We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas V1.3.0

Analytics Canvas is a powerful platform for extracting data from Google Analytics using the API, as well as other data sources, and creating visual data analysis that can be run automatically.

• Pull data from hundreds of Google analytics accounts at once
• Combine, segment, filter and transform data both from GA and other sources like databases and files
• Avoid sampling for high traffic web sites- no more fast access mode in many cases

Analytics Canvas is available as a free trial.

Read on for more details about whats new in V1.3

Google Analytics Core Reporting API 3.0

One of the most important improvements is of course the move to Googles Latest API, which is much faster, and ensures Analytics Canvas users have access to all the new features Google is releasing.

Enhanced Excel export for dashboards

We’ve also enhanced AC’s ability to insert data sets into Excel, making it possible to create template based dashboards that let you save time by automating your excel reporting. With this new functionality, you can see where the data is coming from and going in your Excel workbooks- and you can build templates that you can reuse again and again.

Click on the screen shots to get a full size view.

First, as always in Analytics Canvas, data transforms are defined step by step with visual blocks on the canvas. In this case, we create three sets- segmented keywords for organic search month by month, a total for the year broken down by segment, and then after filtering on only Mobile visits, we break the visits down by Mobile operating system.

You can see how we build each query by stringing together blocks- the end of each block stream is the excel export that inserts the data into the specific point in the Excel template that we want.

When we insert the data into the template, we can see exactly where it is going (in green) and where the other data sets from this canvas are being inserted (in yellow).

And finally, we can build the template to have the charts we want- and this excel workbook is generated at a click of a button every time we want to update. And of course if you want to Automate, there are both on-premise and in the cloud options available. Learn more.

Powerful new data manipulation capabilities

One of the things we love is how our users keep coming up with cool new things they want to do with data- we’re pleased to add a number of new functions into this version that make it even easier to get your Google Analytics data (and any data, for that matter) into line, and ready for insight.

Just a few of the new features:

• Improved automation of query partitioning to avoid the dreaded “Fast access mode”- in many cases can eliminate sampling, and let you export your raw Google analytics data even for millions of unique visitors a month.
• Expanded query design interface including new metrics, meta data, metric and dimension search and more
• Text parsing functions that let you easily decode complex strings- very useful in jamming lots of information into event labels or custom variables when you are tagging.
• Enhanced transposing and pivoting
• Enhanced date conversion capabilities

Upgrading to V1.3

If you are an existing Analytics Canvas user, as always all your canvases will upgrade to the new version. You will need to authorize all your user accounts again, since the change in the API version also changes the authorization method. We strongly encourage everyone to upgrade, and enjoy the new features as well as the speed of the new API.