[Desktop] - Importing and Exporting multiple Views into a Google Analytics query in Analytics Canvas
Analytics Canvas is a powerful tool for working with multiple Google Analytics accounts, properties and views. For many businesses, 'multiple' means 3, 5 or even 10 GA views. A decent amount to juggle, but nothing onerous when it comes to finding and selecting the profiles you want to analyse.
However some of our customers have hundreds of accounts and views linked to their Google accounts and sifting through views when creating a new query can be tedious and time consuming.
Selecting Google Analytics Views
Analytics Canvas supports version 3 and version 4 of the Google Analytics Reportings APIs. We highly recommend using the V4 connector as we have built additional functionality on top of it to automatically detect and eliminate sampling.
In both API connectors, you have the ability to search for the Views you'd like to include, as well as the ability to import a list of views that was previously created, or export a group of views that you have defined.
You can select views from any number of accounts and properties and have those combined into the same table.
Creating a list of Google Analytics View IDs
Once you have selected a group of views, you can generate a list of those views that you can re-use in subsequent queries. If your query already exists on your Canvas, you can do this by right clicking on the query block and choosing "Export GA Profile IDs".
If you are building or editing your query, you can click the Import/Export button in the V3 API connector, or "Export" on the V4 API connector. This will generate a simple text file with the list of View IDs from that query.
Importing a list of Google Analytics View IDs
In your next query, in the same or in a different Canvas, simply select "Import" to import those same profiles into a new query!
This handy feature will save you from having to select a group of views each time you want to query against them.