Product release log

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas V3.5.8 featuring another significant enhancement to our Google Data Studio Data Connector and more cloud quota across the board!

As we prepare for the launch of Analytics Canvas Online we have changed the label on a key metric involved in cloud quota. Since the Online version of Analytics Canvas and the Analytics Canvas data connector for Google Data Studio both use the same infrastructure, we've grouped them together under the label "Online Bytes".

We have also increased cloud quota under each of the three tiers, Mega Cloud (Free), Giga Cloud ($99/mo) and Tera Cloud ($499/mo) to allow for more use of Data Studio and Analytics Canvas Online under each plan.

The Mega Cloud (free) quota sees Online Bytes increase from 50GB to 100GB per month, while storage increases from 500MB to 100GB. The Giga Cloud quota, which can be purchased in multiple increments, sees Online Bytes increase from 200GB to 1TB and storage increase from 250GB to 500GB. The Tera Cloud plan sees Online Bytes increase from 2TB to 15TB per month.

"Data Studio Dimensional Caching" is a fancy way of saying we've made a significant improvement to the way the Analytics Canvas Data Studio connector responds to requests for data.

When a report is refreshed, Data Studio sends a query to the underlying data connector, which then processes the request and responds with the relevant data set. For sufficiently large tables, and when the option is enabled, the Analytics Canvas connector will now cache the response.

The next time the report is refreshed, rather than querying the full dataset for each element of the report, Canvas simply responds with the cached results, saving significant time and significant Online Bytes of cloud quota.

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas Version 3.5.0! In this release we've dramatically increased the limits on the size of Data Studio datasets, introduced append and incremental load functionality to Data Studio exports, and prepared Canvas Desktop for the introduction of Analytics Canvas Online.

As Data Studio evolved, Canvas kept pace, updating the connector to use BigQuery and Data Studio Advanced Services to significantly increase performance and increase the size of datasets. 

Today we’re upping that limit even more to a level way beyond what most people need: 2 Billion rows! That’s right, there's no longer a GB limit and effectively no limit on number of rows. Throw all your data at Data Studio and watch it process with incredible speed.

If your desktop or server can’t handle the initial load, you can now upload in batches using the same Append features available for other database connectors in Analytics Canvas. For example with a very large dataset, you might do the initial load in monthly increments so that no single load is too big.  If you’re into gardening, think of it as using a wheelbarrow to move soil from point A to point B in a series of steps instead of a dump truck doing it all at once. 

You can also do a date-based incremental load.  This means that you can first remove data from the table that matches a given time period before writing new data back in.  This is especially helpful for web-analytics, advertising, and sales data that can be reprocessed within 1 or more days depending on the service. If you’re simply appending only the last day of data each day, you will be constantly falling out of sync with the original data source!  Canvas now makes it easier than ever to account for that reprocessing and keep your Google Data Studio datasets up to date. 

Read more about to get all your data and exceptional performance in Google Data Studio. 

In March at SheetsCon 2020 we announced the upcoming release of Analytics Canvas Online!  This new, Cloud Edition aims to make Canvas more accessible to more analysts across devices and operating systems. 

Perhaps the most exciting part about being in the cloud is that processing can be handled centrally in a way that is both highly scalable and very affordable. 

However, to work with data in Analytics Canvas Online, we first need to get data up into BigQuery where the processing can take place.  Many of our enterprise customers have struggled with this as their data often lives behind firewalls and in databases that cannot be easily accessed remotely.   

To solve for this, and to give customers a way to get data from the connectors exclusively in the Desktop Edition, we have introduced a new connector for publishing data from Analytics Canvas Desktop to Analytics Canvas Online. It allows users to bring internal data into the Desktop Edition where they can mask or filter out sensitive data before publishing the dataset to the Online Edition. 

Once the data is accessible in the Online edition, it’s game on – any authorized user can access that dataset from their browser by simply logging-in.  Better still, they can process that data, huge amounts of it, without writing a single line of SQL!  Instead, Analytics Canvas Online provides many of the same expressions that analysts are used to seeing in Excel and Google Sheets.  Simply type out the expression and Canvas will generate the equivalent SQL.

Read more about how to get data from SQL Server into Google Data Studio.

Since the introduction of our 64bit version for Desktop and Server, users have been able to process as much data as their machines could handle.  However, processing large datasets often comes at the cost of system performance.  If a machine has only 4GB or 8GB of RAM and lots of memory intensive programs running (like Chrome and Outlook), holding more than 10 million rows in a Canvas can really slow things down.  

With Canvas Online, powered by BigQuery, you can load hundreds of billions of rows and process them at the speed of BigQuery.  And don't worry too much about runaway BigQuery costs - there are a host of quota controls to ensure that doesn't happen!

The new Analytics Canvas Cloud Data Set connector is activated and available in the Desktop when you have enrolled in a trial of Online or have been accepted into the Private Beta Program. 

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas V3.3.3 featuring a significant enhancement to our Google Data Studio Community Connector!

We first launched our Data Studio connector in 2017 and were one of the first 10 developers to be invited to develop and launch the Community Connector Program.  Since then we’ve seen great success, inviting in new customers eager to:

• get their data from Microsoft SQL Server, RedShift, and other DBs into Data Studio 
• get unsampled Google Analytics data from one or more accounts
• improve report performance and decrease load on their databases

Over the years we’ve heard the concerns that businesses are having with using Data Studio, specifically the native connectors to Sheets and databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.  Issues with Sheets tend to be related to performance (dashboards slow to update) and data size limitations. With databases, concerns tend to focus on connectivity, unpredictable and heavy database load, and management of access to appropriate tables within the database. 

Today we’re announcing our solution to those challenges, as well as an enhancement that will allow our customers to experience the speed and power of BigQuery. 

We have taken advantage of the new Data Studio Advanced Services to optimize Data Studio performance when connecting to data through BigQuery.

What does that mean?

It means that when publishing your data to the Analytics Canvas Community Connector, the data is now hosted in BigQuery and brought into Data Studio through the Analytics Canvas connector.

You now have performance that rivals the BigQuery connector … because it IS BigQuery under the hood!

Best of all, you don’t need to have your own BigQuery account - and all BQ storage and processing is included in your subscription!

Bing Ads API V13
Included in this release is the new BingAds API V13. Microsoft announced in September that V12 of the API will be sunset by October 31st. Existing Canvas users have been notified, provided with an early release, and must update prior to October 31st in order to continue using the BingAds API without interruption.

Service accounts for connecting to BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage
Google now recommends using Service Accounts to connect to BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. As a result, Canvas now includes those methods as the primary way to connect. Canvas will continue to support the OAuth method of authentication as long as it is supported by Google.

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas Version 3.1, featuring the Google Analytics Reporting API v4 and enhancements to our Data Studio community connector.

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas Version 3.5.0! In this release we've dramatically increased the limits on the size of Data Studio datasets, introduced append and incremental load functionality to Data Studio exports, and prepared Canvas Desktop for the introduction of Analytics Canvas Online.

Canvas is well known amongst Google Analytics professionals for how robust our GA connector is. With the Reporting API V4 we've taken things to a whole new level!

Nobody likes a sampled dataset.  With the Analytics Reporting API v4, if Canvas finds sampling in your dataset, it will attempt to eliminate that sampling programatically by partitioning the query or, with your permission, using your Resource Quota (for Analytics 360 accounts).

If you've ever found a row in your dataset where all dimension values are "(other)", you've encountered Report Query Limiting. This happens when you have a high cardinality dimension, such as a dynamically generated PagePath. While there are slightly higher limits for Analytics360 customers, they are not immune from these limits. The good news is that Canvas will automatically detect and attempt to eliminate this form of sampling as well.

Since some requests can be computationally complex, each Analytics 360 property is assigned a set amount of 'query resource tokens' each day.  This new system of using a resource based quota is designed to support a higher threshold of sampling while still using the Analytics Reporting API.  These tokens can be used to request up to 100M sessions of unsampled data per day, without having to use BigQuery or the Unsampled Reports API (although both of those are available in Canvas for those with larger, more complex queries).   

Google has increased the limits on the number of rows returned per API call.  You can now get up to 100K rows per API call with the Analytics Reporting API, vs just 10K rows per API call with the Core Reporting API. This is ideal for those concerned about exhausting their daily API quota of 10,000 API calls per day, which remains unchanged.  

Since launching our Data Studio Community Connector nearly one year ago, our customers have been using Canvas to clean, prep and blend data sets together for their Data Studio reports.  

As Data Studio usage grows, the team at Google has been working hard to bring new features and functionality to their users, averaging 3 new updates per month in the last year!  

Canvas has taken advantage of their changes as well.  Version 3.1 introduces: 

• larger data sets, up to 1GB per table
• improved data type detection in Data Studio.  Dates will appear as dates, booleans as booleans, etc.
• drastically improved query response times, making it easier to drill into Data Studio reports

 Learn more about getting your data prepared and published into Google Data Studio using Canvas.

Google has increased the limits on the number of rows returned per API call.  You can now get up to 100K rows per API call with the Analytics Reporting API, vs just 10K rows per API call with the Core Reporting API. This is ideal for those concerned about exhausting their daily API quota of 10,000 API calls per day, which remains unchanged.  

This latest release takes us far above the desktop and into the cloud. No need for servers or additional hardware - automating a data workflow is as easy as publishing the file from your desktop to our cloud.

Best of all? The Megabyte level of Cloud Services is included free in all of our plans! That means EVERYONE now has the ability to automate their routine data tasks and can do so within minutes.

That's right, every Analytics Canvas customer can now run up to 150 automation packages each month included with their subscription. And with upgrades available starting from just $99/mo, customers can process gigabytes, even terabytes of data each month, running concurrent packages as frequently as every 10 minutes!

Also new in this release is the ability to import data and export files to secure cloud file sharing and storage services including Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, Dropbox, and Amazon S3.

This gives you more ways to get data into your reporting processes and to deliver the dashboards and reports created in Canvas.

Data files can be pulled into a Canvas from one or more services, and any file created by Canvas can be delivered to one or more cloud file sharing services.

This connector lets you get data from anywhere Canvas connects to, blend it, merge it, fix it and then deliver it directly into Data Studio for fantastic looking reports and dashboards. Combined with Cloud Automation, your Data Studio reports can be refreshed frequently throughout the day. Learn more about getting your data prepared and published into Google Data Studio.

Our new Search Console connector lets you query from multiple sites at once and get the results together into a single table. Export results to your database to capture and store more than 18 months of Search Console history, or process the data using Canvas and publish your dashboards daily. No python scripts or Github repos required - point and click your way to ALL of your Search Console data.

Just for fun we packed a few more features into this release that our customers have been asking for and made sure that you can use them all together with our Cloud Automation service.

• Export JSON to AWS S3 where it can be staged and loaded into RedShift, Snowflake, and more
  
  
• New Tableau .hyper extract export allows you to create larger extracts that generate faster and offer better performance on Tableau Desktop, Online, and Server.
  
  
• Generate MASSIVE Tableau TDE files from BigQuery tables and publish them directly to Tableau Server or Tableau Online
  
  
• Performing an incremental load to your database tables has never been easier. Just set the option to "Delete data in the master date range before exporting" and you'll never end up with duplicates in your table. No SQL required!
  
  
• While our connector is still in beta, you can now experience the power of the Google Analytics Reporting API v4. Query for Cohorts, pivot results before importing them to Canvas, get up to 9 dimensions and 10 metrics per query, receive a higher sampling threshold for Analytics 360 accounts, and more!

A big thanks to our customers for bringing us their feedback and suggestions, our beta testers for their commitment and enthusiasm, and to the growing team at nModal that has helped bring version 2 to life.

This release represents a significant change to Analytics Canvas and includes updates and enhancements that lay the foundation for major changes happening this year and next.

The most significant changes are under the hood. Canvas now makes better use of your available memory to optimize performance and manage larger data sets. While Canvas can't make data come through your network or out through an API any faster, summarize, joins, filters and other data transformation steps are performed significantly faster, 70%+ for those with 8GB of RAM or more.

Pro and Premium customers can now run multiple instances of Canvas desktop at the same time! A highly requested feature that required a significant investment in architecture to ensure your jobs and your system remain stable.

Analytics Canvas Premium now includes BigQuery SQL generation for Analytics 360 and the Parameterization add-ons. Existing customers have already been price protected and will see the lower charge on their next subscription payment.

With more people connecting to Google BigQuery for their GA and internal data, we've made enhancements that make it easier than every before to connect to your BigQuery projects.

This version also includes maintenance to the AdWords, Facebook, and Google Sheets APIs, bringing them up to the latest versions. Other enhancements include:

As with all of our releases, we worked diligently to ensure full compatibility between versions. Your canvases built in earlier versions can be opened and run in version 2.0. Similarly, Canvases built in version 2 can be run by those running version 1.8.8 or earlier.

We are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas V1.8.4.

The latest version gives you new ways to export data, more options to help you prepare dashboards, access to the new version of Google AdWords API, and an enhanced Google BigQuery connector.

We have added some enhanced Google Sheets capabilities to Analytics Canvas.

New Google Sheets export capability gives you the ability to write to Google Sheets. Now you can export your data into Google Sheets, collaborate with your peers, and further extend it with Google Apps Script.

Another new feature is the ability to connect to a Google Sheet using a sharable link. You will now be able to access sheets available via a link and use them in your analysis.

The newest tool by Google, Google Data Studio 360, only connects to data from Google’s tools. We provide a crucial link between your enterprise data, your internal databases and files, and Data Studio 360.

Analytics Canvas’s users have two routes to get their data into Google Data Studio 360:
– Google Sheets Export
– Big Query Export

Connect to your databases and files, blend data, aggregate it and prepare it for analysis. Export your data into Google Big Query or Google Sheets and access it in Data Studio to build gorgeous visualizations and dashboards.

Migrating your analytics to Google Data Studio? With Analytics Canvas you can automate the movement of data from databases, Excel files, and other data sources to access your company’s data in Google Data Studio.

We continue to make progress on our new AdWords connector. While it is still in beta, the following improvements have been made:
– Reporting improvements (several new fields have been added)
– Improved reporting for quality score
– Inclusion of campaign bid estimates

We have also enhanced Goolge BigQuery cache performance and updated the list of dimensions and metrics available in BigQuery for Google Analytics 360 account holders.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Analytics Canvas Version 1.8.1.  Thank-you to our loyal customers for their suggestions, our beta testers for their contributions, and our hard-working staff who helped make this into one of our most comprehensive releases to date.

In Version 1.7.5 we focused on enhancing our integration with Tableau, allowing users to generate Tableau Packaged Workbooks and publish both TDE and TWBX files to Tableau Server and Tableau Online.  We also introduced email as a delivery option for dashboards and files, and launched new functions for working with dates and analyzing or parsing text fields.

Version 1.8 includes:

- A new welcome screen with links to an in-app product tour, new sample data sets, and new 'how-to' videos describing how each of the data blocks work.

- Three new blocks to simplify and enhance the analyst's ability to explore, cleanse, and analyse data sets.

- Expansion of the Parameterization feature to enable a whole new level of automation.

With data visualization tools like Tableau changing the way the world consumes data, analysts are discovering that tools for visual data discovery, preparation and report automation can be much easier and more powerful than custom coding a spreadsheet.

To help these analysts benefit from the automation and analysis capabilities that Canvas has to offer, we have launched a series of new videos and created a new welcome screen with links to our resources.

Get a better understanding of your data and automate more steps of your reporting process with these new blocks.

- Rank block – fast and efficient ranking of data based on one or more columns. No SQL or complex formulas required!

 
- Rank block – fast and efficient ranking of data based on one or more columns. No SQL or complex formulas required!

 
- Data Profile Block – for getting data about your data. Quickly and easily find missing fields, date ranges, data types, and more.

We continue to expand on the Parameterization feature released last year. Customers had asked for the ability to ‘script’ a Canvas by running it multiple times, with each run taking a set of parameters, such as the Google Analytics View ID and a filename for the resulting dashboard.

In Version 1.8 we’ve expanded on this feature to further enhance the automation capabilities and minimize or eliminate manual touch from routine reporting.

Here’s what’s new:

- Email options, inlcuding sending account and distribution lists, are now available as parameters.
- Tableau Server and Tableau Online publish points can be passed in as parameters.
- Database users can now inject parameters into SQL statements.

With Parameters and Server Automation you can now fully automate a reporting process from report generation through distribution by email or publishing to Tableau.

We are pleased to announce that Analytics Canvas V1.7.6 is now available. This release has a number of new features which greatly expand what is possible with Analytics Canvas.

We now have a powerful new ability to detect referral spam- and if you can detect it you can eliminate it from your reports. With a dynamic filter that is constantly updated to include known spam referrers , it is now easier than ever to detect and kill referral spam that has made it past your GA filters and is clouding your data.

All you have to do in Analytics Canvas is filter on IsReferralSpam([fullReferrer]) – this new function returns TRUE if the referrer matches the latest spam detection test. The filter definition is updated automatically behind the scenes every time you launch Analytics Canvas. Learn more about the new function by watching this tutorial.

If you are wondering if you have a referral spam problem- check out a new free report that we have created using the Analytics Canvas cloud platform.

This lets you understand at a glance if you have problems, and where they are. We also have some powerful new templates that let you create dashboards directly in Analytics Canvas that give you the whole story regarding referral spam and your Google Analytics data.

This report is also available as a template in the Analytics Canvas tool- so you can get unlimited access for free during the trial period and when you are in the tool itself, you can go even further- applying all the power of Analytics Canvas.

To learn more about the online report and template, check out the blog post.

Now if you have a really, really massive TDE that you are generating, Analytics Canvas supports the ability to append new data to an existing TDE.

Stay tuned as we continue to enhance our Tableau connectivity including Tableau server automation- we are very excited to be building some cool stuff to the new V9 Rest API.

We are thrilled to announce that our Facebook API connector beta is now available in the general release- we think you are going to love what you can do with this connector. You can access any Facebook page and understand the posts, comments, shares and likes. By querying multiple pages at once, you can easily create competitive analysis- how is your facebook page matching up to your competitors? How are your posts performing?

If you need to go deeper into your Adwords data than the subset that is linked into GA, or if your client doesn’t have their GA linked(!) Now you can directly connect to the Adwords reporting API. With a wide range of reports, and the speed of Analytics Canvas, you can pull down large data sets from multiple accounts easily. Add to this the powerful automation of Analytics Canvas server and it opens up a whole new world for Adwords reporting automation. Hundreds of accounts, millions of rows, all of it pumped into Tableau for visualization- this integration will be a game changer.

We will be posting more detail on all these features and more in the coming days and weeks.

So download your free trial now and discover everything V1.7.6 has to offer!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, we're are very pleased to launch the latest version of Analytics Canvas and to introduce some powerful new features that will make learning and taking advantage of the power Analytics Canvas easier than ever.

The key new feature in V1.7.0 is a library of ready made example canvases available instantly configured with your own Google Analytics data.

These canvases not only provide a pre-built dashboard in minutes, they also will serve as a set of building blocks to help users learn and master the art of building their own dashboards with Analytics Canvas.

- Browse the example library right in Analytics Canvas
- Select a canvas, and the Google Analytics accounts you want to populate the dashboard with
- Save and run the dashboard- you'll be looking at a complete dashboard in minutes

We have had customers remark that even after using Analytics Canvas to completely revolutionize how they do analysis, they are still discovering new things it can do. By creating a library of examples, we aim to supercharge the discovery process, and help everyone take their analytics to the next level even more quickly.

Another important addition to Analytics Canvas in V1.7.0 is the introduction of Block Groups. Block Groups let users organize their canvases, label groups of blocks and provide notes and comments to help colleagues and collaborators understand their analysis.

Users of Analytics Canvas save huge amounts of time and are able to do much more because of its ability to automate and reuse analysis again and again. Along with Block Groups comes the ability to export individual blocks and groups of blocks together. This makes re-using and sharing the analysis created in a canvas easier than ever.

For example, once a particularly awesome data cleansing and segmentation is created in one canvas, users don’t have to redo all that work in the next canvas, they can simply export the entire set of blocks to a single file and use that file whenever they need that analysis. Analysts can share their best files, and everyone’s analysis is faster, clearer and more consistent.

Last year we surveyed our customers and they gave us a lot of great feedback that we’ve been implementing ever since. Version 1.7 contains the largest set of usability enhancements to date and will help users to get up to speed faster, build new canvases more efficiently, and share their best work with their teams. We will continue to blog about the new features and functionality in the days and weeks ahead. You can read more about the new features and download the latest version here.

We’re very excited today to release Analytics Canvas for Sheets, a Google Sheets Add-on. You can get Analytics Canvas for sheets here.

If you love Sheets, and you love Google Analytics, we think you’re going to love our Add-on, a way to very quickly define a dashboard template, and share it, switching effortlessly between different GA views and mixing and matching with your Google Sheets data.

While users of Analytics Canvas are used to dealing with millions of rows (or even billions now with Big Query on the way), we realize that there are also times when having easy access directly into spreadsheets and collaborating with others might not need all that Enterprise scale power.

We’re pleased to provide a powerful but free add-on for Google Sheets- a platform that we know many digital marketers love.

A powerful, graphical query editor

We’ve built a powerful graphical interface that lets you define your query, using the Core reporting API. Multiple queries can be created, linking to one or more GA views.

On top of this its also possible to modify queries via the spreadsheet itself- which means advanced users can be creating filters based on spreadsheet formulas- we’re looking forward to what people come up with.

Change from one Website to another in a moment

One of the features we think people will love is the fact that once a dashboard is built they can point it at any Google Analytics View they want in one step. This lets you create a series of templates, and re-use, re-use, re-use.

Share your dashboards

Because the add on is available to everyone who uses Google Spreadsheets, and sheets has such great collaboration features, we’re looking forward to seeing how people share their dashboards. We’ll be announcing some more in the department soon.

To learn more about the plug in, check out our tutorials and FAQ.

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Today Google announced more than forty new dimensions and metrics available in the Google analytics API. We are pleased to also announce the release of Analytics Canvas V1.5, that has full access to all of them.

We’ll be looking into the different metrics in more detail- but here’s our take on what we think is most interesting in these new data sets:

Offsite Social Activity

One of the key enhancements is that the data from the analytics social data hub is now available. The interesting aspect of this data is that it is not data about visits to your site but about people talking about, bookmarking, or linking back to your site. Want to see when your site is mentioned on Digg, bookmarked in Delicious, or saved on Pocket? Now that data is in Google analytics- and through the API, can be in your Analytics Canvas generated dashboards and reports.

These new dimensions and metrics do take a bit of getting used to- they are not visit based. In fact, if you try to use the Visit metric with a social activity dimension you’ll get an error. Because there wasn’t a visit- this is activity that is happening on other social websites, and being collected and delivered to you via the social hub. Which is, if you think about it, an interesting new capability- and by having the data available in the API, makes understanding what interactions are happening around your site and by extension your brand in a much wider way.

Mobile APP tracking

Of particular interest to mobile application developers using or thinking about using the Google Analytics SDK for iOS and android, now the App view and exception metrics are available. So if you are building apps, you can use Google analytics to collect lots of data, and the API to pull that into your reporting/backend systems for analyzing user behavior.

Mobile device information

Back in June, we blogged on how Google changed how it tracked its operating system dimension for mobile visits- suddenly, iPad and iPhone were gone, replaced by IOS.

Well, they are back- and better than ever, now you can track the exact model of the phone where it should be, on dedicated dimensions- you will have all the detail you need, if you want to know exactly which phones are visiting.

Plus more dimensions in the areas of site speed, and user timing- giving you full access to everything in Analytics Canvas via the API.

Result? Coming up on almost 500 dimensions and metrics available.

Looking at all the dimensions and metrics is impressive- Google has a complete interactive list that lets you select a dimension or metric, and shows you which other dimensions and metrics are compatible, to help you form queries.

Google Analytics has been evolving quickly over the last year, and Google’s obvious commitment to the API, and to delivering new data sets and sources through it means that it provides a compelling platform for enterprise analytics. With Analytics Canvas, it is possible to tap into that data, automate it, and report on it in entirely new ways.

To try the new dimensions and metrics out for yourself, sign up for a free trial. Or contact us to have us help you deliver an end to end solution.

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.

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.

Extraction time reduced by up to 50%

nModal Solutions is pleased to announce the release of the public Beta of V1.3 of Analytics Canvas, which takes full advantage of the new Google Analytics Core Reporting API announced today. We’d like to thank Google for having granted us early access to the API, as it is our goal to always deliver the latest capabilities in our products, as quickly as possible.

If you are already an Analytics Canvas customer, or already have a trial key, you can download Analytics Canvas here. If you are new to Analytics Canvas, sign up for a free trial, and you’ll be up and running in no time. Check out these comparisons of previous vs new:

How much faster? WAAAAAY faster!

The new version of the API is seriously faster- one reason is that now it uses JSON to deliver the data, which is much more efficient than the previous XML format. We’ve seen it take less than half the time for queries with the new version.

Also new: Detect sampling

Nobody really likes sampled data. While Analytics Canvas can be used to avoid sampling by partitioning the requests to Google, it is helpful to know if queries are resulting in sampling or not. In V1.3, there is a new tab in the query definition area, that lets you do just that:

Exciting things will happen in 2012

The world of Web analytics moves fast, and certainly 2011 has seen a lot of important changes in the web interface and capabilities of Google Analytics. The creation of Google Analytics Premium for enterprise customers with big data needs has also changed the market, and with the new API capabilities things are just getting better.

2012 is going to be an exciting year for Analytics Canvas- stay tuned, Google Analytics data use will never be the same.

We are pleased to announce that V1.2 of Analytics Canvas is now available, both in the free trial, and for upgrade to our subscribers.

This release of Analytics Canvas both keeps the application up to date with Google Analytics API changes, and adds some interesting new functionality. It makes it even easier to pull data from multiple Google Analytics Accounts and profiles, analyze, cleanse and transform it and pump that data into databases and files.

New Functions, and a new Pivot block

This version brings some new functions, particularly in the area of URL and text parsing.

It also adds a powerful new block, the Pivot block, that lets you exchange row values for new columns.

For example, if you query Google Analytics for visits by country and date, you get this:

After using the pivot block, you can turn the country into new columns, and get the total number of visits for each date shown this way:

Very useful for getting ready for different types of graphs. If you add other dimensions, you can then build multi-series bar, area or line charts with Country on the X-axis.

Google Analytics API updates

We work hard to keep Analytics Canvas on top of all the latest developments from Google, here are some of the recent changes:

• New page load time metrics added: ga:pageLoadTime , ga:avgPageLoadTime , ga:pageLoadSample
• Depreciated metrics and dimensions removed: ga:connectionSpeed, Confidence interval

To keep everyone informed, the Google Analytics API team posts updates regarding the API at this Google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-analytics-api-notify

We look forward to everyones feedback on the new version, and have even more enhancements in the works. We’re excited by enthusiasm of our customers and users, and amazed by the powerful and innovative analysis they are doing with Analytics Canvas.

To give Analytics Canvas a try, signup now for the free trial. Discover what you can do when you have full access to your Google Analytics data.

We’re pleased to announce that Analytics Canvas V1.1 is now available, here are just some of the goodies you will find in this release:

1) Support for multiple Google accounts and full use of OAuth standards to make the authentication with Google Analytics easier, more secure and more powerful.

2) Enhancements that give more access to more data, through the ability to combine even larger numbers of profiles and Google Analytics accounts together.

3) Row based data profiling that lets you view the frequency and distribution of values in your data, and drill down into the specific row sets easily.

Multiple Google account management

Analytics Canvas now uses OAuth to provide a much more powerful and multi user account approach to authentication with Google Analytics. You can read more about this here– the key thing to know is that it gives you better control, and is the method recommended by Google.

Querying multiple Google Analytics Accounts at once with multiple profiles

One of the most popular things about Analytics Canvas is its ability to export data from lots of profiles all at once. We learned from our users that lots of profiles might mean, well, LOTS- so now the tool is able to pull data from literally hundreds of profiles if you’ve got ’em. New functionality manages very large numbers of profiles to let users with serious web properties whole new capabilities.

Row profiling and value distribution

Because we’re major data heads, we’re also excited about the new access you now have in Analytics Canvas with the introduction of some of our data profiling tools. With this functionality, you can look at histograms that outline the frequency of values in your data, and then drill right into the bar charts to look at the underlying rows.

And if you are looking at value distribution (for example, average time on page over your pages) the value distribution explorer lets you zoom in and out, and drill down into the detailed data.

To checkout this new version, signup for a free trial, and discover the next generation in data tools for your Google Analytics data.

Huzzzah! We are declaring the Alpha over, and starting the private Beta for the Analytics canvas tool.

We’ll start contacting the first private Beta testers who have signed up over the coming week, and we’ll get them up and running with the Beta1.

We just don’t have the bandwidth to have everyone who has signed up test at first, so please be patient. In particular we’re looking for people with specific analysis goals and REALLY big data to test out the tool, so if you think you fit this criteria email us at beta@analyticscanvas.com

But it’s not too late to sign up– as we get up and running with the testing, we’ll be increasing how many testers we can support at once- we’ll generally work on a first to signup, first to get their hands on the tool basis, so get your name on the list if you are interested.

You will find attached to this post a couple of screen shots- the challenge we constantly face is that we don’t really want to publish all our analysis showing our own web site traffic (we don’t like to share that with our competitors, for obvious reasons), but as we start to get some example data sets worked up we look forward to creating the screenshots and video area to highlight the powerful analysis possible. In particular, we’ll be showing how useful it is to be able to combine google analytics data with non-google analytics data- and the fantastic insights that are possible.

We’re very excited to see what our Beta testers discover when they get their hands on all this capability- If you are serious about your analytics, signup- discover a whole new way to get at your Google analytics data.