API to get raw data, to export the analytics data to a data warehouse.
Taylor Thain
So I think at the core of this request is an understanding that as we continue to move towards a "privacy first" internet and the eventual phase out of 3rd party cookies, 1st party data is going to become more and more vital to a businesses's ability to leverage and take action on their site traffic.
Given that impending reality, an analytics platform needs to be part of a closed loop that interfaces with the rest of the technology structure or business intelligence apparatus of any given company or website. Otherwise the data exists in a vacuum.
Given that a core value position of this plugin is "Super, ridiculously, shockingly accurate." Having an api to enable other tools to take signals from this plugin and inform actionable decisions would be incredibly valuable.
Some examples of how this could be used would be:
- Email Marketing: Could monitor user activity on site content and sort visitors into different drip campaign segments based on the content they're most interested in/visiting the most.
- CRM Data: Similar to the above if a past client has returned to your site looking at information on a different service you provide could pass that information to the CRM, allowing a sales team member to reach out to start a conversation with this client.
- Data Warehousing: This is becoming more and more important as data retention limits now exist in GA4. Being able to get near time data from all the touch points from a client journey into a centralized storage warehouse allows for top down business intelligence and the capability to analyze web traffic insights needs to be part of that. Especially for orgs that have hybrid sales points. ie. websites + physical storefronts. If a client first found your company from a Facebook ad, signed up for a newsletter, came back from an email then went to the store and bought something using their email for a receipt a data warehouse would be able to tie that point of sale + web journey together to allow for deeper attribution and assessment of marketing spend, assuming we were able to pull the data from the web analytics.
To that note as a marketer the #1 thing that I need from analytics platforms is the ability to integrate with my broader marketing ecosystem including the capability to feed data back to my ads platforms. Shockingly accurate data that I can't easily use or leverage to improve or optimize my ads/marketing efforts is far less useful than fairly accurate data that does integrate with the tech stack.
Along those lines some thoughts:
- The journeys data is interesting but not very actionable when its all individual datapoints. I'd be interested in seeing aggregate journey data and user flows to see the path the majority of users take on the site, identify where people are falling off etc. I appreciate that it's early days and there's more to come but playing around with this on a non-ecommerce site the data that is reported is either too generalized (on the dashboard page) and too specific (on the journey's page) to actually provide much by way of actionable insights. Even if the data is more accurate than GA4 it's not as useful.
- Regarding integration, could there be ways that this software could help to implement Meta's CAPI and GA4's Measurement protocol in order to send some of that super accurate data to these platforms that are directly informing and training Meta's and Google's ad algorithms respectively? Improving match rate of CAPI and GA4 user sessions with the data this tool collects would be massively valuable because as it stands the tool can't really replace the need for GA4 or a FB Pixel.
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Jake Muller
Team AnalyticsWP, I think what I was picturing (and perhaps others) was a way to take live website data and display or export it various ways using API to create custom dashboards, trigger notifications at certain thresholds ("YAY, 1,000 unique users today!"), and automate reports for clients ("Congrats! Your site reached 10,000 visitors last week!").
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Team AnalyticsWP
Hein, and others, the good news here is that you have
full control over all of your data
. It's all in a single custom database table, so you could theoretically export it, report on it, write custom SQL on top of it, etc. This is not
possible with most analytics solution.Could you kindly elaborate on how ideally you'd want this functionality to work? When you say "API to get raw data, to export the analytics data to a data warehouse." what exactly does that look like?
Taylor Thain
Team AnalyticsWP To this specific end a suggestion might be looking into how other softwares and solutions interface with Customer Data Platforms like Twilio's segment, rudderstack or even the open source Jitsu. These sorts of platforms take data from a bunch of inputs, format the data to all be consistent and then push the data out to a bunch of different endpoints. If your system could interface with some of these platforms they'd handle the data structuring and passing of data to a data warehouse/ad platform/etc in a way that was usable and universally structured.
Typically I'd think that once an organization is looking into data warehousing they'd also be looking into a CDP to ensure uniform event data from all their data sources, and being able to push data to that sort of platform may ultimately end up being more useful than direct raw data pulls from the database.
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Hein Hofman (gmail)
Team AnalyticsWP I Agree with Taylor Thain, this is what I was referring to. This would be so powerful!
Whitney
YES!