At long last, Google released the Google Analytics API. The timing couldn’t be better, since I was just trying to get to some information through screen scraping… which is never fun.

The API is pretty easy to use, and other than a typo which slowed me down way too much, it didn’t take long to write a simple PHP script to get the total number of page views across all my Analytics profiles. This is a quick tutorial for using the API for this simple purpose. Also check out the official API documentation. Download here

The basic steps involved are:

1. Authenticate the user and get a one-time token from Google
2. Exchange the one-time token for a session token, which does not expire
3. Retrieve and parse a list of the user’s Google Analytics accounts and profiles
4. Retrieve and parse the page view count for each profile
5. Done!

Note that this will send you to a link from Google asking you to grant a session token to the script, and it will show the information in YOUR Google Analytics account; the script doesn’t actually store the token, but if it did, that would provide it with unlimited read access to the data in your Google Analytics acccount, until you revoke the token from your Google Accounts page. If you’re not comfortable with this, download the script from the link above instead, and run it on your own server.