This technique, originally published on
SEOMoz, outlines how to generate reports and charts depicting the performance of different sections of a website over a given time frame as opposed to a flat overall view of the website's traffic. The raison d'etre is that
different website sections perform differently.
When I came across this article, I was intrigued and thought it invaluable to employ it for our clients. The only downside was the manual collection of data. Thankfully, others also felt this a major drawback and
Maki Car Rental produced a couple of PHP files to automate the data collection process.
This worked superbly on some of our clients servers however some were still running PHP 4 so we've made available a version of the code which uses PHP 4 functions rather than the original PHP 5 implementation. We've also tacked on a small UI so customised reports/metrics/date ranges can be produced quickly. The PHP 4 version is available for download
here.
This version of the script also allows you to quickly adjust the CSV delimiter by altering the
$csv_field_delim
variable. Many thanks to those involved, this is an absolutely superb technique for collecting data enabling users of Google Analytics to make valuable business decisions.
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