Seeing Google Analytics Off-Site?

July 20, 2009 8:58 AM

The boss has assigned me a project that boils down to a marketing "dashboard," the two key features of which are viewing our Google Analytics and an advertising calendar in one space. How can I pull it off?

I thought iGoogle would be a great starting point, but it looks like all the Google Analytics gadgets have died off in the last few weeks. Another option I considered is using Analytics' XML output to create some kind of RSS feed, but viewing the Analytics graphs on the same page as the marketing calendar seem like a big part of the assignment. Help me impress the boss!

posted by sjuhawk31 to computers & internet (7 answers total)

The Google Analytics API might be a good starting point.
posted by nostrich at 9:24 AM on July 20, 2009

Thanks, nostrich, but your suggestion reminds me to add a caveat: I don't know how to do a lick of programming on my own, so pre-packaged solutions are preferred.
posted by sjuhawk31 at 9:26 AM on July 20, 2009

You might be able to hack something up like putting both pages in frames/iframes, but basically yeah, you want to use the APIs. If you're not a programmer, hire someone to do it using the API
posted by crayz at 9:54 AM on July 20, 2009

If you have Sharepoint at your place of work you can create a page which displays various frames, one of which could be a web page, one an Outlook-style calendar, etc.
posted by Lleyam at 11:00 AM on July 20, 2009

My understanding from a conference I've attended on setting up dashboards is that most of these are still done manually in Excel or PowerPoint or whatever your tool of choice is. That means that somebody (you) will be doing the grunt work of pulling it all together.

That's probably a good idea initially anyway since you may not fully understand how you want to collect and display the data yet, so it's early to ask your IT people to build something more automated for you until you're sure of what you need and that you'll actually look at it.
posted by willnot at 11:58 AM on July 20, 2009

Along the lines of what willnot said, set up a template and then just print screen copy and paste together a dashboard that can be pdf'd in ten minutes or so. The good and bad part about this is that you will be the only one that can generate the dashboard.
posted by pwally at 12:23 PM on July 20, 2009

Salesforce.com is your friend.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 3:04 PM on July 20, 2009