Today I am going to write about an excellent application, which I discovered yesterday. The main reason why I hated checking out my Google Analytics reports was that I hated logging in to my Analytics account. My personal Google account is different from the one I use for website related uses, including Adsense, Sitemaps and Analytics. Whenever I try to check my personal mails and Analytics account together, I get logged out from the former. That was when I discovered Google Analytics Reporting Suite based on Adobe Integrated Runtime (Previosly Apollo), developed by Nico.
Google Analytics Reporting suite is a desktop application based on AIR, which allows you to access your Google Analytics Reports directly from your desktop. GARS provides a much better interface compared to the original web application. It also implements almost all the features provided by the web application.
The program allows you to manage multiple profiles from different Google Accounts directly from the program. The login credetials will be saved on your computer so that you don’t have to re-login every time you check your reports.
Here is a screencast of the previous version
Highlighted features of GARS (from AboutNico.be)
- Easy profile selection and account management »
- Use multiple profiles from different Analytics accounts »
- All visitors, traffic and content reports available »
- Tabbed interface to easily switch between reports »
- Data drilldown, goal values, data segmentation »
- Animated, interactive graphs »
- Advanced data grids with filtering and paging »
- Switch between interactive reports or PDF reports »
- Site overlay view »
- Exports to PDF, Excel and XML »
The program is still in its beta stage with beta 2 released on October 5th. I recommend everyone to tryout the program and provide feedback to Nico, so that it can be improved further. Version 1.0 of the reporting suite is expected to be released by early 2008. A sneak peak of Google Analytics AIR 1.0 was provided and the new version is much prettier.
Google does not provide an official API to access Google Analytics data by external programs. Fortunately, programmers have developed unofficial APIs[1, 2] for doing the same, even though Google is remaining silent on the legality of using it. Google Analytics Reporting Suite is also based on an unofficial API developed by Nico, by studying the working of the web application for months. Fortunately, both Google and Adobe extended support to Nico for further developing the application. GARS is included in Adobe’s Showcase program and Google has offered assistance in making the program more secure.
Now that I have Google Analytics Reporting Suite installed, I now check my Google Analytics reports 4 – 5 times a day. Thank you Nico. 🙂
Downloads
Link is dead now