Late last month, Google announced its Google Analytics Data Export API (GADEA). The API enables developers to do all kind of cool stuff with google analytics data outside of the online analytics page.

Last week Content Management System (CMS) developer, Siteflex, announced it had won the race to be the first local CMS developer to build GADEA functionality into their product. What makes that interesting is that CMS’s are probably the most natural fit for any kind of analytics API - after all, the point of analytics systems is essentially to monitor and measure access to content.

As such, the integration of GADEA into Siteflex, and another of the the company’s products, Mailflex (email marketing software), is that it finally allows both the “cause and effect” to be seen on the same screen. For instance, both campaign creation data in Mailflex (eg, number of email recipients, State & Territory breakdowns) and the outcomes of that same campaign are side-by-side.

I grabbed both Mark Kofahl (MK) and Jeremy Cabral (JC) from Siteflex for a quick chat about their experience with GADEA:

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KH: How easy it is to integrate the new API?

MK: It’s really not that hard if you have some experience with API’s. The Google documentation is quite strong

KH: And what level of functionaility does it enable - i.e. what data can you get access to?

MK: You get access to the whole dataset. The only limit is that you’re restricted to valid combinations. By that I mean the two distinct field types are metrics and dimensions. If a particular metric doesn’t have a particular dimension associated with it it will return an error, but other than that you can do anything that you can do on the normal Google Analytics site.

JC: One thing to note is that you only get data sent through. The API doesn’t return graphs or anything like that. But you can use custom graphing software or even the Google Chart API, as we do, to generate a visual representation of the data.

KH: You deal with businesses. Have you shown the new functionality to any customers/prospects and, if so, what’s the feedback been?

MK: We actually showed it to a client of ours, who uses MailFlex, last week. The client is a listed company and the demonstration had the full range of marketing people from marketing assistants to C-levels. The response was consistent from everyone in the room - they were really impressed to see all the data come together in the same application.

JC: Yeah, that’s one of the real benefits of the API and having it integrated into MailFlex. Clients no longer have to access two separate systems to get the benefit of MailFlex and Google Anlaytics. It’s all there. We could have built our own detailed stats engine but the API is much more efficient and, on top of that, you get access to benchmarks based on Google Analytics’ huge install base, which is something that custom analytics packages can’t compete with.

KH: And what are some of the other benefits?

MK: It goes beyond having information in one place. It’s what that means that’s probably the biggest benefit. By having cause and effect in the same place you are now able to ensure that measurement of performance is always top of mind, and easy to achieve, for our customers. The better they measure their campaigns and act on that data, the better the outcomes for them. Enabling us to provide better outcomes for our customers is a really amazing thing.

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No doubt others will be releasing apps with GADEA functionality built in in the near future, but there’s great value in hearing from the early adopters about their experiences. As such, A big thanks to Mark and Jeremy for taking the time to talk about their experiences.