Fetching Pageview Counts from Google Analytics API with Ruby

Published: May 9, 2020

Tags:

• Ruby
• Google Analytics

Improve this page on GitHub

I’m working on a Jekyll plugin which needs to fetch page view counts from the Google Analytics API for popularity ranking. While Google’s google-api-ruby-client does support the Reporting API v4 unfortunately there are no official examples from Google on how to use it.

As such I wanted to share a working example for fetching pageview counts from the Reporting API v4 in Ruby.

I'd like to give a big shoutout to the author of the post Google Analytics Reporting API in Ruby on Rails which was hugely helpful in guiding me in the right direction.

The Code

The following code is currently working and allowing me to fetch pageview data from the Google Analytics API.

require 'google/apis/analyticsreporting_v4'
require 'date'

service = Google::Apis::AnalyticsreportingV4::AnalyticsReportingService.new

# Without environment variables
# credentials = Google::Auth::ServiceAccountCredentials.make_creds(
#   json_key_io: File.open('service_account_json_key.json'),
#   scope: 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly'
# )

# With environment variables
credentials = Google::Auth::ServiceAccountCredentials.make_creds(
  scope: 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly'
)

service.authorization = credentials

$google_client = service

date_range = Google::Apis::AnalyticsreportingV4::DateRange.new(
  start_date: Date.today - 90,
  end_date: Date.today
)

metric = Google::Apis::AnalyticsreportingV4::Metric.new(
  expression: "ga:pageviews"
)

dimension = Google::Apis::AnalyticsreportingV4::Dimension.new(
  name: "ga:pagePath"
)

report_request = Google::Apis::AnalyticsreportingV4::ReportRequest.new(
  view_id: '<<YOUR-VIEW-ID>>',
  sampling_level: 'DEFAULT',
  date_ranges: [date_range],
  metrics: [metric],
  dimensions: [dimension]
)

request = Google::Apis::AnalyticsreportingV4::GetReportsRequest.new(
  { report_requests: [report_request] }
)
# Make API call.
response = $google_client.batch_get_reports(request)

response.reports.first.data.rows.each do |row|
  puts row.dimensions[0]
  puts row.metrics[0].values[0]
end

Executing this at the command line prints the page path, followed by number of page views for each page:

$ ruby fetch-ga-pageviews.rb
/
452
/?ref=hexometer
7
/?semalt.com/10=
1
/blog/
186
/blog/5-enterprise-page-cache-missing-features
3
...

A couple things I’d like to call out…

Authentication

The example uses environment variables for authentication as documented in the README google-auth-library-ruby. I’ve included commented out code that shows how you can do it by pointing to the key file.

view_id

You’ll need to update the view_id with the correct value from your Google Analytics account. See this guide. This is not your UA- value.

Date Range

The example uses Ruby Date to fetch the last 90 days of page views. This can be tweaked as needed.

Query Strings

In the Google Analytics admin UI, query strings are stripped from URLs, but when using the ga:pagePath dimension, each query string variation is a unique pagePath:

/blog/ssrf-exploits-against-redis?fbclid=IwAR07g7Y7oP64H7NSvNl5s_9vIK8Gr34ErXDVF23QLPkOTbLjEZ3hriwG1yI
1
/blog/ssrf-exploits-against-redis?fbclid=IwAR09tXxWetvl_-biJF-l6kfdJPMjibUhHzoEv2HZhWDGzVEEvfWP1Mp2PrA
1
/blog/ssrf-exploits-against-redis?fbclid=IwAR0en_C-ebYeWfqLPFzbeGlaZ2lnf6aewRrLOBSAKU78rSF4HaS23PVkiuc
1
/blog/ssrf-exploits-against-redis?fbclid=IwAR0KA3oIkm_mPG3Z6RzKCaAnFJgH1MemsblGGuU2Lug7C18u6QBBbfIb8Qg
2

There’s some discussion about this the Gooogle Analytics API Google Group. It appears it’s not possible to prevent this behavior when querying the API and you must make a change to your Google Analytics account. Personally, I plan to strip these out, after I get the response from the Google Analytics API.