Google Analytics Dashboard

[snide]

Ian has this mostly hooked up now. Essentially you validate with your Google account and we can bring in Google analytics data from your site. Needs design and a few days of work.

[snide]

So we investigated this pretty heavily and got a rough demo working, but Google's API is just way too limited to build a nice product. Currently you can check it out in the analytics branch of this repo if you'd like to play around with it.

For now, we're gonna put this project on hold.

[budparr]

So it looks pretty good to me, what's the problem, if you don't mind me asking?

[snide]

1. Google's API limits to 10 queries a second. It limits the amount of data that loads on the page. Half the times you reload, you'll notice one of the data points just craps out.
2. It's restricted to IP, which means anyone in an office environment would see this even more severe.
3. It's a clunky experience. You have to login to google, not just once, but for every client/computer. Then, once it works, the graphs / data just load pretty slow.

All together it's just a rough product that's not up to our usual product / design standards. We've thought about long term maybe building our own analytics platform into the system so that we can actual feature the data within the CMS rather than just a haphazard dashboard.

I guess we just walked away and thought, yeah, this get's the job done, but it kinda sucks. Not something we'd want on the front page of the CMS.

[budparr]

Ah, I see. Appreciate the ethic too.

[budparr]

@snide - don't know if you're ever interested in pursuing this again, but I wonder if 18F's recently created analytics tool might make this doable. Instead of reading the analytics directly, it dumps the data into JSON for reading on the site (https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-gov/)
It's open source: https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter And, as always, I'm happy to help, if it's welcome. Here's the site they're publishing the data on: https://analytics.usa.gov/