Google Analytics (GA) is a free website tracking system offered by Google. Tracked statistics include visits, contents and traffic and the tracked data can be used to take strategic decisions about the website. GA shows nice charts and graphs of page views, time on site, geographical location and many other collected statistics.
GA also exposes raw data which can be exported in various formats like XML, CSV and PDF. Google Analytics, in my sense, lacks another important feature: sharability. The profile configured in the GA account could only be shared in individual basis which is done using the shared user’s Google account. Thus the GA system doesn’t allow the webmasters to share the site’s analytical details with the visitors who anonymously access the website.
To address this problem, I’ve developed a widget service which enables the site owners to share the site’s statistical data with the visitors. All you have to do is to share the GA profile with our Google account, which fetches the XML data and prepares Flash based charts that can be embedded on your web pages. It takes just few minutes to create a widget for your site and you can create as many widgets as you want. At present, only one widget type is available which shows the chart for visits information.
Follow these steps to create a widget for your site,
- Share your GA profile with
- Register with your profile id and Google account
- Select the widget type (Only one, Visits Statistics, is available as of now)
- Choose the statistics, time line and the widget size.
- Copy and Paste the embed code on your site
This widget below shows the visits statistics for this site, …
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I got an opportunity to learn about a tool called Xcelsius. It’s been a wonderful experience so far. This tool lets you create handy dashboards in less time. The tool is very useful for those who work in Data Ware Housing and would like to create a presentation out of their data. Designing a visualization is very simple and requires no analytical skills. It generates a interactive Flash movie of the presentation which can be easily shared by mail.
Prerequisites for using this tool are,
- Knowledge on spreadsheets and cell formulas.
- XML and Web services (If you want to show dynamic data in your presentation)
Flash knowledge is not required as the tool generates the flash movie and Actionscript based on our design using the underlying data model (spreadsheet). Excel is used only in the design time for defining the data model.
For a demonstration, I’ve created a visualization which compares popularity of the inputted terms. The logic is implemented in a ASP.Net web service, which makes use of the Google SOAP Search API to find the number of result pages for a search query.
The visualization invokes the web service and gets back the XML data containing number of result pages for each of the inputted terms.
Number of result pages is not a perfect measure for popularity. But by phrasing a search query for each of those terms, we can get an approximate picture of their popularity.
Click to see the visualization
It can be downloaded from its product page.
Here are some of the sample inputs for this visualization,
-
Sun TV programme
Jaya TV programme
Raj TV programme
Vijay TV programme
-
dinamalar
dinamani
dinakaran
-
sivaji tamil movie
lagaan hindi movie
gilli tamil movie
-
Google search
Yahoo search
MSN search
-
.Net framework
Java Virtual Machine
Technologies behind this visualization,
- Crystal Xcelsius
- Macromedia Flash
- ASP.Net web service
- Google SOAP Search API
- Microsoft Excel
