Google Analytics Query Explorer

If you are a developer and have to work with a new API, the life can be hard. Some APIs are really bad documented and you are happy if there is something to test your API. For Google Analytics you have both! A good documentation and better: a very good query explorer where you can test your queries. The program is called Google Analytics Query Explorer. A special tool for fast query execution and to test certain values.

Google Analytics Query Explorer

This is the perfect tool if you want to work with the API or you have to do it. The only thing you have to do is to login with your Google account and to allow this app to use your Analytics data. Don’t worry, the tool doesn’t store your data, you have to login every time again.

If you want to use Google Analytics Query Explorer, it is a good idea to know a bit about Analytics hierarchy of data. If you know Analytics quite well, you can easily get data from this tool. You have to insert data about account, web property and profile. Then you have different fields to customize your query and to get your needed data very fast.

Query

You have different fields to customize your query. There are some needed fields. You have to insert id, metric and a time span. On this picture, I displayed the sum of time spended on my site. A very good usability option is that many fields are drop down fields, so you can test and things and try to get the right values. For developers it is interesting, that all labels are the same in Googles Analytics API. So you can nearly use this labels 1:1 in your program. With the button on the left, you can also get the url of the query which is very useful for own queries.

Testing

If you are a specialist in Analytics API, you can us Analytics Query Editor to test if your program code is right and gets the right values. It is easy to check Analytics values.

A good book about Analytics is this one: Google Analytics: Implementieren. Interpretieren. Profitieren..