CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticsgoogle-analytics-api
MikeK
MikeK

Reputation: 383

How can I pull data from Google Analytics to see the top pages visited from the current page?

I would like to create a small sidebar on each page of my website that contains related/popular pages with perhaps the top five pages users visit after reading the current page.

I could track and record user movements across the site myself and build the list that way, but as my site already uses Google Analytics and I know the data is there I'd rather access that if all possible.

The trouble is that I don't have the faintest idea whether it is possible or not.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2839

Answers (2)

M Schenkel
M Schenkel

Reputation: 6364

If you don't want to get involved with learning the API and develop this from the ground up, check out EmbeddedAnalytics (disclaimer: I created the service). We could provide such a widget.

You may find This Article useful. It provides the necessary query to find the "next page visited" using the page of interest as a filter. Ultimately your query would look like this:

https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3Aabc&start-date=30daysAgo&end-date=yesterday&metrics=ga%3Apageviews&dimensions=ga%3ApreviousPagePath%2Cga%3AnextPagePath&sort=-ga%3Apageviews&filters=ga%3ApreviousPagePath%3D%40pricing

The query above will give you the "Next Page" along with pageviews assuming the "previous" page contains the word "pricing".

We could easily build such report widget for you:

  • You would insert a javascript source code snippet into your page. The javascript would pass the page url to our server and we would return the next "most popular pages visited".
  • The pages could be "linkified" so that someone could click the link to go to that page.
  • We already have caching mechanism in place. So each pageview would not require a new query to google (making it quicker and also staying away from the API quota that was mentioned above). For pages that are hardly ever looked at (e.g. less than once a week), we could make "on-demand" calls to get the statistics.
  • In my experience with the API, the lag in the API is only a couple hours. It may be longer for larger sites.

Please let me know if you are interested in such widget and I can work with you.

Upvotes: 1

Linda Lawton - DaImTo
Linda Lawton - DaImTo

Reputation: 116878

Remember that the Google Analytics Reporting API is not real-time it can take between 24 - 48 hours for the data to finish processing and be in the API for you to request.

The Realtime Google Analytics api is real time but the data is only about 5 minutes old and its very limited to the dimensions and metrics you can request.

Quota, with either of those APIs you are limited to 10,000 requests per day per profile / view. I have no idea how many pages there are on your site or how may users are on your site but this could quickly blow out this NON extendable quota.

Options: Except that its not realtime data and use the reporting api every night run a request against the api get everything for two days ago then show your users on your site data that's two days old. Store the data in the database then you are showing them data on in your DB and wont have an issue with the quota as you only requested it once.

But this isn't exactly what you want as its not showing a users activity over the site. TBH I am not sure you can exactly use Google Analytics to track a user as the data is user non specific.

Upvotes: 4

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