Re: [tlug] [OT] Scraping Google Analytics for top ten pages on a site

[Ian Barwick <barwick@example.com>]

2010/1/19 Dave M G <dave@example.com>:
> TLUG,
>
> I use Google Analytics to monitor traffic to my web sites.
>
> On one web site, I'd like to have a list of the top ten most popular pages.
>
> Is there a way I can scrape that data out of Google Analytics for
> inclusion in a web page?
>
> I looked around on the web, and it seems there is a Google "API" that
> *might* be something that one uses to access that kind of data, but the
> terminology is so beyond me, I'm not even sure what it is, let alone if
> it is what I'm looking for.
>
> Has anyone done this kind of thing before, or would know what direction
> to point me in?

I suspect the only practical way to access that data is via API access,
along the lines detailed here:

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataDeveloperGuide.html

The analytics web interface does not lend itself to screen scraping.

There's an open source analytics solution called "Piwik" [1] which positions
itself as "an open source alternative to Google Analytics" - theoretically
if you used that you would have direct access to the raw data. However
I've never used it so can't say how well this would work.

[1] http://piwik.org/

Ian Barwick