Google simplifies use of Analytics API

Google has developed a tool to automate the creation of custom-reporting dashboards for its Analytics website-usage tracking service

Google has developed a tool to automate the creation of custom-reporting dashboards for its Analytics website-usage tracking service, the company said on Wednesday.

The new Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library lets developers create these dashboards without the need for them to learn the ins and outs of the Analytics API (application programming interface) and manually write the code.

Instead, the Analytics Easy Dashboard Library only requires that webmasters register to access the Google APIs console, copy and paste a prebuilt chunk of Javascript code and then tailor the code for the type of data they want it to fetch and the type of chart they want displayed.

"So now you can create custom Google Analytics dashboards very quickly, with minimal code," wrote Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski, from the Google Analytics API Team, in a blog post.

Google built the tool in conjunction with a team of University of California at Irvine students, and the company is now working with another group of students at the university to simplify the tool further.

Google Analytics is a cloud-based application that webmasters use to monitor traffic on their websites and analyze usage in order to determine the effectiveness of different content sections and ads.