What do the Google Analytics related API's buy me that the Google Analytics UI cannot achieve?

Question

Long time ago, I took and passed the Google Analytics IQ certification test. At the time, I don't believe there were such things as Core Reporting API, Management API, and Metadata API (and probably some other Google Analytics related API's that I don't know about). Now that I am going through the Google Analytics IQ certification training course again (provided by Google, presented by Justin Curtoni?? I believe that's his name), I found that they now have Core Reporting API, Management API, and Metadata API.

I am a computer programmer by trade; so, I have no problem with programming using these API's. However, what I don't understand is, what do these API's buy me that the Google Analytics UI cannot offer? There is no reason to write a program that utilizes these API's simply because I can do it. To me, the existing Google Analytics UI has a lot of tools, reports, and other features that quite extensive. I am hoping that some of you can help me see something that I am probably missing.

Answer 1

HI I guess there is no definite answer. Here are some things you can do with the APIs:

• Automating AdWords CRO based on keyword ad and campaign performance.
• Scoring leads based on Analytics data (Engagement with different items) and external data from a CRM.
• Collecting unsampled data using multiple daily queries
• Filtering using several dimension.
• Tracking conversions for periods longer than supported by AdWords.
• Looking at a funnel via segments
• Analyzing funnels with non-linear structures
• Create more robust alerts
• Export data to BigQuery and analyse it together with data from other systems.
• Create Machine learning apps for behavioural customizing your site.
• Create a dashboard with data from multiple views
• Use product recommendation to implements "better together" in an online store.
• Automate creation of accounts and properties + their integration in a Hosting provider's console.

Cheers!!

Answer 2

Take a look at the GA Partner Page. I would say the primary reason is to "liberate" GA Data from outside of GA itself. As Eike mentions, you can create dashboards and combine this data with other sources for a complete "View" of your online presence.

Answer 3

• Dashboards (executive summaries; managers often want nice visualizations instead of boring drill-downs)
• Custom reports for user groups that do not have a Google Account or are not supposed to have access to full reports (e.g. Affiliates)
• advanced filtering and aggregation (GA report cannot do everything)
• You can combine analytics data with external data (e.g. you are not allowed to store personally identifiable information within GA; but you might store a custom key that allows you to link analytics data to customer data from you CRM or fulfillment system)
• Machine-to-machine communication; I once did tracking for an airline that needed trend data on what people where searching for and what they where actually booking; that data was used to allocate/withdraw resources from busy/lame flights, and part of this was done by hooking up GA to their backend system

Answer 4

The APIs are primarily for programmatic access. For example, if you need to create 1000 accounts all with the same property/view structure and then maybe add a few view filters to each of those accounts, you'll probably want to use the Management API. Doing that by hand would be a nightmare.

The same thing is true for the reporting API. Maybe you want to set up task that runs every monday morning and reports on the previous weeks data. And maybe you want to display that data on an internal dashboard for your company using some fancy charting library. You'd have to use the API to get the data.