It is a straight forward operation to be honest, it took much reading and much less code to get it done, hope this saves some other folks some time.
This is how it’s gonna look like in the end
Trying to connect to communicate to the google analytics API is a bit tricky and takes some time to get it right, you have to use HTTP headers and what-not, I went through this route first thinking that there weren’t any Ruby gems to do, guess I was mistaken.
The gem that suited my needs is garb, pretty decent but you would still have to read the wiki to understand how it works.
First establish a new sessions and bind to the profile that you want
Garb::Session.login('email@example.com', 'password', :account_type => 'GOOGLE_OR_HOSTED')
profile = Garb::Profile.first('UA-XXXXXXXX-X')
I have also declared a class so I can get the reports I want filtered by URL
class ViewsVisits
extend Garb::Resource
metrics :visits, :page_views
dimensions :date
@@path = ''
def ViewsVisits.path
@@path
end
def ViewsVisits.path=(value)
@@path = value
end
filters do
matches(:page_path, "#{@@path}")
end
end
I then iterate over the entities that I want to get the stats for
@entities = []
@entities.concat(Restaurant.published)
@entities.each do |e|
ViewsVisits.path = "/" + e.class.to_s.pluralize.underscore + "/" + e.id.to_s
report = ViewsVisits.results(profile, :start_date => (Date.today - 31),:end_date => (Date.today - 1) )
#save the result in the DB for latter processing
end
All good so far, remember to serialize the column into which you plan to save report.
Now lets head into generating a nice little chart for this data, I decided to go with Highcharts, first lets parse the data into array where @pvarray is for page views and @varray is for visits.
@pvarray = []
@varray = []
@entity.info.views_stats.each do |r|
@pvarray << r.pageviews
@varray << r.visits
end
and the following Javascript should render this data in a lovely fashion
<script type="text/javascript">
var chart;
$j(document).ready(function() {
chart = new Highcharts.Chart({
chart: {
renderTo: 'container',
defaultSeriesType: 'area'
},
title: {
text: 'Views and Visits over the last 30 days'
},
xAxis: {
type: "datetime"
},
yAxis: {
type: "linear",
title: "pew",
min: 0,
labels: {
enabled: false
}
},
tooltip: {
formatter: function() {
return this.series.name +':<b>'+ Highcharts.numberFormat(this.y, 0, null, ' ')+'</b>';
}
},
plotOptions: {
series: {
pointStart: Date.UTC(<%= (Date.today - 31).strftime("%Y").to_s %>, <%= (Date.today - 31).strftime("%m").to_i - 1 %>, <%= (Date.today - 31).strftime("%d").to_s %>),
pointInterval: 24 * 3600 * 1000, // one day
}
},
series: [{
name: 'Views',
data: [<%= @pvarray.join(",").to_s %>]
}, {
name: 'Visits',
data: [<%= @varray.join(",").to_s %>]
}]
});
});
</script>