While the best queries might not have lots of data, but have the RIGHT data, sometimes you do have a reporting need that means you want to get a lot of different metrics from Google Analytics all at once. Because Goal completions are tracked as metrics, this is often the case- if you are tracking 10 goals, for example, you want to get a data set that has both the standard metrics, as well as all ten Goal metrics.
Of course the Google Analytics API is limited to 7 dimensions and 10 metrics, that doesn’t change. But using Analytics Canvas to access the API makes it simple to connect multiple queries together, and get the final result you need.
The key is to have two (or more) queries that contain exactly the same dimensions, but different metrics, then join them together, using the dimensions as the join key.
In Analytics Canvas this is done easily using the JOIN block:
The two queries are easily made- create the first one, then cut and paste, and edit just the metrics. Then after you connect the two queries to the two inputs of the JOIN block, just select all the dimensions as joined columns. To confirm that you are getting what you expected, the number of rows in each query should be the same, as well as the resulting number of rows from the Join.
You now have a complete snapshot of traffic, by source and medium, per day, with fourteen key metrics.
Give it a try with your own Google analytics data- Analytics Canvas is available for 30 days as a full function free trial.