How to extract data from Google Analytics and build a data warehouse (webhouse) from it?

Question

I have click stream data such as referring URL, top landing pages, top exit pages and metrics such as page views, number of visits, bounces all in Google Analytics. There is

Answer 1

You can pull the GA (Google Analytics) data anytime through their API and build your own data warehouse (DW). Before you start, you may want to sit with the business user and get clear understanding of business requirements. In DW environment it is extremely important to have a clear set goals and understanding of business user requirements due to fact that you will maintain history of transactions which live for long time and used often.

Assuming that business user defines KPI (Key Performance Indicators), metrics, dimensions, granularity needed for you to proceed, you can check different dimensions and metrics that are availabe through GA API at code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/. Then it is just a matter of making the right API call and getting what you need. DW activity involves data cleaning, extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) or ELT along with summarizing the facts along different dimensions. Since data is much cleaner than one would encounter in disparate systems (from web logs, external vendors, excel or files, etc.), you can simply load the data through any ETL tools (For example, Talend, Pentaho, SSIS, etc.) or through application of your choice (Perl, Java, Ruby, C#, etc).

For daily load, you need to design incremental loading process during the low user traffic time (nightly loads), pulling only the recent data, de-duping any duplicates, cleansing any non-conforming data, handling erraneous rows, etc.

I have provided a sample GA API application at http://www.hiregion.com/2009/10/google-analytics-data-retriever-api-sem_25.html and it will provide you basic info to get started.