Hello Analytics API: Python quickstart for service accounts

This tutorial walks through the steps required to access a Google Analytics account, query the Analytics APIs, handle the API responses, and output the results. The Core Reporting API v3.0, Management API v3.0, and OAuth2.0 are used in this tutorial.

Step 1: Enable the Analytics API

To get started using Google Analytics API, you need to first use the setup tool, which guides you through creating a project in the Google API Console, enabling the API, and creating credentials.

Create a client ID

  1. Open the Service accounts page. If prompted, select a project.
  2. Click Create Service Account, enter a name and description for the service account. You can use the default service account ID, or choose a different, unique one. When done click Create.
  3. The Service account permissions (optional) section that follows is not required. Click Continue.
  4. On the Grant users access to this service account screen, scroll down to the Create key section. Click Create key.
  5. In the side panel that appears, select the format for your key: JSON is recommended.
  6. Click Create. Your new public/private key pair is generated and downloaded to your machine; it serves as the only copy of this key. For information on how to store it securely, see Managing service account keys.
  7. Click Close on the Private key saved to your computer dialog, then click Done to return to the table of your service accounts.

Add service account to Google Analytics account

The newly created service account will have an email address, <projectId>-<uniqueId>@developer.gserviceaccount.com; Use this email address to add a user to the Google analytics account you want to access via the API. For this tutorial only Read & Analyze permissions are needed.

Step 2: Install the Google Client Library

You can either use a package manager or download and install the Python client library manually:

pip

Use pip, the recommended tool for installing Python packages:

sudo pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client

Setuptools

Use the easy_install tool included in the setuptools package:

sudo easy_install --upgrade google-api-python-client

Manual installation

Download the latest client library for python, unpack the code and run:

sudo python setup.py install

You may need to invoke the command with superuser (sudo) privileges to install to the system Python.

Step 3: Setup the sample

You'll need to create a single file named HelloAnalytics.py, which will contain the given sample code.

  1. Copy or download the following source code to HelloAnalytics.py.
  2. Move the previously downloaded client_secrets.json within the same directory as the sample code.
  3. Replace the values of the key_file_location with the appropriate values from the Developer Console.
"""A simple example of how to access the Google Analytics API."""

from apiclient.discovery import build
from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials


def get_service(api_name, api_version, scopes, key_file_location):
    """Get a service that communicates to a Google API.

    Args:
        api_name: The name of the api to connect to.
        api_version: The api version to connect to.
        scopes: A list auth scopes to authorize for the application.
        key_file_location: The path to a valid service account JSON key file.

    Returns:
        A service that is connected to the specified API.
    """

    credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name(
            key_file_location, scopes=scopes)

    # Build the service object.
    service = build(api_name, api_version, credentials=credentials)

    return service


def get_first_profile_id(service):
    # Use the Analytics service object to get the first profile id.

    # Get a list of all Google Analytics accounts for this user
    accounts = service.management().accounts().list().execute()

    if accounts.get('items'):
        # Get the first Google Analytics account.
        account = accounts.get('items')[0].get('id')

        # Get a list of all the properties for the first account.
        properties = service.management().webproperties().list(
                accountId=account).execute()

        if properties.get('items'):
            # Get the first property id.
            property = properties.get('items')[0].get('id')

            # Get a list of all views (profiles) for the first property.
            profiles = service.management().profiles().list(
                    accountId=account,
                    webPropertyId=property).execute()

            if profiles.get('items'):
                # return the first view (profile) id.
                return profiles.get('items')[0].get('id')

    return None


def get_results(service, profile_id):
    # Use the Analytics Service Object to query the Core Reporting API
    # for the number of sessions within the past seven days.
    return service.data().ga().get(
            ids='ga:' + profile_id,
            start_date='7daysAgo',
            end_date='today',
            metrics='ga:sessions').execute()


def print_results(results):
    # Print data nicely for the user.
    if results:
        print 'View (Profile):', results.get('profileInfo').get('profileName')
        print 'Total Sessions:', results.get('rows')[0][0]

    else:
        print 'No results found'


def main():
    # Define the auth scopes to request.
    scope = 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly'
    key_file_location = '<REPLACE_WITH_JSON_FILE>'

    # Authenticate and construct service.
    service = get_service(
            api_name='analytics',
            api_version='v3',
            scopes=[scope],
            key_file_location=key_file_location)

    profile_id = get_first_profile_id(service)
    print_results(get_results(service, profile_id))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Step 4: Run the sample

After you have enabled the Analytics API, installed the Google APIs client library for Python, and set up the sample source code the sample is ready to run.

Run the sample using:

python HelloAnalytics.py

When you finish these steps, the sample outputs the name of the authorized user's first Google Analytics view (profile) and the number of sessions for the last seven days.

With the authorized Analytics service object you can now run any of code samples found in the Management API reference docs. For example you could try changing the code to use the accountSummaries.list method.

Troubleshooting

AttributeError: 'Module_six_moves_urllib_parse' object has no attribute 'urlparse'

This error can occur in Mac OSX where the default installation of the "six" module (a dependency of this library) is loaded before the one that pip installed. To fix the issue, add pip's install location to the PYTHONPATH system environment variable:

  1. Determine pip's install location with the following command:

    pip show six | grep "Location:" | cut -d " " -f2
    

  2. Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc file, replacing <pip_install_path> with the value determined above:

    export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:<pip_install_path>
    
  3. Reload your ~/.bashrc file in any open terminal windows using the following command:

    source ~/.bashrc