The New Dimensions and Metrics Explorer

To make it easy to navigate all the 270+ data points the Core Reporting API exposes, today we launched version 2 of the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer.

Click to see the list view.

This tool makes it easy to browse all of the dimensions and metrics, identify valid combinations, and get comprehensive definitions and descriptions.

Click to see the description view.

No wonder it’s the third most visited page on the Analytics Developer site.
Today’s update to the tool added:

• Modes - easily see how API names map to Web View Names, and App View Names.
• ‘Allowed in Segments’ - Quickly see which data can be used in segments.
• Updated descriptions- See more details like data type, index ranges, UI names, deprecation status, calculations. For example, see the Custom Variables and Columns group.
• It’s fast! - No more page loads as you browse and switch between modes.
• Deep links - Share details of a specific dimension or metric by copying the URL of any view.
• Automatic Updates - The Metadata API is now used to power the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer. This is a big change and means the tool will automatically update with the latest dimensions and metrics as soon as they’re released.

Visit the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer and tell us what you think.
This tool is built completely using the Metadata API. If you’re thinking about developing your own tools with this data, get started here!
Posted by Pete Frisella, Developer Advocate, Developer Relations Team

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Introducing Mobile App Indexing on Search: a better experience for mobile search users

Here's some great news from Google’s search team: In-app content is now becoming visible in Google search. Starting today, users on Android devices can jump straight from Google search results to pages inside an app.

For Google Analytics for mobile apps users, this opens up a new world of insights into areas like revenues, engagement and overall app usage.

We've reposted the original blog post below. And if you haven't already, try Google Analytics for mobile apps for powerful insights into how users engage with your app.

There are many reasons to build or not to build a mobile app as part of your broader mobile strategy. For instance, while apps offer a rich user experience, users can’t access them through Google Search like they do websites. Today, we’re announcing a new Google Search capability, app indexing, that will start to make apps more accessible through Google on Android.

Let’s say that a user is searching for a movie. With app indexing, Google will begin to include deep links to apps in Android search results. When the user taps on the “Open in app” deep links, the app opens up directly to the movie in question.

In this example, in order for the app deep links to appear in search results,

• The Flixster app supports deep linking
• The Rotten Tomatoes website has specified that the Flixster app page is an alternate for the web page
• Google has indexed the Flixster app to determine relevance
• The user has installed the Flixster app

The end result is that users will have a seamless search experience when accessing your app content through Google.

Google is currently testing app indexing with an initial group of developers including AllTheCooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy,Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDb, moviefone, newegg, OpenTable, Trulia, and Wikipedia. Deep links for these applications will start to appear in Google search results on Android, in the US, in a few weeks.

How to get started

If you are interested in enabling indexing for your Android app, you can learn more about our developer guidelines at developers.google.com/app-indexing and sign up. We are expanding our app indexing efforts and will gradually include more developers over time.

Posted by Chaesang Jung, Software Engineer

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Measuring Twitter with Universal Analytics

In between rolling out new features for Google Analytics, we also like to feature how users and companies are actually using our products. Matt Stannard of 4PS Marketing details how to easily monitor Twitter and see number of tweets, active users, and hashtags for a topic using Universal Analytics. We’ve excerpted parts of his post below, read on to see the results, and don’t forget to click through to see the technical details!

How?

Step 1 - Create a new account

First, we need to create a new account, which is accomplished easily through the new look and feel of Analytics. Remember this is under Admin and then in the Account drop down. I made a new Universal Analytics account for my particular experiment - you then need to note the UA number.

Step 2 - Install PHP / MySQL

I downloaded a WAMP stack called XAMPP as I wanted to use PHP as my Twitter monitoring library. XAMPP includes Apache, PHP and MySQL. You can use any tool of your choose provided you are able to edit the code and add the necessary Measurement Protocol requests. The library I used is was from 140Dev.

Step 3 - Create Twitter Application

In order to use the PHP monitoring library you need to have a Twitter Application. You can create this by signing in at https://dev.twitter.com/. Click My Applications:

Create your application and after you've done this you will need to note the Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, Access Token Secret. 

Step 4 - Start Monitoring

So, now we've got our Twitter application we can begin monitoring, in the 140dev package you need to modify a few files, firstly the db_config.php. You can find the code here, on the original blog post.

Results

The reporting interface of Google Analytics is actually very effective at monitoring Twitter as you are able to look in Real Time, use Dashboards, or custom reports.

The Real Time Analytics is fantastic at showing how active the things your are monitoring on Twitter is. If you just look at the Real Time overview as this screenshot shows:

(click image for full-sized version)

You can use Dashboards to report on key areas of interest and apply whatever filtering you need, the dashboard below just shows the key hashtags, users, users mentioned and urls shared: 

(click image for full-sized version)

Custom Reporting also allows us to produce charts such as what times of the day users were active:

(click image for full-sized version)

The full post can be found here.

Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics Team

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