Building the Analytics Reporting Suite for Google Analytics

It has to be functional

After the first alpha and feedback from a limited number of alpha testers, I decided to put all my effort in this project. Everything felt right; I fell in love with Adobe AIR, I'm really intrigued by web analytics and it's great fun working on a product like this.

The agency I worked for wasn't able to fully support me on this venture and I was neglecting my work already in favor of this project so we decided to part. Shortly after I left the agency I joined Boulevart, one of the fastest growing Flash/Flex production companies in Belgium. We made a deal, and from then on I was working on the Analytics Reporting Suite full time. Yes!

My philosophy is simple and I have two main goals for the Analytics Reporting Suite:

• Create a quality product that is functional. This might seem obvious at first. However, if you take a look at the initial AIR applications that have been released, you'll notice that a lot of them are visually interesting but not very functional and certainly not applications you'll use every day. Who needs another music player or instant messenger? Although it is great to see so many AIR apps out there, I think AIR really needs more functional applications like eBay Desktop to make the platform succeed.
• It needs to be free, or at least offer a free version. Google Analytics owes its success to the fact that it was the first to offer professional web analytics at no charge. I'd like to reach at least 20% of the Google Analytics users and by offering a free version I hope to get that target by the end of the year.

Adobe AIR is a great technology and Google Analytics is a great service. To me it seems like a perfect marriage and I want to attract as many people as possible to both platforms. Although the Analytics Reporting Suite could be another factor for one to pick Google Analytics as a measurement platform of choice, Google Analytics with its enormous user base could put the runtime’s market penetration on the fast track, and could certainly get more people interested in Adobe AIR. The Analytics Reporting Suite could be another reason for people to go with Google Analytics as their web measurement platform of choice.

Aside from a general strategy the project also has some more specific goals and requirements from a software development perspective.

In order to extend the Google Analytics platform it first must be recreated and ported to the desktop as a solid base to start from. The biggest challenge was to improve the user experience without moving too far away from the original web interface. People who've been working with Google Analytics for years should be able to use the desktop version without having to learn using a new interface. This is why I only made subtle user interface changes in the beta version. A good example is the tab interface (see Figure 2); by opening a new report in a new tab the user can switch fast between different reports, but it doesn't break the original flow of the web-based user interface.

Figure 2. The tabs enable users to switch quickly between reports.

For those who are not familiar with Google Analytics, it has more than a hundred base reports and if you start drilling down into the data or if you start making segmentations the possibilities are nearly endless. Take in the fact that Google regularly adds new report types or changes data models it is imperative that the desktop version needs to be very flexible.

Also, I don't want to be a code monkey, hard-coding each and every report, nor do I want to redistribute a new version of the suite each time Google pushes and updates the web version. That is why every report in the Analytics Reporting Suite is created dynamically. Figure 3 shows a diagram that explains in a simplified manner what is happening behind the scenes.

Figure 3. Reports in the Analytics Reporting Suite are generated dynamically.

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