We are pleased to release Analytics Canvas V1.7.3, which has a range of improvements, two key areas are support for Google BigQuery, and an upgrade of the Bing Ads API to the newest version.
BigQuery: Take your analysis to the next level.
V1.7.3 has a full connector to BigQuery, allowing you to read and write data to BigQuery, and to manage and automate the running of queries and data transfers within BigQuery itself.
Because Analytics Canvas also has powerful connectors to many other data sources, in particular Google Analytics, a range of different databases, Excel, Google Sheets and text files this means it gives you a single place where you can manage your data flows and automate them into and out of your BigQuery account.
BigQuery Automation
Do you have data in Excel that you need to join to your huge data sets in BigQuery?
Do you need to move data from BigQuery into your data warehouse, or make it available in an Excel file on a shared drive for Analysts?
Analytics Canvas lets you define all the flows, and define the frequency (or set up on demand processes for user self serve).
Automation also means that your data is in sync. Unless you keep your big data platform in sync with the spreadsheets circulating, constant confusion and a lack of confidence in the data will result.
A Powerful addition to Google Analytics Premium
With Analytics Canvas and Google Analytics Premium, every option for data management is available. Use the Core API, the Unsampled reporting API, and combine both with your daily BigQuery Exports or query sets based on them to get the best of all worlds. And with our SQL Generation, even analysts without any SQL knowledge can create queries directly.
But not just for Google Analytics Premium…
Even if you don’t have GA Premium, it doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of BigQuery power- and with Analytics Canvas, you can upload ALL your Google Analytics data through the Core Reporting API. Because Analytics Canvas is designed to be able to pull millions and millions of rows of data from GA, it is possible to get GA Premium like data volumes out of your GA Standard account. You might not have the hit level exactitude that paying for Google Analytics premium gives you, but you can have analysis that is simply impossible with GA alone, or using a spreadsheet based solution.
We’ve created extractors using Analytics Canvas that have pulled detailed data from GA for over 150 million visits using GA standard, and populated them into BigQuery for analysis.
How does it work? Say you have 250,000 visitors a day. You can create a Canvas that queries any number of queries from Google Analytics and writes them into BigQuery. If you run this each day using Analytics Canvas automation, your table in big query will have all your data, without any sampling. BigQuery can easily handle the data volumes- this would result in over 90 Million visits a year. Because Analytics Canvas can load millions of rows at a time, the full flow from the GA core reporting API to your BigQuery account can be created- all using just GA Standard.
We’ll be diving deeper into use cases for this capability and sharing some templates and how-to for Analytics Canvas.
Also in V1.7.3 Bing Ads API V9
One of the major advantages of using Analytics Canvas rather than writing custom code is that when the underlying data source changes, instead of having to hire a developer and re-write your code at great expense, you just update your Analyics Canvas version. V1.7.3 moves Analytics Canvas to the new Bing Ads API, as well as integrating in changes to Bings authorization, moving to OAuth. Both of these changes are backward compatible, customers existing Canvases will continue to run, no modifications required.