Google Analytics, OAuth and Ruby. Oh, my.

I recently had the opportunity to take a peek at accessing Google Analytics data using their OAuth endpoint. We did this in Ruby using the Ruby OAuth gem. There were a few snags along the way so I figured I’d put up some notes for other people to take a peek.

First, you’re going to need a newer version of the OAuth gem (0.3.5 seems to work). Google uses some features from the 1.0a version of the OAuth spec, the oauth_verifier specifically, that aren’t available in older versions of the OAuth gem. That took a while to track down.

The second thing you’re going to need is a consumer token and secret from google. You can retrieve this from your domain management page (here as it’s a bit difficult to find.)

require 'oauth'
con = OAuth::Consumer.new(CONSUMER_TOKEN, CONSUMER_SECRET,
                              {:site => 'https://www.google.com',
                               :request_token_path => '/accounts/OAuthGetRequestToken',
                               :access_token_path => '/accounts/OAuthGetAccessToken',
                               :authorize_path => '/accounts/OAuthAuthorizeToken'})

To start we create our OAuth connection. You’ll need to substitute your token and secret for the consumer constants above. We need to specify all of the OAuth paths to match the endpoints provided by Google.

rt = con.get_request_token({}, {:scope => 'https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds'})

We use the connection to create a request token. get_request_token takes two parameters. The token parameters and other parameters. Above, I’m not specifying any request parameters but, if you want Google to redirect the user to a site of your choice you would provide {:oauth_callback => URL} as the token parameter. After authenticating the user would be redirected to the provided URL and the parameters oauth_token=TOKEN and oauth_verifier=VERIFIER will be passed to the URL. You’ll need to use those parameters when creating the access token.

The second parameter when creating the request token is used by Google to restrict the users access to specific portions of Google. In our case we’re requesting access to the Analytics data. A list of available scopes is here. You can specify multiple scope values by putting a space between them. e.g. "http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/%20http://docs.google.com/feeds/".

rt.authorize_url       => "https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthAuthorizeToken?oauth_token=4%2F-1o2aZgHxJmjhaExv9htRsGWLlwy"

With our request token in hand we can use it to generate the authorization URL. You’ll need to redirect the user to this URL to do the authentication.

Since we aren’t providing a callback URL our users will just get redirected to a standard Google page and you’ll need to copy their verifier code into the application.

at = rt.get_access_token(:oauth_verifier => 'vQH9bpXateNpsISpEDZax')

When the user has authorized we either get them to paste the verifier code or we can retrieve it from the parameters passed to our oauth_callback. We use the verifier code to create an access token. This is the token we’ll be using to access the Google resources. We can save the at.token and at.secret values into our database to create new access tokens next time the user needs data from Google. We don’t need to authenticate each time.

at = OAuth::AccessToken.new(con, USER_TOKEN, USER_SECRET)

We can also, if we’re using the oauth_callback store some of our request token information to the session. If we store rt.token and rt.secret we can re-build our request token in a simlar fashion to the access token.

    rt = OAuth::RequestToken.new(con, REQUEST_TOKEN, REQUEST_SECRET)

With the authentication out of the way we can get on with accessing the analytics data.

puts at.get("https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/default?prettyprint=true").body

We grab our profile data first. You’ll need the dxp:tableId value in order to make calls to get profile specific analytic data. (The prettyprint=true is a handy little flag to get Google to nicely indent the XML returned. Makes for easier reading/debugging.)

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/" xmlns:dxp="http://schemas.google.com/analytics/2009">
  <id>http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/dan.sinclair@gmail.com</id>
  <updated>2009-07-06T11:00:09.000-07:00</updated>
  <title type="text">Profile list for dan.sinclair@gmail.com</title>
  <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/default" />
  <author>
    <name>Google Analytics</name>
  </author>
  <generator version="1.0">Google Analytics</generator>
  <opensearch :totalresults>1</opensearch>
  <opensearch :startindex>1</opensearch>
  <opensearch :itemsperpage>1</opensearch>
  <entry>
    <id>http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/ga:123xxxx</id>
    <updated>2009-07-06T11:00:09.000-07:00</updated>
    <title type="text">everburning</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/analytics" />
    <dxp :tableid>ga:123xxxx</dxp>
    <dxp :property name="ga:accountId" value="73xxxx" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:accountName" value="everburning" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:profileId" value="123xxxx" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:webPropertyId" value="UA-73xxxx-1" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:currency" value="USD" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:timezone" value="America/Toronto" />
  </entry>
</feed>

puts at.get("https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:123xxxx&start-date=2009-06-05&end-date=2009-06-06&dimensions=ga:pagePath&metrics=ga:pageviews,ga:uniquePageviews&prettyprint=true").body

The data I want from Google Analytics is the number of ga:pageviews and ga:uniquePageviews for each ga:pagePath between June 5th and 6th.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/" xmlns:dxp="http://schemas.google.com/analytics/2009">
  <id>http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:123xxxx&amp;dimensions=ga:pagePath&amp;metrics=ga:pageviews,ga:uniquePageviews&amp;start-date=2009-06-05&amp;end-date=2009-06-06</id>
  <updated>2009-06-06T16:59:59.999-07:00</updated>
  <title type="text">Google Analytics Data for Profile 123xxxx</title>
  <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?end-date=2009-06-06&amp;start-date=2009-06-05&amp;metrics=ga%3Apageviews%2Cga%3AuniquePageviews&amp;ids=ga%3A123xxxx&amp;dimensions=ga%3ApagePath" />
  <author>
    <name>Google Analytics</name>
  </author>
  <generator version="1.0">Google Analytics</generator>
  <opensearch :totalresults>52</opensearch>
  <opensearch :startindex>1</opensearch>
  <opensearch :itemsperpage>52</opensearch>
  <dxp :startdate>2009-06-05</dxp>
  <dxp :enddate>2009-06-06</dxp>
  <dxp :aggregates>
    <dxp :metric confidenceinterval="0.0" name="ga:pageviews" type="integer" value="162" />
    <dxp :metric confidenceinterval="0.0" name="ga:uniquePageviews" type="integer" value="152" />
  </dxp>
  <dxp :datasource>
    </dxp><dxp :tableid>ga:1239xxxx</dxp>
    <dxp :tablename>everburning</dxp>
    <dxp :property name="ga:profileId" value="123xxxx5" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:webPropertyId" value="UA-73xxxx-1" />
    <dxp :property name="ga:accountName" value="everburning" />

  <entry>
    <id>http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:123xxxx&amp;ga:pagePath=/&amp;start-date=2009-06-05&amp;end-date=2009-06-06</id>
    <updated>2009-06-05T17:00:00.001-07:00</updated>
    <title type="text">ga:pagePath=/</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/analytics" />
    <dxp :dimension name="ga:pagePath" value="/" />
    <dxp :metric confidenceinterval="0.0" name="ga:pageviews" type="integer" value="9" />
    <dxp :metric confidenceinterval="0.0" name="ga:uniquePageviews" type="integer" value="8" />
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <id>http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:123xxxx&amp;ga:pagePath=/quotes/&amp;start-date=2009-06-05&amp;end-date=2009-06-06</id>
    <updated>2009-06-05T17:00:00.001-07:00</updated>
    <title type="text">ga:pagePath=/quotes/</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/analytics" />
    <dxp :dimension name="ga:pagePath" value="/quotes/" />
    <dxp :metric confidenceinterval="0.0" name="ga:pageviews" type="integer" value="6" />
    <dxp :metric confidenceinterval="0.0" name="ga:uniquePageviews" type="integer" value="6" />
  </entry>
</feed>

You may notice that all of the paths returned are relative to some base URL. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get Google Analytics to tell me what that base URL happens to be. If you figure it out, please leave a comment so I can update my code.

That’s it. You can take a deeper look at the Google Analytics API documentation to learn about the different dimensions and metrics that can be queried.

If you’re doing this in Ruby you may also want to take a look at the Happy Mapper gem to make your XML using life easier.

Have fun.