After you have purchased Analytics 360, it is very convenient to continue with the interactive dashboards.
But sometimes your requests result in sampling conditions (greater than 500,000) sessions. Click the button that appears on your ribbon bar (in Windows), and you can get more detail which query is being sampled.
At that point, you need to switch to a special API, designed just for Google Analytics Premium.
This requires implementation of a two-step data refresh process.
Click by Click Instructions: How to Implement Unsampled Data Access using Analytics 360
NEXT Analytics has implemented a workflow that allows you to access the data that Google creates and stores in a Google Drive file.
As a first step, click on the checkbox.
Default Title for Google Drive
The file that Google creates needs a title, so that you can recognize it in Google Drive. NEXT Analytics offers a default value of “Unsampled Report” as the title, but you should change that to reflect your query. For example, describe the time dimension and the metrics in the title.
Enhance the title with fields that get expanded into their data values
Then you have the option check and un-check some of the boxes that are below it, that puts more detail into your Google Drive’s title. This is particular important if your query has multiple Views or Segments (or both) in it.
After you Get Fresh Data, NEXT Analytics will send queries to a Google Premium (Analytics 360) web service. That service will store the results as a CSV file in Google Drive.
You cannot use the results until Google puts the data into Google Drive. You will have to watch your Drive folder to see when it is available and get the data in a separate “Get Fresh Data” operation. Once a pattern forms, you can use Windows Task Scheduler to automate the process in the timeframes that match Google’s production ability.
Download the data that’s stored in Google Drive
Before you Get Fresh Data, click the button “View Script…” and a second spreadsheet will be created.
That spreadsheet has a NEXT Analytics script that transfers the file from Google Drive to your own computer. If Google has split the results into multiple files, then it combines them into one file during the transfer.
You can copy/paste this script into another spreadsheet, perhaps which has other scripts who’s purpose is to transfer the Google Drive data from multiple Premium-only queries. This single spreadsheet can be scheduled at a time when you know that all your Google Analytics 360 (Premium) queries have completed running.
Click the Get Fresh Data after the Google Drive entries are completed. The refresh operations transfers the titles that are in Google Drive to your own computer where you can easily produce a dashboard or store the results in a database.
Work with the downloaded data
Once you have the data on your computer, you can do many things with it to make your job easier when you want to build a dashboard or prepare a report.
- Excel. You can build a dashboard in Excel, using a NEXT Analytics’ Import File feature
- Save the data in Google Spreadsheet and then use Google Data Studio to connect to the spreadsheet.
- Save the data Google Cloud SQL
- Save the Microsoft Azure database, use it with Microsoft Power BI
- Save the data in a local database
Added Value with Embedded Analytics
Once you are comfortable with the data flow, you should consider experimenting to NEXT Analytics value-add embedded analytics engine. This engine modifies the and makes the data much easier and quicker to work with in dashboarding tools.
For more information, visit the Macros and Commands that you see, after you’ve created your Custom Queries.