Google Analytics APIs Launched

Google announced the launch of its Google Analytics Data Export APIs (beta) today. It was anticipated for a long time. Analytics API is a Google data API (same as Google calender API). APIs currently support Java and JavaScript (details on the Google Analytics Blog).

So what does this mean to Google analytics users?

• You can access Google Analytics on your desktop (using Adobe AIR or Google Desktop). Desktop reporting is one such application.
• You can access specific reports on your iphone or Android powered phones. Few other cool applications can be found here.

• The most important impact is that you can mash-up your data. You can marry your web analytics data with your offline data (Sales, CRM), create custom dashboards or new visualizations. Web analytics reports can be combined with data from other sources to create even more accurate predictive models and study online-offline user behaviours. You can now track your multi-channel campaigns more effectively.

Other web analytics vendors (like Omniture) already provide this functionality but Google Analytics is the first big player to do it for free (a lot of $$$ savings). Piwik (open source web analytics solution) enables you to own your analytcs data by hosting it in-house, but with these new APIs, you can save yourself the hassle of maintaining the analytics server and import the data.