Over the past few months we've received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API, and it included adding access to Google Analytics newest and most powerful features, such as advanced segments, custom variables and more. Today we want to let you know about improvements to the Google Analytics Data Export API, including the following highlights (all the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group):

Support for Advanced Segments

With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond your aggregated data and peer into the nuances of traffic and visitor activity on your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Germany is over 2 minutes.

We've added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:

1. Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
   


2. Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.
   

This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.



Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data

With the recent Google Analytics launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data. Good call! So now, you can access 48 new metrics around goal performance. We've also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, and step names for each profile.

Take a look at this video describing how to work with goal configuration data in the API.



Custom Variables

Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we've added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you've used is now available through the Account Feed.

We've updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group. We can't wait to see the new apps that come from developers using this data. We're hoping that you spend your holiday tinkering with it :-)

Enjoy!


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team