Here is a
captivating way to visualize your Google Analytics data in a Treemap visualization and you can
visualize your own data
with our live demo. (note: IE currently not supported for visualization part)
The goal of
this example was to teach people how to use the Google Analytics API on App Engine in Java. As
well as demonstrating how to use both OAuth and AuthSub along with the App Engine's various
services. The code looked great, but the output was a boring HTML table. So I used some open
source tools to transform the table into a pretty tree map visualization!
All the code has been open
sourced on Google Project hosting. I also wrote an article
describing how this application works making it easy for developers to use this
example as a starting point for new data visualizations and other Google Data projects.
For the data retrieval part, this example uses the App Engine Java
SDK and the Google Analytics
Data Export API Java Client Library to retrieve data from Google Analytics. The
example code implements both unsigned AuthSub and
registered OAuth authorization
methods allowing developers to get up and running quickly in development environments and
later switch to a secure authorization method in production environments. The application also
uses the Model-View-Controller
pattern, making it flexible and allowing developers to extend the code for new applications.
(like adding support for other Google Data APIs)
For the visualization
part, I used the open-sourced Protovis SVG
Visualization Library to create the Treemap. This JavaScript library is maintained
by the Stanford Visualization Group and excels at creating brand new visualizations from a
data set (in this case a boring HTML table). To handle all of the interactions, including
rollover, tooltips and slider controls, I used JQuery. Here is the JavaScript
source to the visualization part of the sample.
Enjoy!
By Nick
Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team
P.S. If you
have created any cool new visualizations using the Google Analytics Data Export API, email us so we can highlight them as well.
