the domain name for it to live under, browser detection settings and various other settings for campaign configuration and domain setup. You can find the full code on his github account ready to download or clone.

More and more users are turning away from Google Analytics (GA) as a provider of web measurement solutions on security, independence and functionality grounds. One problem they run into is that after years of using Google's product they have a considerable inventory of data about their websites stuck with GA, which makes starting over with an alternative provider something of a hassle. [...] Effectively, thanks to Google2Piwik, nothing is stopping you from moving away from Google Analytics to a safer, more robust and more functional alternative.

The tool is written in Python, so you'll need to have that and both access to the Google API and have a Piwik install set up (it's PHP/MySQL based) to make the translation. There's a few limitations to the import, though, so be sure to check out the tool's project page for those. Piwik is an open source project that provides real-time web analytics that installs on your own server and gathers data via a Javascript tag embedded in your site.

Recently I started playing with the google analytics API, looking at ways to bring analytics onto dashboards and generate simple reports from the data in there. Very shortly after I started to look at the API, I had working data retrieval, so I thought I'd share my experiences (and code!).

She mentions the data reference document you can use to find the methods to call for specifically what you want as well as a snippet of sample code to connect and pull data based on a set of "query data".

I'm using pecl_oauth to authenticate users against their google accounts (see my post about using OAuth from PHP), but even after I have a valid google user, working out which analytics accounts they have access to and how to refer to them is a puzzle in itself, so I thought I'd share what I learned.

In her example she shows how to fetch the permissions for a user (which analytics they can access) via a call to the "/feeds/datasources/ga/accounts" URL. This returns some XML easily parsed by SimpleXML to grab the accounts' names and IDs. This is used to fetch the profiles and gather the "magic tableId" for use with the Export API to pull the actual data.

A lot of cool features are being hatched in branches that should hit trunk in the near future! [...] Things to look forward to are view helpers for various services like Google Analytics and the various CDN loaders although this is still under review and might be a few releases away.

Other new features he mentions include a reworked authentication stack that will allow for more than one auth adapter to be used at one time (his example is a normal login and a Facebook login). To help, an auth module for Facebook will also be included to make this even easier.

Although no standard library is available from Google for PHP, some small and easy interfaces are available out there. In this post we will see how to access Google Analytics data using PHP using the GAPI library.

The GAPI library is an open sourced project that provides a direct, easy to use interface you can use to connect directly to the Analytics service without having to handle all of the manual stuff yourself. Sameer shows how to get information from the service like the top ten sources and visit counts, regional information and how to do some filtering on the results returned.

I've been thinking about how I can make use of this API to enhance the sites I'm working on. But before kicking off ideas, I had to find out how to access and use the API. I finally came up with a PHP class that will do all the grunt work of calling the API, you just need to supply your report's parameter and the PHP class will return you an array of Analytics data.

The class [zip] makes connecting to the Analytics backend as easy as dropping in a username/password, defining which profile to use and the date range. The getReport() method does the hard work

Magento, has gotten a good amount of attention leading up to and since its initial release. I was recently entasked with doing an analysis of its features and thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts. This first one will cover the Analytics and Reporting feature set.

He mentions the Administrator Action logging, the Google Analytics integration, the Admin Dashboard for reporting overview, included RSS feeds, Accounting Reports and Feedback reporting.

Google Analytics allows you to collect pretty robust data about how users move through your e-commerce site. Here's how to make it work with Zen Cart, an open source shopping cart.

You'll need to already have a Google Analytics account set up for the application, a Zen Cart instance installed and have at least a passing knowledge with using PHP and MySQL. There's two steps to the process - a creation of a custom functions file (code provided) and a modification to two other files (the checkout success page and global footer) to send additional information to the Analytics service.