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.

If you want to get in on the beta action sign up here.

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.